WHY BOYS AND GIRLS PLAY SPORTS In 1989, Michigan State professors surveyed 8,000 kids, asking what their motives for playing youth sports were. Reasons for participating in school sports: boys 1. To have fun 2. To improve my skills 3. For the excitement of competition 4. To do something I'm good at 5. To stay in shape 6. For the challenge of competition 7. To be part of a team 8. To win 9. To go to a higher level of competition 10. To get exercise girls 1. To have fun 2. To stay in shape 3. To get exercise 4. To improve my skills 5. To do something I'm good at 6. To be part of a team 7. For the excitement of competition 8. To learn new skills 9. For team spirit 10. For the challenge of competition Reasons for participating in non-school sports: boys 1. To have fun 2. To do something I'm good at 3. To improve my skills 4. For the excitement of competition 5. To stay in shape 6. For the challenge of competition 7. To get exercise 8. To learn new skills 9. To play as part of a team 10. To go to a higher level of competition girls 1. To have fun 2. To stay in shape 3. To get exercise 4. To improve my skills 5. To do something I'm good at 6. To learn new skills 7. For the excitement of competition 8. To play as part of a team 9. To make new friends 10. For the challenge of competition

1) Understand why children play sports
Parents and youth coaches commonly assume that kids want to win. And they do. But winning means far more to adults than it does to children. A 1989 survey by Michigan State researchers found that the No. 1 reason children give for participating in sports is, “To have fun.” That was the case with boys and girl, in school sports and non-school sports (see charts at right). Children want the excitement and challenge of competition, but “To win” only cracks the top 10 reasons given for playing sports by boys on school teams. While winning is preferable to losing the day’s game—and many children will try hard to win, even crying when they come up short—they don’t linger on the result. Ten minutes after the final whistle, they’ve moved on. It’s mom and dad who keep talking about the game at dinner. View youth sports through the lens and needs of children, and you’re more likely to keep them engaged in the activity.

2) Train all coaches
Those who volunteer to organize teams often spend more time around a child than any adult outside of the home or school. Yet, unlike teachers, the great majority of them have never been trained on how to work with children so that they develop the desired skills and character traits. What’s the best way to percolate a love of the game? What type of play can an eight-year-old athlete handle that a six-year-old can’t? How do you keep the late bloomer involved in sports, and the early bloomer from burning out? Groups such as the Positive Coaching Alliance and the U.S. Soccer Federation can give coaches the tools they need to both reduce attrition and create better athletes, but such education has to be mandated and subsidized by the local, state and national organizations that govern each sport. Training is easier than ever to dispense, with the availability of online courses.

3) Get active on town and club boards
Most non-profit groups that offer soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports opportunities are run by volunteer boards. Those boards are often dominated by the most motivated sports parents—the dad, for instance, who wants to create tournament teams at ever-younger ages because he’s ready to compete and/or he wants to give his kid a leg up on his peers. The voice of the more moderate parent—the silent majority, I would argue—gets lost because few of them bother to vote in elections. So, show up. Run for the board or, better yet, the town recreation committee that controls the use of public facilities. Create a mission statement that gives more than lip service to the goal of broad-based participation. Ban travel teams before middle school, if necessary. Post signs on the sidelines telling parents that it’s fine to cheer, but keep it upbeat and leave the coaching to the coaches. Agitate. Build coalitions. Democracy in action is a beautiful thing.

4) Fund research on youth sports
There’s lot of data available on the shape of pro and college sports, and the most effective ways to develop elite adult athletes. There’s a relative dearth of research about trends involving youth and high school sports, and best practices when working with athletes at those levels. Michigan State University has done some excellent work in this area, as have other sports scientists, much of which I used to inform the perspective of this book. But much more needs to be known about such topic areas as early sport specialization, the impact of travel teams, and the effectiveness of government funding on recreation options. We need to give parents and organizations the tools to make sound decisions about the development of child athletes, rather than rely on gut instinct and old habits.

5) Promote Talent ID
Every kid can be good at some sport. But they often don’t find it, because most kids get funneled into the same four or five mainstream U.S. games, all of which favor explosive muscle action and most of which rely on good hand-eye coordination. That’s a recipe for high drop-out rates. We need to introduce children to a wider variety of sports. In Game On, I write about the value of “Talent ID,” a program that would put teens through a battery of physical and psychological evaluations so that custom recommendations could be made. Such a program would be integrated into school physical education classes, as a once-a-year assessment to help spot options at a time when participation opportunities are shrinking rapidly. Clubs would be notified of potential prospects in the area, as would school-based coaches, and connections could be made. Here and there in a nation of 300 million, surely, champions will emerge in sports that we—and some kids—didn’t think Americans had any chance to compete in on an international level.

