In their release, USSA says that in order for American teams to be competitive against international squads, we need to step up our training program and have HS kids play 10 months of the year, starting in September. That translates into having HS players walk away from their HS team.

My radio guest, Matt Allen, head coach of the boys’ team at Byram Hills HS in Armonk, NY, made it clear that it just isn’t fair to place these kids into this situation. “If you talk to the players themselves, by far the vast majority of them want to play for their HS team – not the club team — during the fall season.” But USSA is no longer giving the kids that choice.

To me, this is really an unnecessary dilemma to force teenage soccer players to choose one or the other. But it’s also a sign of the times as more and more HS athletes are beginning to walk away from their HS teams. The difference, though, is that if the kids make their own decision to walk away from their HS squad, well, that’s their choice. With USSA, they are being told they HAVE to walk away. That’s a big — and significant – difference.

It’s absolutely time for travel programs and HS coaches to finally sit down and work together and figure out a compromise. For example, let the USSA kids play on their HS teams. But during that fall season, allow those kids to spend an extra 1-2 days during the week practicing with the USSA team. At least that’s a start.

Almost like clockwork by the end of every season, the parents of at least one of my squirt hockey players would ask me how they could help their 9-year-old win an athletic scholarship someday, and perhaps even make the pros.  The parents’ names were different each year, but the questions remained the same.  Hope springs eternal, I guess, even in elementary school.

Our players’ parents were good people who meant well and supported their children’s sports as best they could. They wanted their sons and daughters to achieve, but they were open to reason and did not go batty about games.

Some kids are not so fortunate. Visions of collegiate or professional sports careers can lead some parents to impose unhealthy pressure on themselves and their child, threatening the fun and fulfillment that youth sports should provide players and their families. The irony is that sometimes the unhealthy pressure backfires by leading the child to quit as a young teen, ending any possibility of future advancement in sports, even if the child showed some potential.

Winning and Early Specialization

Sometimes parents with visions of future stardom pressure coaches of even the youngest teams to win at almost any cost, even by benching other children. Trophies and championships at such a tender age, however, are not markers of individual skill, particularly in team sports where victory or defeat on a given day depends so much on the performance of as many of two dozen teammates and opponents.  Even when parents urge coaches cut corners, it can be difficult to control the final score.

Parents nowadays may also push their particularly young children to specialize in one sport and abandon others.  The anticipation is that year-round concentration for a decade or more will enhance skills and open doors later on.  Early specialization, however, can exact high emotional and physical costs that can cut an athletic career short.  The player may lose out on youthful experimentation and free play that generates sustained enthusiasm for sports; the player may suffer chronic overuse injuries as growing bones and tissues suffer continuous wear-and-tear from similar repetitive stresses and strains month after month without adequate time for rest; and the child may never develop the all-around coordination and dexterity that can come from experience in a few sports before settling on one later on. 

The Youth Sports Lottery

Do visions of the “big payoff” make sense? News accounts of college signing days and multimillion dollar pro contracts can blind many parents to the harsh sifting process that regulates entry into the collegiate and professional ranks.  No matter what parents do, few youth leaguers will ever be talented enough to play big-time collegiate sports, and fewer still will ever reach the pros. 

Professional athletes are so talented that they sometimes make their games look deceptively easy, but it has been estimated that the odds against a child’s reaching the pros in any sport are about 12,000 to one, or higher.  Two million children participate in competitive gymnastics each year, for example, but only seven or eight participate in the Olympics every four years.  Less than 4% of varsity high school football players move on to college football, and less than 1% of college players are offered professional contracts.  For every 2300 high school senior basketball players, only 40 will play college basketball and only one will play in the National Basketball Association. Because many pros enjoy only brief stints in the big leagues, the odds against enjoying a successful pro career are even more overwhelming.

With numbers like these, parents eyeing the collegiate ranks or the pros might as well play the state lottery.  Like adults who see a lottery winner’s smiling face in the newspaper and rush out to buy tickets, sports parents are sometimes tantalized by media accounts of players like Tiger Woods and Mickey Mantle, whose fathers pushed them and won the “lottery” when their child made it big.  The newspaper photos show only the one winner, however, and not the thousands or millions of losers. These media accounts are noteworthy precisely because they are so extraordinary, and rare winners do nothing to improve the overwhelming odds facing everyone else. 

