It used to be that kids could take up a sport, or two or three or five and play the games and have fun doing so. There was no pressure to isolate one sport and play and train specifically for that sport. It is common knowledge that an athlete, a true athlete can play a variety of sports and excel at all of them. Cross training was heralded as the way to make an athlete an even better athlete. Kids had fun in sport. The Long Term Athletes Development Plan (The World of Sport Examined, P. Beashel et al.) has recognized this as a key ingredient for young athletes, that keeping the FUN in FUNdamentals is more likely to ensure a sustainability of athletes beyond the typical burnout, dropout age found in all sports.
Today, kids as young as 11 are being forced to choose between sports, forced to choose one sport and stick with it and train sport specific. That would be fine if organized amateur sport played on a level playing field. But it doesn’t.
Take minor hockey for example, for a boy to have dreams of making it in the big league, they as well as their peers have to decide relatively young how committed they are to their chosen sport. Once the decision is made, it isn’t enough to simply go to practices, play games, off ice train, eat and sleep. They have to sacrifice being a child and live and breath hockey, from early morning hockey schools, to after school gyms to practicing stick handling and shooting as much and as often as they can in their “spare” time. Everyone does it, so it is considered normal. As the book Outliers states, in order to be exceptional, 10,000 hours are required. For many, the FUN slowly transitions into work, into unwelcome but necessary sacrifices and this is the norm rather than the exception.
So where is the payoff for these kids? It is in trying out for and making their teams, meeting their goals, receiving the rewards. One would assume that if you are one of the best that you would make the best team, that if you are better than others that you would be chosen over the less skilled based on abilities. However, in minor hockey for example, it is readily apparent that this is simply just not the case.
How many times have I witnessed boys being passed over for kids that are taller, regardless that their talent is superior. The ideology that you can’t teach a child to grow but you can teach them how to skate is fundamental in high level hockey. Does it matter that these boys being passed over skate faster, never lose battles in the corner, make hits just as hard as the taller ones, make smarter plays? Or what about the kids whose parents are influential in a multitude of ways in minor hockey, and thus have influence in swaying decisions in one direction or another for their children? How often have I witnessed a boy score a goal only to have the credit be given to a boy who wasn’t even on the ice when the goal was scored? Where has the accountability gone?
The politics behind the scenes, and the goal to be the biggest and not necessarily the best , the decisions completely out of the hands of these youth, decisions not based on skill level or integrity seriously impact these boys heart and soul, motivation and self esteem at an already difficult time in their young lives.
Shouldn’t it always be about how good you are, how hard you work, your integrity and character? Shouldn’t the best in evaluations make the best teams? Is there something flawed in my reasoning? To me, it should always be about how good you are versus everyone else and that that should dictate which team you ultimately play for?
What message does it send our youth? Work hard, sacrifice, train, put your heart and soul into everything you do, be the best in your sport but expect to fail?
In Canada, we put our children in the hands of volunteer coaches, managers, assistant coaches whether they are qualified for the job or not (Coaching Young Performers, M. Hagger). We put our children into the hands of perfect strangers, who have their own vision of what they want their team to look like and we trust them to coach our children, chaperone our children, be a role model for our children yet these people only do this part time, without pay and often there aren’t enough volunteers so it resorts to taking whoever is willing to spend time on and off ice. These volunteers make life altering decisions for our children, can take a childs hopes and dreams and crush them, or give them a false sense of security.
What about those boys that make the top teams based on politics or size and not on abilities? Is that not also doing them a dis-service, setting them up with a false sense of security only to be crushed at a later time further down the road when they stop growing, when their skills improve but remain consistent with the level of their abilities all along? Of course there is the anomaly, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team and we all know what happened to Michael Jordan. The difference is that Michael Jordan was cut based on his skill level at the time, not from political pressure, not from physical characteristics, but from his level of ability at the time of his basketball evaluations.
If a boy can’t go on the ice and play to the best of his ability, play better than the majority out there and be confidant that he will be placed exactly where his skills demonstrate he belongs, then how do expect our burnout and dropout rates to ever slow down? How do we keep these players choosing to continue to work so hard and to sacrifice so much when we reward them with failure?
This isn’t the NHL where you build a team based on criteria of how you want your team to look and make trades based on that criteria. This is amateur sport and shouldn’t the best player be placed on the best team and funnel downward until every hockey player is playing on a team of the same abilities? Shouldn’t the top teams consist of the top players in amateur sport?
No wonder attrition rates are so high in high level amateur sport! No matter how good you are, ultimately it may make little difference. There are too many other variables that come into play and none of them have our children’s best interest at heart.
Life isn’t fair. Life is hard. Life is filled with disappointments. But don’t we try to impart to our children that if you work hard, if you really really really work hard and set yourself above your peers, that you will be rewarded. Is it really necessary to teach our kids, in what is supposed to be a game, that no matter how good you are at what you are doing, no matter if you are one of the best, that it doesn’t matter, that ultimately a volunteer will decide that abilities don’t matter, and that size does, or that external influences take precedence over abilities, that life is completely out of their control and theres not a darned thing they can do about it? Do they really need to be taught these lessons at the ripe age of 15 or 16?
Amateur sport is failing all of us. Most importantly it is failing our children. Is this how you pictured the sport your son or daughter chose? Has amateur sport lost all of its integrity, its sense of fairness? Are these the lessons you want your children to learn so young? We need to see some serious changes in amateur sport or soon, professional sport will be being played by the mediocre because the kids who deserved it were passed over back in their youth.
We always hear the adage, “politics in sport” but never has it been more true than in amateur sport in Canada. Shame on us for watching it happen day after day and doing and saying nothing. These are our children. They deserve a lot better.
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