6) Get beyond the one-team, one-school structure
High school athletics is a uniquely American phenomenon. Elsewhere in the world, clubs dominate and educational institutions have little to do with sports, much less spectator sports. Instead, we have a one-team, one-school construct in which our varsity tries to one-up your varsity. That setup works fine at small schools where teams are plentiful, but it’s highly problematic at large public schools where only a handful of teens get to make the lone soccer, basketball, baseball and other teams. If schools are truly interested in serving students, and not just winning state titles, they would find a way to allow the creation of multiple teams (A, B, etc.) where demand dictates. Yes, this idea runs counter to the trend of whacking budgets for teams, intramurals and recess. But schools need to either embrace athletics as a tool of child development or get out of the enterprise entirely and abdicate to the clubs. Because chasing teen glory alone isn’t solving any problems.

7) Increase funding for recreation
Any true commitment to broad-based participation begins with infrastructure. Fields. Gyms. Rec centers. Fund ‘em, or pay the price later. Federal support for such projects took a serious hit when Ronald Reagan took the presidency in 1980, and it’s never recovered. That’s not much of problem in wealthier and middle-class communities where parents can afford rising fees for recreation. But in distressed urban cities such as Baltimore, many recreation centers have shut down in the past couple decades and some kids look to drug dealers for financial support. We need find a way to give children of lesser means safe places to play after school. And if that means shifting government subsidies away from stadiums and arenas for pro teams to help pay for such programs, so be it.

8) Get rid of college athletic scholarships and special admissions
The manic hunt to get kids college roster spots helps drives bad behavior at the youth level. So, if education truly is the mission of college sports, then there is no good reason that NCAA titles need to be pursued by (under-) paid mercenaries hired and fired by the athletic department. Do away with the so-called athletic scholarship and base all aid on financial need or academic merit—and all of a sudden the AAU has a tough time getting signups for its third-grade national championships. The parents of fifth-graders feel less compelled to join that year-round travel baseball team. A sprawling industry built upon the sale of pans to those prospecting for gold surely will resist this proposal, but it would serve the interest of the common good. I’d also recommend that NCAA members agree to go a step further and do away with special admissions for recruited athletes. Let the student get accepted to college without a coach’s all-powerful help.

9) Create alternate pathways for pro prospects
If the NCAA stopped going out of its way to hoard most elite athletic talent of a certain age, the pro leagues would be forced to take control of their player pipelines. They would have to invest in the grooming of its next generation of stars, just like the European clubs do, instead of using colleges and high schools as de facto farm clubs. This would be an excellent development in a sport such as basketball. Imagine David Stern requiring every NBA, National Basketball Development League and WNBA club to offer age-group teams at the teenage levels—from U-20 down through U-14. Players would be drawn exclusively from the local area and region, so disruptions to a kid’s education and family life would be minimized. A top prospect would get trained by youth coaches affiliated with the NBA club, and perhaps use existing facilities. Games would be played but the priority would be on skill development as clubs would be looking to produce talent that eventually could help its NBA team. These clubs later would receive a discount on draft day for—or perhaps first dibs on—any prospect that came up through its system. The best kids could still choose to play on their high school teams, if they still found it to be a challenge. But the elite-vs.-participation pathways would become more defined, allowing schools to focus more on the students with no NBA futures.

10) Re-write the Amateur Sports Act
The Amateur Sports Act of 1978, later amended, put the U.S. Olympic Committee in charge of coordinating the grassroots development of many sports in this country. The USOC instead has come to spend most of its energy on the elite of the elite among prospects, while letting the national governing bodies (NGBs) organize the grassroots. Congress should bolster the Sports Act to require the USOC and the NGBs to prioritize broad-based participation above all else at the youth level. That means monitoring attrition rates and setting annual goals. It means disbursing USOC funds to NGBs based primarily on progress at the grassroots level, not by Olympic medal count. It means funding and dissemination of scientific sports research relevant to child athletes. It means restricting the use of USOC-controlled Olympic marks, such as the name Junior Olympics, to organizations that agree not to hold national championships before the teenage years. It means helping the USOC do all this with some funding, which in turn will create real accountability. It means tasking a government agency, perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services, to ensure the USOC is acting in a manner that promotes public health.

Make no mistake, transforming the culture means restructuring the culture. But change starts on the local level, with grownups who believe in the enormous promise of youth sports.