Taking Chances on the Future

Life is full of uncertainties and even risks.  We take a chance whenever we choose to do something today, solely or primarily because we hope that it will lead to something desirable in the future. If we achieve our aspiration, we win; if not, we may lose.  Sometimes taking a chance today makes sense, such as when students choose to study indoors on a sunny day because they want to earn higher grades and achieve a higher class standing on the way to graduation and future employment. But taking a chance may make much less sense when adults impose artificial pressure on their children’s games, hoping that today’s sacrifices will lead to collegiate or professional sports careers that are highly unlikely ever to happen.

Before we finished talking each year, I would urge our players’ parents to support their children, root hard for them in every game, provide the best equipment they can, and help the children work through victories and defeats alike.  But I would also remind the parents that in youth sports, adult-imposed pressure can be counterproductive. About 70% of child athletes quit by their early teen years, often because they are tired of being cut, benched or continually hectored by parents and coaches.  This stunning number suggests that the adults’ artificial pressure likely aborts many more collegiate and professional careers than it creates.  Some children who quit playing early, before ever developing skills and demonstrating genuine talent, would have had a better chance of reaching the collegiate or pro ranks with supportive parents who pursued reasonable opportunities but allowed them to engage in natural play in their earliest years. 

[Source: Douglas E. Abrams, The Challenge Facing Parents and Coaches in Youth Sports: Assuring Children Fun and Equal Opportunity, Villanova Sports & Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 8, pp. 253-92 (2002)]

Your impressions will be just like mine: Wow, is this kid quick! It’s amazing how fast he is when he drives to the hoop. He’s got terrific peripheral eyesight – he sees the court with remarkable vision. And he shoots like an All-Star veteran.

So…if you can spot all this about Lin, and I can see this, how come ALL the pro and college coaches and scouts couldn’t see this? Here’s a 6-3 guard who led his HS team in California to a state championship, but the only two D-I programs that sniffed at him were Harvard and Brown, not exactly known as basketball powerhouses. Then, after a terrific career at Harvard, Lin isn’t drafted by anyone in the NBA. He gets signed as an undrafted free agent, bounces around for a year, and then lands as a benchplayer for the Knicks.

Nobody, but nobody, thought this kid was going anywhere as a pro player. And it was good that Lin majored in economics at Harvard, because the time was getting close for him to start thinking about applying to business school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The REAL story of Jeremy Lin is that for every kid who sits on the bench in sports, this is their hero. Lin personifies in every way the lament of every benchwarmer who pleads: “Coach, just give me a shot…I know I can play. Just put me in the game.”

Remember, for every star player, there are countless other kids who bide their time, riding the pines. For me, I can personally attest to that feeling. Back in the early 1970s, after being All-County in baseball and football in high school, I found myself transformed into a benchwarmer on the Harvard varsity baseball team. Understand that Harvard actually had big-time baseball in those days (my sophomore year, the Crimson went all the way to the College World Series in Omaha). But as a reserve infielder, I could never understand why the coach couldn’t look at me and see how much potential I had.

That feeling was fueled by the fact that I played each summer in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League (ACBL) in New York City, where dozens of college players are showcased for pro scouts each year. And in the ACBL, I not only held my own, but I was an All-Star player.

But then I would head back to Harvard, and would find myself the bench. The coach just wasn’t impressed with what I could offer the Crimson.

But then, after my junior year, my story had a happy ending. Based upon my showings in the ACBL, the Detroit Tigers took a chance on me and made me a low-level draftee. I was absolutely ecstatic! And that following spring, I found myself in Lakeland, FL, in spring training in the Tigers’ organization, getting to know young aspiring players like Jim Leyland, Ron LeFlore, Joe McIlvaine, and others.  

Was I as successful as Jeremy Lin? No, not even close. But I was good enough to be drafted and play pro ball for a couple of years. But for me, the dream of finally getting off the bench and getting into the game had been fulfilled. So, benchwarmers everywhere, look at Jeremy Lin’s amazing success and keep the faith! Your turn is coming.

Last week’s column urged youth sports programs to assemble coaching staffs that may include interested adults who lack experience playing or coaching the game.  Experience in the game is not essential for setting a positive example and teaching citizenship lessons.  Men and women inexperienced in the game may also soon develop proficiency teaching the X’s and O’s because coaches, like classroom teachers, learn by instructing. 

This Part II discusses five roles that less experienced assistant coaches can play on a youth league team when staff members respect one another despite differences in their playing or coaching backgrounds. 

What coaches without significant experience can accomplish

The inexperienced coach’s cardinal rule is, “Be yourself.”  This rule should motivate experienced and inexperienced coaches alike, and indeed almost anyone in a position of authority because leadership begins with candor. Particularly in older age groups, youth leaguers and their parents soon figure out the experience levels of their various coaches.  No coach fools players or parents for very long, and no serious coach should want to.

