Phones have been ringing. Talk-show hosts have been railing. Clients have been crying. In the week since Atlas Sports Genetics went live with its ACTN3 test for sports performance, company officials have sold the product to about 100 clients. And terrified millions more.

I sensed the fear last week when I was in San Antonio to speak at the annual National Alliance for Youth Sports conference. Recreation leaders from around the country pulled me aside after reading the New York Times article on Atlas and said, "Can you believe what we have to deal with now?" They were bit angry, a bit scared--and a lot bewildered that a Colorado firm has started to make the test available, at $149, to American families. Many youth sport officials already feel beleagured, trying to convince parents not to go too fast, too soon with Junior Jet.

Now, with a cheek swab, anyone can have their kid's genes analyzed to learn if his muscle fiber is likely to be more tailored for endurance sports (such as distance running), power-based sports (football, etc), or sports that require a blend of such traits (soccer, etc.).

"Recommended for ages 1 and up," is what the Atlas website says.

I knew genetic science was taking us in this direction, so that's why I got Kellen, my youngest son (he's on the book cover), tested four years ago when he was still in diapers. He was the first baby in the world to get the ground-breaking ACTN3 screen, I'm told by the Australian company that introduced the test. It was just a journalistic experiment, a window into the future of athlete development, and I found the exercise intellectually fascinating. I wrote about it in Game On, which spends a good bit of time considering the value of a well-structured Talent Identification program in highlighting specific sports that teenagers might have success at.

Here's what I didn't do with the ACTN3 test results: Use them to steer Kellen in any way.

Continue reading "Sports gene test--it's here" »

Travel teams can be a blast. My 11-year-old son, Cole, now plays on two of them. He started with his soccer team three years ago, and this week he began competing for the town basketball team after making it through a large tryout. He gets to play with several of his best friends, and thanks to his quality coaches, he's having fun and learning a lot. But I'd be lying if I didn't wonder about the impact of forming such a team at such an age (fifth and sixth grade) on other kids in town, where only a third of all middle-schoolers pass the annual fitness test.

Travel teams inevitably segregate kids into those most ready to perform ... and, well, all the rest. If the proper balance isn't struck, travel teams can undermine town recreational leagues that provide participation opportunities for the broadest set of kids. You'd like to think that kids who get cut from travel teams use that as motivation to get better and go at it again next year, and that certainly happens in some cases. But other kids just get the message that they're not good enough, period, and begin to lose interest in the game. And then the rec league withers in size, and before long disappears.

It's a tough balance to strike: At what age should town travel (or club/premier) teams be formed? And once that happens, how can a league keep the rec league robust? I was kicking this topic around with a reader of Game On, Harry Steindler, commissioner of the Deerfield (Ill.) Youth Baseball and Softball Association, and was intrigued with a lot of his ideas. Like most leagues these days, his group sponsors travel teams down through age 9. But the DYBA also has low attrition rates all the way through age 14 in its house league, which is impressive.

So I asked him to write something up for readers of this blog, some of whom are youth sports administrators wrestling with these issues. I told him, "Give me 5 pointers for leagues that want to prevent attrition while still sponsoring travel teams as early as grade school."

Here's what Harry wrote:

Continue reading "Balancing travel and rec" »

In the past year, we've seen coaches at Kentucky and USC make oral offers of athletic scholarships to eighth-grade basketball players, a development that set off alarms because of the unseemly appearance (quite accurate) that college recruiters are now sucking up to middle schoolers to gain early commitments from presumed future stars. So now comes news that the NCAA is talking about designating seventh- and eighth-graders as "prospective student-athletes."

That's the NCAA's way of saying we need to start regulating relationships below the high school level. The hope, as Steve Wieberg in USA Today reported, is that by applying some of the same rules that guide the recruitment of high school prospects, the NCAA can limit the increasing amount of contact that college scouts are having with the middle school set. That kids can get back to being kids, largely free of valentines from desperate DI coaches.

Well, good luck on that. As readers of Chapter 13 of Game On can appreciate, the youth basketball scene at the highest levels of that age group is rife with absurdity. But it's hard to see how it'll be cleaned up by the addition of more bureaucratic language in the NCAA's already massive rule book. Indeed, the law of unintended consequences--always in play with new NCAA rules--might only make matters worse.

Continue reading "It's just bidness, folks" »

Americans have a love-hate relationship with winning. As readers of Game On know, we explore this terrain in chapter 5, in which we look at the rise of "winning" as a cultural value and its role in the creation of organized youth and high school sports a century ago. Much as we'd like to think that youth sports started from a place of innocence--as sport for sport's sake--the truth is that adults have always sought to organize and control the games of children for their own, larger purposes.

