I want to issue a belated thanks to everyone who read my open letter to Barack Obama on the eve of his inauguration. In the weeks since the ESPN.com piece was published, I've received a lot of great response, from coaches, parents, and top officials at organizations such the U.S. Olympic Committee and Nike. I even heard from a D.C. lobbyist who represents a parks district. As you can see in the Conversations section beneath the piece, some readers objected to government using its resources to keep more kids playing sports into their teenage years and beyond. But most embraced the notion of "sport as a human right," and using broad-based access to athletics as a tool of preventative health care.

Evidence of these benefits was highlighted by the results of a study recently published in the journal Pediatrics. European researchers found that the children who were the most physically active as teens were those most likely to be physically active two decades later. The study, which followed 1,016 Norwegian children at six schools starting in 1979, also found that the active teens were more likely to be at a healthy weight through their 30s, though this association disappeared once adults reached their 40s. The results--common sense but under-studied from an academic perspective--show the importance of keeping children moving, as well as the benefits of staying active into adulthood.

On the other side of the Atlantic pond, the study presents some interesting challenges...

Continue reading "Sports and universal health care" »

Speaking of Joe Keller, the NCAA last week decided to officially agree with him: Middle school students, in fact, are bonafide college basketball prospects. A new recruiting rule was adopted, classifying males in the seventh and eighth grades as "prospective athletes," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education

NCAA rules previously defined a prospective basketball player as any student who had begun classes for the ninth grade. But that standard was lowerered in recognition of the fact that some D-I coaches were working at summer events such as Keller's Adidas Junior Phenom Camp, where early recruiting connections were being made. In recent years, a few eighth-graders have received oral offers of college athletic scholarships.

The new rule was presented by its sponsors as a way for the NCAA to keep college coaches out of the business of kid hoops--through regulation. “It’s scary,” one of its backers told the Chronicle. “The fact that we’ve gotten to this point is really just a sign of the times.”

It's also an acknowledgement by the NCAA that its programs aren't all that different than the soccer and basketball clubs elsewhere in the world that scout talent whenever it presents itself. Overseas, a kid might get a modest contract once he's 16 or so. In the U.S., he might get a scholarship that's worth as much as $45,000 a year when he's 18.

Bottom line is, if you could bring value to a sports organization with money, scouts are going to want to find you and work you.

And when they have something valuable to offer, you're going to want to be found.

NCAA officials are hoping the new rule will nip the problem of super-early recruiting in the bud. Give them credit for moving quickly, before scores of college coaches feel compelled to start up their own middle-school camps. But don't expect all that much to change on the summer hoops scene. And don't expect to see Junior Phenom and its ilk to go away. If anything, the rule only confirms their relevance.

You gotta give Joe Keller credit. The man was a pioneer.

A few years ago, the L.A. summer basketball coach created the Junior Phenom camp for what he called the top middle-school prospects in the nation. It was a dubious proposition—the idea that anyone could identify and aggregate the future stars of the game at this age—but Keller got buy-in from Adidas. Then he got buy-in from the parents of several of the kids who had generated the most buzz at annual AAU national championships. Some of these players flashed bonafide emerging talent; others merely had early growth spurts would have no real future in the game. Didn’t matter. Keller used their names to get other parents excited about taking their kid to San Diego so he or she could wear the same “Junior Phenom” jersey, and get ranked by HoopScoop. College coaches hated to be there, but some of them came anyway, fearing that some rival might make some key connection. Soon, Junior Phenom became a (lucrative) fixture on the elite hoops scene.

Now say hello to the curiously named Football University Youth All-American Bowl, the inaugural edition of which was held last week in San Antonio. The New York Times and Washington Post both ran features on the event, which brought together 143 seventh-graders and eighth-graders for a series of three games at the Alamodome. The director of the bowl, John Gallagher, told the Times’ Thayer Evans and Pete Thamel that thousands of children across the country were considered for inclusion, with selections made based on performance, competition level and long-term potential. By seventh grade, Gallagher insisted, it is “mostly clear” as to which players have football talent.

Hmmm ...

Continue reading "Football learns how to eat its young, finally" »

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" »