I have seen players develop an abiding respect for coaches who, despite lack of experience in the game, remain honest with the team and set a wholesome example. But I have also seen players snicker at coaches who try to be something they are not by joining in practice drills that they cannot perform skillfully, or by inflating their credentials.

Here are five valuable contributions that coaches without years of experience in the game can make to the team effort:

Help conduct practice sessions.  In many youth leagues today, practice time is scarce or expensive, or both.  To make the most efficient use of every minute, skillful head coaches sometimes split the squad into smaller groups that each works on a different fundamental or skill for a few minutes.  After an assigned time (say, five or ten minutes), the coach blows the whistle and the groups rotate from one station to another.  The groups continue rotating until each group has worked at each station.  A less experienced assistant coach can conduct an individual station that the head coach believes is within the assistant’s capacities.   

Offer leadership during games.  The head coach normally makes out the lineup and, depending on the sport’s substitution rules, manages the lineup throughout the game.  Because the head coach may find it difficult to pay close individual attention to a dozen or more players while also directing the team, assistant coaches can help fill the void by paying particular attention to individual players who seem to need it.  Even less experienced assistants can make a difference with words of encouragement or correction at the right time. 

Help supervise the team.  At any age level, players need adult supervision before, during and after practice sessions and games.  Even well-behaved kids sometimes horse around, and unregulated locker room horseplay can take players’ minds off the game and even cause needless injury.  Parents can help supervise at younger age levels, but supervision depends on coaches and captains at older age levels because parents no longer frequent the locker room or its immediate area.  A mature assistant coach who lacks significant experience in the sport can help supervise.

Recent news stories report bullying and hazing on some youth league teams. Experience in the public schools demonstrates that weak supervision can undermine even a strong written anti-bullying policy.  Most kids will not bully a classmate while a teacher is watching, but bullying frequently occurs in poorly supervised areas such as underneath stairwells and in hidden corners. 

On youth league teams where bullying or hazing may be a potential problem, players similarly need to be supervised in the locker room and in nearby out-of-the-way places.  The head coach might even name one or two parents as assistants to remain in the same general vicinity as players who might be prone to trouble.  These assistants can supervise even without deep knowledge of the game, and few people even need to know that supervision is their major role.

Offer advice.  Head coaches have relatively few people they can turn to for candid advice about lineups, discipline, team social activities, strategies and other day-to-day decisions.  Sounding out individual parents may be off limits because discussions may smack of favoritism. 

Even if an assistant coach is also a player’s parent, the assistant coach can be an accessible sounding board in the role as a staff member.  Assistants without much experience in the sport may have perspectives and common sense that the head coach needs (and may lack).  Assistant coaches can rescue the head coach from potentially bad decisions simply by raising contrary perspectives and encouraging the head coach to think things through more carefully.  

Maintaining relationships with parents.  Where an inexperienced assistant coach is a player’s parent, the assistant can help the head coach measure the pulse of the rest of the parents. Even if the head coach is also a player’s parent, a variety of viewpoints is often the best recipe for team success.

Several years ago, our mid-Missouri youth hockey program conducted an annual review of the teams’ coaching staffs.  Before too long, the board of directors split into two distinct groups.  One group favored coaching staffs comprised, to the extent possible, of adults who had significant hockey backgrounds as players or coaches.  The other group believed that the program should also encourage service by parents with little or no background in the game.  As coaching director and a board member, I supported the second group, and here is why. 

Community youth sports programs teach players not only the game’s fundamentals and strategy, but also citizenship lessons that will last beyond the season.  Ideally the head coach, and one or more assistants, should have experience playing or coaching the sport they now seek to teach. Some coaches develop proficiency by attending clinics and reading instructional manuals, but background in the sport is the preferred foundation.

Coaches experienced in the game, however, are not the only adults who can teach players citizenship lessons.  On nearly all the youth hockey teams I have seen in recent years, the staffs have included one or more assistant coaches who began thinking about hockey only when their children enrolled in the program.  Most of these parents served admirably by helping with coaching duties while serving as role models for the players in practices and games.  Wholesome role models are sometimes hard to find, and coaches should set an example for youngsters who will be citizens long after they stop being competitive athletes.