When Teddy Roosevelt was president, the U.S. was taking its place as a world economic power. Nations were fighting for control of natural resources around the globe, and school sports became seen as a tool to build the next generation of corporate managers and soldiers who could advance American interests. At the same time, the Muscular Christians--founders of the YMCA and Olympics--saw sports as a way to get more males interested in the church.

It was the perfect storm, but the market expansionists and the religious set approached the notion of competition from slightly different angles. The latter were arguably less comfortable with a "win-at-all-costs" mentality, though that division isn't necesarily clear cut either, as many of the proponents of organized youth sports, including Roosevelt himself, were both certified capitalists and Muscular Christians.

These differences have never been reconciled. What is a champion? It is the one to wins the league title? Or the one who wins with dignity, respecting the rules and opponents at every turn? Many perhaps will say it's the latter, but does that mean you ask your kid to reverse a bad referee's call that happens to go his way--consistent with respecting the rules and your opponent at every turn? Hmm ... There aren't always easy answers here.

But it's certainly a discussion worth having. That's what Robert Quinn, an athletic director at a suburban Chicago high school, recently did with coaches and parents involved in his program. Wheaton Warrenville South High School has a broad-based program--12 male and 12 female teams for 2,400 students--that has won many titles. His job is to set a tone for the program, so after reading Game On he passed out 125 copies to his coaches to stimulate the discussion. He's hoping that it's a dialogue that pushes down to the youth sports leagues that serve as feeder programs in his middle-class town.

Here's how Quinn eventually came down on the definition of "champion," a word I had deliberately used in the subtitle of the book because it would make readers think:

Continue reading "Defining a champion" »

Very late in my reporting for Game On, Robert Lipsyte asked me if I was going to write about kids and NASCAR. Coming from journalist with the credentials and credibility of Lipsyte, whose work I have long admired, that meant, to me, that I probably should have included a chapter on the topic. I hadn't, for three reasons: 1) auto racing is somewhat disconnected the world of organized sports that most children in this country are exposed to, 2) it's nearly impossible to reach the highest levels of the sport (no more than 2-4 rookies hit the Sprint Cup level each year, whereas in the NFL there are at least that many first-year players on each team), and 3) I frankly don't follow the sport with any consistency. Game On covers a lot of ground geographically and intellectually, and one of the great challenges was getting to know the pathways to success in more than a half-dozen sports, as well as the challenges of the respective organizations that govern the landscape. It was easy just to take a pass on NASCAR, popular as it may be as a spectator sport in some parts of the country.

So I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to spend some time recently with Joey Logano, the 18-year-old phenom who was expected to make his Sprint Cup debut this weekend until rain cancelled his chance at qualifying. He'll now make his debut next weekend, and it's already been announced that next year he will get a full-time ride at that level when he takes over Tony Stewart's No. 20 Home Depot car. In my reporting for an all-access profile that appeared last week on E:60 (you can watch it here, if you missed it), I couldn't help but notice that his meteoric ascent mirrored in many ways the pathway of the most well-known sports prodigy of our era.

Yes, I'm talking about Tiger Woods.

Continue reading "The Tiger Woods of racing" »

OK, good news first. And this one's a little belated, my apologies ... Emily Silver, who I wrote about in my last blog entry, helped the U.S. women's swim team win a silver medal in the 4x100 meter relay in Beijing. Her father, Bob, posted an delightful photo of his third daughter on his http://bainbridgetobeijing.com/blog so check it out. You'll get some sense of what it's like to be the parent of a child who shines at one of the world's most prestigious sports events. I'm so happy for her and for her family--Bob, Mary Sue, Patrick, Kerry and Helen. Surveys of Olympians have shown that family support is critical to their development as elite athletes, and this certainly is the case with the Silvers. Everyone in that family shares in Emily's triumph of will and spirit. And what a great smile Emily has--it's the same one I remember from when she was a preschooler on Bainbridge Island!

Now, for a few observations on topics touched on in Game On:

The Olympics. It's nice that NBC and the American media in general isn't focusing on the medal count, as the Olympics really are about the spirit of competition among athletes, wherever they may be from. And yet, it's worth taking note of the medal count because the U.S., for the first time since 1992, isn't going to win more gold than any other country. That claim will belong to China. The Asian giant is rising, but more to the point, we're seeing the downstream effects of neglecting grassroots sports and long-term athlete development in the U.S. Pick up a copy of ESPN The Magazine next week, as I'll be writing about why the pipeline of potential champions isn't as wide or deep as it can or should be in the U.S. I've talked with Steve Roush, chief of sport performance for the US Olympic Committee, and he understands that the USOC needs to take a more active role with the organizations that structure the youth sports landscape. The magazine piece touches on themes I address in several chapters of Game On, and calls for a new direction for American sports, which increasingly are focused on the (often haphazard) grooming of elite child athletes in a limited number of sports.

