Youth Sports, Winning, Losing, Comp/Travel Leagues...

[E.J.]

What say you BOTL???

On another(unrelated) forum a guy started a discussion about winning and losing, as opposed to the no official score keeping of youth sports today(everyone is a winner). His stance was the kids need to learn to lose and lose gracefully, as opposed to everyone being a winner ect.

Though, at least locally, we keep score except for the youngest SUPER early entry stuff. Even some of that, almost everyone is keeping score, including coaches. Kids tend to know if they won or lost.

As tends to happen in a thread, it soon turned to comp/travel leagues and kids specializing too early....so on and so forth. People tend to have some pretty strong feelings about kids being involved in comp/travel teams and the pressure to specialize early. Most of this then tends to fall towards blame on the parents.

Being that I have kids that are involved in athletics, I had a bit to say and tried to look at both sides of this as best possible, trying to stay objective(that is tough when you are dealing with it first hand).

The days of my youth were me and all my friends played a sport in the Fall, a sport in the Winter and a sport in the Spring/Summer. You didn't have an option to play anything year round, it just wasn't offered. Today, almost everything is. Kids today can play year round if they choose. That may or may not affect their development in said sport vs the masses.

THEN you have the option of travel and comp teams.... No longer do all the best kids from an area get slotted to different teams and compete against each other in a league, they form a team and go out and play teams from neighboring areas. Does this take away from the rec leagues and those kids playing in those(assuming the kids don't play in both)?

The fact is, this snowball is moving and it isn't going to stop. It is the way youth athletics are nowadays. So I guess as a parent you do the best you can and leave it at that. For me that is offering everything on the plate and letting the kid choose what they want to do, then supporting that. Though that is a VERY broad stroke. You see with that, you can be steering. Back in the days when it was one sport a season, it was this is what you can do....or you can do nothing. Some kids will do something vs nothing, but now if they like something.....they may never choose to do an alternative....

Sometimes this rambling can have my head spinning.... Anyway, thought maybe some of you would have some thoughts on this.

[forgop]

I'll just say I think this whole notion that parents feel the need to protect their kids from losing. Taking away the winning/losing takes away the true reason to play and put in the work necessary to become better if there's no inventive. Kids need a dose of reality in the real world long before they go to college and are trying to stand on their own two feet.

[Jasonw560]

My boys HATE to lose. They've been on some crappy teams, so they know how to lose, and (in team sports, at least) lose graciously. The same with winning.

As Steven Tyler sang, "You've got to lose to know how to win". Sports or life, you have to "meet with triumph and disaster/and treat those two imposters just the same". Taking away winning and losing, GIVING away trophies (because some teams didn't EARN them), and saying everyone's a winner may boost kids' morales in the short term, but IMHO, it turns them into entitlement brats in the long run.

We ask our boys if they want to play a sport with the caveat that they have to stick with it at least one season. They've decided what they like and what they don't. We haven't pressured our kids into doing anything they didn't want to so.

Logan has gotten invited to play on the travel soccer team. We're not doing it because 1)he doesn't care if he's on the team or not, and 2)we don't have the time to do it. It is an honor, and if we could, he'd do it. He understands that. It would make him better, and I believe it helps the leagues. It makes the teams try harder.

[Silound]

When I was a kid playing rec sports, we knew if we won or lost, it was that simple. This whole "no one is a loser" thing is, in my opinion, detrimental to early development. Not learning to shoulder the burden of defeat in life quite possibly contributes to people being unable to shoulder responsibility later in life because "it's not their fault they couldn't do it."


There's a fine line however, between losing because it was a well fought close game, and losing because the other team ground your chit into the dirt. The most important thing for youth sports is to ensure that they --have fun-- while participating. Everyone regretted losing that semi-finals baseball game by one run, but they damn well went out there and fought for that near-victory. And at the end of the game, everyone stood around drinking water, snacking, and smiling ruefully saying "but they better look out next year!"

That's what it's about.


The above has been stated IMO. YMMV. SYLDFD.

I'm of the age that I was one of those playing a different sport every season kid. When growing up, I played baseball, soccer, and basketball (football instead of soccer in high school). I started off in the rec leagues, as that was all we had, at the time. With baseball, there was a short travelling season after the rec league season was done. In 7th grade is when there were travelling leagues, and there were no more city leagues for us. The player pool had shrunken enough by then to that point.

My parents never told me they wanted me to play anything. I always had the desire to play sports. In fact, punishments were to not let me play, occasionally. I couldn't go to practice or a game if I got in trouble (which, thankfully was very rare). They never pushed me one bit, and I've always been more critical of my own performances than they were. I remember after some basketball games in high school, my dad would said I played well, and I'd proceed to refute that with examples from during the game that I screwed up or could have done better. Just how I've always been wired.

As for the specialization, I understand that it's a different game than it used to be, with all the AAU teams and such. I have mixed feelings on it. By being in those, the kids can get further in a faster fashion than if they played multiple sports. However, I believe that for me, playing all the different sports I did made me a better overall athlete. By not being specialized, I was able to learn more body movements, control, etc. that I could apply to each different sport. I played goalie in soccer, which I had to have quick reactions, judgement for the movement of a ball coming at me, and good hands. In baseball, I played catcher, which required leg strength, and of course, the quick reactions/reflexes, and good hands. Basketball...the other sports played into making me a better basketball player, with some of the components within the other sports I played. I don't think I would have had the jumping ability I had, if I hadn't been a catcher in baseball, honestly. Then, when I started playing football, applying some things from those other sports helped me even more. Lateral quickness from basketball, the hands from all 3 other sports, and the quickness and explosion from basketball. However it worked, I was able to play Div 2 college football for a couple years. Could I have gotten further by specializing? Maybe. But I don't think I would have had as much fun or be as well rounded as I was. Just my opinion.

As for the scorekeeping. I really dislike that they don't do it. I understand they want to boost the morale of the kids, but I also feel that it doesn't teach them the lessons that they need to learn. When they get into the "real world", they won't always be a "winner". They need to learn how to both win and lose gratefully, and that is a lesson that pays dividends as an adult. The life lessons it teaches is very important. You can't always win, so you have to work hard and always give it your best. At least that's what I got out of it. Additionally, how hard you try will always matter, whether you're up big or down big. I was always someone who would play as hard as I could until the very end of whatever game it was. I see too many kids that have that entitlement attitude, and think that a decent portion of it is coming from the lack of scorekeeping and participation trophies that are being handed out nowadays. I've had people work for me that have the attitude that I owed them for just showing up at work, and not for doing top quality work. VERY frustrating to deal with as a supervisor.

Well...I think that about sums up what I've seen and how I feel about this particular subject.