The coaching selection process

Welcoming service by parents inexperienced in the game does not mean filling coaching staffs with every parent who seeks to coach.  Ideally youth leagues should appoint all coaches – experienced or otherwise — only after a formal application process.  Each applicant should submit a resume detailing experience in the game, experience coaching other sports, employment, community service, and similar background.  Interviews with the board of directors or a coaching selection committee should explore what first-time applicants hope to achieve and what returning coaches believe they achieved last season. The board should select applicants who have something positive to offer, including applicants whose offerings extend beyond teaching X’s and O’s.  

Gender

This column has used such terms as “parents with little or no background in the game” and “applicants.”  These terms include both men and women.  Men frequently coach girls’ teams, and I see no reason for excluding women from consideration as head coaches or assistant coaches on boys’ teams.  Traditional barriers may be falling because the media periodically reports about women who coach boys in youth leagues or sometimes in high schools.

Nearly 40 years after Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the United States now has a generation of young and middle-aged women whose experience in sports rivals the experience of their male counterparts.  Even before Title IX, men were not the only adults who could teach youth leaguers citizenship lessons.  Indeed, including a qualified woman on the coaching staff of a boys’ team today may itself teach a citizenship lesson whose social importance transcends sports – that in various walks of life, artificial gender barriers disserve the nation in the 21st century.

Next week: Part II – What adults without significant experience in the game can accomplish as youth league coaches.

In sum, any HS student-athlete can register on BeRecruited.com for free, and one can post their athletic achievements, their GPA, SAT and ACT scores, and much more. You can even post video of yourself in action for all coaches to see. And we’re talking coaches from Div I, II, and III, and NAIA.

And it’s not just for superstar basketball and football players. The best part of the service is that it works for boys and girls – kids who play volleyball to those who run cross-country to those who play lacrosse and everything else in between. A total of 31 sports are tracked.

As Vish explained, there are more than 27,000 college coaches who now routinely check on potential prospects on BeRecruited. Once they find an interesting candidate, they can contact them right away and set the recruiting process in motion.

Over the years, I have heard from all sorts of college recruiting services, all of them usually charging a fee upfront of $1000 or more. But of course, nothing in terms of a scholarship is guaranteed. But this service is different because it’s free. There’s no risk to the athlete. The only charge – which is optional – is $60 if you opt for BeRecruited’s special bonus feature which allows you to see which college coaches have actually checked on your profile.

Otherwise, that’s the only fee. Vish told me that thousands of HS athletes have used the service, and have been deighted with the results.  Seems to me that before you start writing out checks for big bucks, you ought to check out BeRecruited.com first.

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)]

Whether they’re posting comments or photos on their Facebook account, or sending text messages, or posting comments on Twitter, they have to be aware that once something is sent out — well, it’s sent out!

Law professor Doug Abrams has been at the forefront of this, warning many times on the radio show that kids just don’t seem to understand how radioactive their tweets and postings can be. And that these postings can quickly come back to burn them.

Here’s the latext example. By all accounts, senior defensive back Yuri Wright is one of the nation’s premier football prospects. He’s 6-2, 180, fast, and comes out of a top program at powerhouse Bergen Catholic HS in northern NJ. Yet stupidly, Wright recently sent out a series of tweets that contained both inappropriate sexual and racist comments.

Bergen Catholic moved quickly: they immediately expelled Wright from school. They just kicked him out. A senior, he now has to find a new HS in order to graduate. And right behind that, the Univ of Michigan, which had offered the kid a full scholarship, immediately rescinded their offer. Other colleges, such as Notre Dame and Rutgers, are waiting to decide what they want to do.

In any event, apparently the message is still not getting through. In short, it’s this: KIDS, UNDERSTAND THAT ANYTHING YOU POST ONLINE OR IN A TWEET OR AS A TEXT MESSAGE CAN BE READ BY ANYONE IN CYBERSPACE. Yes, you may intend something as a joke, but unfortunately humor doesn’t travel well in cyberspace.

In addition, if you’re lucky enough to be a recruited athlete, you HAVE TO KNOW that college coaches are constantly following your social media postings. Colleges these days DO NOT want to bring aboard a kid with a questionable personality. It exposes the college to all sorts of potential lawsuits if that athlete does something dumb in college, so coaches are extra vigilant these days in scouring the internet for incidents like thie one by Wright.

What’s the bottom line? When in doubt, don’t send it out. Think twice before anything is sent out. All that being said, these cases just seem to be multiplying. What a shame.