Little League World Series. For the second time in four years, a team from Hawaii has advanced to the U.S. championship game of the series. It'll be played on Saturday and includes a team from Waipio Little League, in Waipahu, on the island of O'ahu. That's not far from Ewa Beach, the team that won the 2005 World Series over Curacao in dramatic fashion--with a walk-off home run on the night Hurricane Katrina was about to barrel into the Gulf Coast. In Chapter 12 of Game On, I write about that Ewa Beach team and their march to what was seen then as an improbable victory. It was an incredibly dedicated bunch, led by a coach who basically had the team in training camp all season and, as I discovered in my reporting, a star pitcher-slugger who lived out of district. Turns out the parents of Vonn Fe'ao (remember him--the kid with the long, curly golden locks and Ray Lewis intensity?) went to family court and got their legal guardianship rights transferred to a woman who lived inside the Ewa Beach district. He still lived with his parents most of the time, but when local rivals complained in the post-season, Little League felt like it couldn't pull Fe'ao from the game because the court had signed off on the arrangement. Retaining access to the hard-throwing Fe'ao paid off with a victory that qualifies as perhaps the biggest moment in Hawaii sports history. But members of that team will tell you that the toughest part of the road to Williamsport was simply advancing through the state championships. That's how tough the youth baseball is in Hawaii--and we're seeing the product of that highly competitive environment again in the presence of Waipio. If the team beats a Louisiana team on Saturday, it advances to Sunday's international championship against the winner of the Japan-Mexico game. And wouldn't that be amazing if two teams from one little island in the middle of the Pacific conquered the world twice within four years?

High school football. Just a quick update from Miami Northwestern, the mythical national champion from last season whose team was the focus of Chapter 14 in Game On. How loaded was that team? Well, at least 16 seniors signed Division I football scholarships in February. That's an insanely high number--most good high school teams would be lucky to have one or two kids get athletic scholarships in a given year. Indeed, Northwestern probably isn't going to have nearly as many kids go DI after this season, as the Bulls are in a rebuilding mode. But it's not just that last year's team loaded with talent. The number of scholarships handed out was due in part to the improved academic environment at the troubled school, which has had plenty of talented prospects in the past never make it to college because they just couldn't meet the basic NCAA requirements. (Trust me, those SAT and GPA requirements aren't all that rigorous--if you're a blue-chip athlete in a revenue sport such as football or basketball, universities can usually find a way to get you in). Principal Charles Hankerson, a no-nonsense guy who is known as a turnaround specialist, was brought in after a sex scandal involving a star football player led to grand jury charges had prompted a house-cleaning of administration, and he used that situation to improve the school. Northwestern students posted their best state testing scores in years, and the football players were brought along. That meant more seniors were eligible to get signed for athletic scholarships. Congratulations to Hankerson, coach Billy Rolle and the players who made the effort. Just goes to show that good things can flow from adversity.

Jock sperm. Finally, as readers of Game On know, I wrote about a sperm bank in Los Angeles that is now selling the seed of college athletes. And it's selling like hotcakes. If you want more on that, watch E:60 on Tuesday (7 pm ET) when I take that reporting and extend it out a bit further, speaking to some of the families that bought the sperm of donor 3448, a college tight end from a few years ago. We found that there are at least 16 children born from his sperm. His sperm sold so well he's now "retired," meaning it's all gone--none for sale anymore. Which raises an interesting question: If some UCLA or USC athlete is getting paid $900 a month for his sperm, does that constitute an NCAA violation? Would love to see the NCAA gumshoes investigate that one!

Heading on vacation for a week. I'll catch up on the blog after that.

I'm back from vacation, the better part of 2 1/2 weeks in the Seattle area with a book signing (Elliott Bay Book Company in Pioneer Square) and east coast trip (storytellers conference on New Jersey shore) mixed in. If for some reason you're still checking this blog daily, or even regularly, more apologies for the long absence. I was overdue for some down time with the family.

Not that I stayed down for very long. On July 4th, I flew off the couch like a bottle rocket while watching NBC's coverage of the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Omaha. We were at a family friend's home on Whidbey Island, and I had a deep rooting interest in the results of the women's 100-meter freestyle final.

There, in a middle lane, was four-time Olympian Dara Torres, who I had reported on for E:60 back in the spring when she granted us her first major national television interview. At 41 years old, she was trying to make her fifth Olympic team in 24 years. Thus, just about anyone over the age of 30 was pulling for her, including many at the party I was attending.

But I had my eye mostly on Emily Silver, who was in an outside lane and was trying to make her first Olympic team. Her father, Bob, was once sports editor of The Seattle Times and had been dopey enough to hire me to cover the Sonics a few months after I graduated from college. Emily was a toddler at the time, just a lovely little girl with blond hair and the sweetest smile, I thought.

Bob saw more than that. He saw those big hands, big feet, and thought, "SWIMMER."

Continue reading "My favorite All-American Race" »