Ask Coach Wolff

By Doug Abrams

For the past two weeks, I have discussed the importance of equal playing time in games below the middle school age.  Last week, Part II said that youngsters who participate fully in each game finish the season with permanent recollections of camaraderie and accomplishment.  This week’s column explains how equal playing time promotes player safety. 

In youth sports, safety precautions seek to assure each player a lifetime of memories free from the lasting effects of avoidable injury.  Physical safety – freedom from concussions, broken bones or other physical injury — is only half the story.  Emotional safety is the other half.  

Equal playing time promotes safety by helping to assure each youngster a lifetime of memories free from the lasting effects of avoidable emotional injury.  Win or lose, physical well-being and emotional well-being are joint legacies of youth sports at its best.

“The Shame and Humiliation Never Went Away”

Chronic benchwarming does not leave the sort of visible scars that sometimes follow physical injury, but chronic benchwarming can leave permanent emotional scars.  Rick Wolff is right that “too many youth league coaches just don’t understand the harmful psychological impact that sitting on the bench has on a young kid.” 

Benchwarming is a major reason why about 70% of youth leaguers stop playing by their early teen years, but the harmful psychological impact may continue long after a player quits.  In our society which places so much emphasis on success in sports, benchwarming is a badge of shame whose immediate assault on self-esteem can dog the player throughout adolescence and adulthood.

A few years ago, the Los Angeles Times published a letter-to-the-editor by a former Little Leaguer whose benching more than a generation earlier left permanent emotional scars long after scores grew meaningless.  “With tears pouring off my face and agony in my chest,” the letter writer responded to a recent Times article about the emotional hurt suffered by a local 8-year-old baseball player who went hitless for two years on teams led by coaches unconcerned about his fragile sensibilities. 

The letter writer described the one summer he had spent in Little League as a fourth-grader decades earlier.  “Despite hours spent at home trying to get wood to meet horsehide,” he wrote, “I was hopelessly inept.  Our coach played only the stars.  I remember nothing else of that summer . . . except the sole inning I played.  I struck out and screwed up a play in left field.  For the remainder of the season, I was invisible to the coach.” 

The letter writer confided that “[t]he shame and humiliation of that one night at age 9 never went away.  I’m 50 now.”

[Source:  Humiliation of Ineptness on the Field Never Left, L.A. Times, May 21, 2001, Part 5, p. 4 (letter-to-the-editor)]