Now-a-days, it doesn’t matter.
Basketball! Archery! Track & Field!
It’s all the same. It’s like a regimented boot camp with whistle blowing drill sergeants. It’s practices and scrimmages and hours and hours of dedicated time. It’s a brave new world where parents are spun on their heads and shaken down by a modern day mafia known as the travel ball cartel.
Travel Sports are all about driving junior to practice before dawn. It’s about picking Little Johnny up late at night. It’s about standing on the side of flooded fields on weekends and shivering in a lawn chair in Late November. It’s games on Sundays and more competition on Holidays. It never ever ends. It’s a modernized version of a tread mill where affluent parents run after a magic carrot filled with dreams and what might be.
I’ve spent so many weekends at so many sporting events they all run together like coagulating bacon grease sticking to the side of the pan.
America’s Youth sports program is an aggressive, competitive missile, and if you don’t get on, you get left behind. Maybe this is what the East German machine felt like. Perhaps this is what we have to do to keep up with Chinese Gymnasts who weigh 22 pounds and fly through the air like humming birds on crack.
These aren’t your daddy’s sports leagues. Today’s 5th grade athlete is groomed for a specialty. Maybe your kid is the next Lebron James? Maybe not!
Maybe you would like your child to play a couple of sports. That seems reasonable right? But now-a-days, it’s not that easy to do.
Soccer or Baseball? Baseball or Track? Apparently there are not enough days on the calendar to do both.
Now it is a world of specialization where maximizing physical prowess is stressed by isolating athletes into one sport and then ramming that sport down their throats.
Not again, I think to myself.