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.