Media » Articles

Section Shortcuts:

• A timeout on youth sports
• Who's at the wheel?
• Setting priorities
• Changing the culture

A timeout on youth sports

Mary Lynn Smith, Star Tribune, December 5, 2004

Andrea Grazzini Walstrom sees the runaway train of kid sports barreling right at her family and wants to get her two young children off the tracks.

The Burnsville mother and former high school soccer player has watched other parents juggle practices, sports camps and dance competitions that have erased the family dinner hour, scratched vacations and jeopardized holiday traditions.

She's heard the horror stories: Exhausted parents worn out from shuttling kids to practices and tournaments across the metro area. Frustrated parents upset because their child was benched when he skipped the team's Christmas Eve practice. Guilty parents worried that their son or daughter will be left behind in the cutthroat competition for varsity squads and college scholarships.

"I don't see the benefit to all this craziness," Walstrom said.

Neither do a growing number of parents in communities around the metro area.

• Wayzata/Plymouth: Putting Family First is blocking out March 7 as an activity-free day for the entire community. No meetings. No practices. No homework. The group also has published a consumer guide to give parents an idea how much time and money they can expect to spend on various activities.
• Eden Prairie: Family dinners are on the table. Family Time First wants parents to pledge to have at least four family dinners a week and to designate one night a week as family night.
• Robbinsdale: Aren't two days enough for weekend tournaments, wonders Todd Biewen, president of the Armstrong/Cooper Youth Basketball Association. Sundays, he suggests, should be kept free "to go sledding on a nice snowy afternoon or skating or taking the kids to their grandparents' house. ... If you're putting in 10 to 12 hours a week into an activity, that should be enough. You don't need to take up the whole weekend."
• Southwest Minneapolis: The year-old Time in for Family group is spearheading a Let Kids Be Kids initiative that focuses on less intense youth sports programs. It also is collecting family dinner pledges. Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and his wife, Megan O'Hara, were among the first to sign the dinner pledge, and the mayor plans to make the campaign for more family time part of an upcoming citywide youth initiative. "Almost all my time is public," Rybak said. "But dinner is not."

Walstrom is collecting all the ideas she can in hopes of launching a plan tailor-made for the Apple Valley-Rosemount area.

"So many parents I talk to say that this has all gotten to be too much, but they don't know how to get off the racing train," Walstrom said.

Who's at the wheel?

The high-speed train left the station about 20 years ago, according to Bill Doherty, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and coauthor of "Putting Family First."

Some parents "push for more and more because they're supercompetitive, and the rest of the 90 percent of parents feel like they're going to get left behind," Doherty said. "They're driven by anxiety and fear."

For some families and children, the high intensity may be the right thing, say Doherty and others. They're not out to demonize such choices. But many families get sucked in and don't even realize they're being consumed by such activities until they suddenly discover they spend more time on the road than at the dinner table.

"There's the parent who signs up her child for a half-hour dance class and it's really cute," said Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of the Putting Family First. "But what they don't know is that when their child is in fifth grade, you'll be practicing five to six times a week, and when you're in seventh grade, you'll be flying to Florida to compete.

"It's kind of sneaks up on you," she said.

Setting priorities

Barb Johnson acknowledges the scheduling stress of having two sons in hockey and other activities. Her 18-year-old daughter chose music over sports.

"We don't have much family time around the dinner table, but we have family times together in a different way," she said. "We watch games together. ... We think these activities are a good way for them to be with friends, have fun, learn discipline, get good exercise and develop the mind as well as the body."

But for one Eden Prairie family, the demanding sports schedules for teams that route kids onto prized varsity leagues meant music activities, school work, church and family time took a back seat. "My daughter was up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to go to school and got home at 9:30 or 10:30 at night," said the Eden Prairie mother, who asked that her name not be used for fear her children would be blacklisted from top teams.

It was time to tamp down the madness. She and her husband pulled their 15-year-old and 12-year-old girls from the high-level volleyball team and put them in the less demanding "in-house" league. Their daughters were angry. The odds of them not making varsity are now greater.

But they now have more time for music, church, family and friends. Their grades are back up. They're not as edgy. They might even take up golf, she said. "If they don't make the varsity team, hopefully we can convince them that it's not the end of the world."

And the variety in their lives may help them, according to Barbara Benner, a staff psychologist at Boynton Health Services at the University of Minnesota.

"Kids should be allowed to sample variety and get a sense of trying a little of this and little of that a fair amount of time. ... It's about learning about yourself and the world," Benner said. "Those kids are more able to direct their own lives."

Changing the culture

But Paul Bearmon, founder of a nonprofit group called Keep 'em All Playing, said kids on less competitive teams are getting left with crumbs.

The higher-level teams "get the best fields, the best times, the best coaches, and the other teams get what's left," said Bearmon, an Edina father of two sons and an emergency room physician with experience in clinical psychology and child development.

Bearmon's metro-wide group is pushing for reforms that make resources more equitable and give kids equal playing time. He wants to change a culture that cuts some young kids before they're physically developed and burns out others.

So does former NBA player Bob Bigelow, who has written a book called "Just Let Kids Play."

Adults have made kid sports less fun and more competitive, he said.

"Now you have travel-select elite teams in fourth and fifth grade being picked by adults, mostly men who are lawyers, accountants, butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers and insurance salesmen," he said. "Think about how many great future basketball players have been cut by insurance salesmen during the last 20 years. They've been cut in fifth grade because they couldn't walk and chew gum, as is the case with so many fifth-graders."

Instead, coaches should concentrate on developing all the kids, Bigelow said. Give all kids equal time on the court and in the field. Practice more. Play fewer tournaments. Travel less.

But that can be a tough argument for parents to make, Bearmon said.

"I have parents in Edina come call me and say, 'We support you,' but they say they can't say anything because they don't want to be blacklisted [from a team] or chastised," Bearmon said. "It's really gotten crazy. The emperor really does haven't any clothes on."

Bigelow, Bearmon and others say more parents need to face that reality.

"More and more parents are beginning to feel empowered to say there's more to life," Doherty said. "A lot of people are talking. And that's the beginning for social change."