Last week I added my voice to others who have advocated equal playing time on youth league teams below the middle school age.  I said that chronic benchwarming is an unacceptable price to pay for a chance at victory in elementary schoolers’ games whose scores will soon be forgotten anyway.  At this age, playing a short bench smacks of emotional child abuse because benchwarming hurts players not only in the short run, but also in the long run. 

Safeguarding the emotions of other people’s children is serious business for adults who lead youth organizations, and coaches abuse their authority when they inflict such lasting hurt.  A personal anecdote helps explain why.

Remembering the Old Days

After appearing on The Sports Edge with Rick Wolff one Sunday morning a few years ago, I received a thoughtful “Remember me?” email from a player I had coached at a New England summer hockey camp when he was a young teen in the late 1970s.  We had not seen each other in about 25 years, and he wanted to renew the friendship after he heard the show.  So did I.

When we talked by phone the next day, my former player reminded me that he was now in his early 40s.  He and his wife had a special-needs child, and he expressed some concern about his own his job security.  “Weren’t the old days great!,” he joked, “In summer camp, all I needed to worry about was whether I would score goals and whether we would win games in the winter.  My wife and I have a lot more on our plates right now.”  We both knew that their plates would remain full for the rest of their lives.

He was not the first of my former players to contrast childhood fun with adult responsibilities.  Many of my former youth leaguers are now in their forties, and I had heard the story before.   

The Youth League Coach’s Crystal Ball

The responsibilities of adulthood help explain why equal playing time is so important in leagues below the middle school age.  The next time you coach a game, look up and down your bench.  Through no fault of their own, as many as a quarter of your 8- to 10-year-olds are destined to lead the sort of challenging adult lives that my former summer camper leads.  They or a family member will experience medical setbacks, accidents, layoffs, raising a special needs child, coping with divorce and single parenthood, or perhaps some other circumstances that require constant attention.  Even when the years proceed more smoothly, juggling mortgages, budgets and other family obligations remain facts of contemporary life.

Bob Bigelow is right that children have only “one chance at childhood.”  For many youth leaguers, sports teams may offer the most lasting memories of childhood fun outside the home – pure fun unburdened by the challenges that can accompany adulthood.  Let the kids be kids while they can. 

It is no excuse to rationalize chronic benchwarming by telling parent and child that the team should do its best to win, that some players appear most talented, and that the others need to work harder at self-improvement.  (After years of coaching, I see no necessary correlation between hard work and athletic talent before high school, but I have already discussed that in an earlier column.)  Life will teach kids the competitive ladder’s hard realities soon enough.  The kids will not learn any faster if benchwarming deprives them of the playtime that has characterized the best of childhood in America for decades.

[Source: Bob Bigelow, Just Let the Kids Play, p. 6 (2001)]

But that’s what’s happening with increasing frequency around the country. It’s already happening in Texas, Calfornia, Florida, and now it’s coming to the NY-NJ-CT-PA area. And in talking with Matt Allen, the highly-successful boys’ soccer head coach at Byram Hill HS (Armonk, NY) this AM, I – for one – am not convinced that US Soccer Academy is being smart about telling its players that they have to give up playing with their HS varsity program and devote another 10-weeks of the fall semester to train with USSA.

True, there’s no question that kids who play on select travel teams will be seen by more college coaches during tournaments and showcases. And the level of play is better overall than HS games. But these come with a price: in general, USSA costs money to be on the team (usually between $3,000 to $4,000 a year, not including travel and hotel costs to different tournaments), there’s no guarantee of the amount of playing time a kid will receive, there’s no guarantee of ever getting a college scholarship, and of course, you have to walk away from your local HS team and buddies. That is, during the fall, when they’re going to practice and playing games, you’re getting in your car and driving off to practice on a travel team perhaps an hour away to play with kids from other towns and communities.

As Coach Allen related on my show this AM, it’s a very difficult choice for most young kids to have to make. And from my perspective, there’s no reason to put them and their parents through this. While I understand the travel team coaches and their desire to have the kids practice for another 10 weeks in the fall, I just don’t understand the necessity to force them to quit their HS team. Look, the travel team kids already work out for 10 full months of the year with USSA, so what’s the harm with letting them play for 2 1/2 months on their HS squad? Personally, I think it would give these kids a break from their travel schedule, let them enjoy playing with their home-town friends, and best of all, it would refresh them psychologically. It’s all good.

But to mandate them to quit playing for their HS team? Sorry. It doesn’t work for me. And by the way, hasn’t the time finally come for national travel team programs to finally sit down with state HS athletic associations and work out compromises? That just seems logical, and would help solve a lot of these issues early on.