You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
kid’s sports in America.
It’s a business. It is a racket. It’s politics. It is a full time job.
Back in the day when my kids were four and five years old, soccer was so simple. I like to call it Buffalo Ball.
It was organized chaos. It was a bunch of munchkins standing in a circle wildly swinging their legs like pendulum clocks on Red Bull Energy drinks. The kids kicked up more dust and daisies than anything else.
But eventually, a pint sized Pele would get a little size 2 Nike on the ball and it would roll 5 yards to a new space. The herd would gravitate to the ball in a roving dust cloud and the wild leg swinging would again commence.
It was hilariously delightful to watch.
It was a mint julep of easy. The coach was somebodies mom or dad. He or she knew as much about soccer as The Situation knows about molecular biology.
The cost was family friendly thanks to the YMCA.
Parents were low key, offering encouragement from the sidelines. Some would take pictures, some would chill in lounge chairs talking to friends. It was all pretty relaxed.
Fast forward 10 years.
Now it’s a small business built on parental expectations and kid’s athletic abilities.
There is still encouragement from the sidelines, but there is also anxiety and angst.
For every “way to go Johnny” there is a hyper intense mom or dad screaming “Hustle! Play through the pain! Hey ref what game are you watching?”
Parents watch intently, hands clenched, jaws set firmly, foreheads wrinkled in a wave of epidermal tension.
Some parents sit on the sideline as close as the ref will allow. They lean forward in their chairs and they cheer encouragement non stop.
Other parents pace behind the lawn chairs, like expectant fathers waiting for the birth of athletic greatness.
And through it all, there is a churning anxiety.
Parental grumbling runs the gamut from kid playing time to coaching strategy. Parents wonder if their child-athlete is giving it his all. Parents calculate rate of return on investment based on dues divided by playing time divided by cost of traveling to the next obscure field in some back woods zip code.
As I sit on the sidelines and games grow intense, I sometimes find myself squeezing my own knuckles white. Sometimes I wish for the days of buffalo ball. Sometimes I long for the stress free Saturdays of sport that was no more taxing than a soft pillow with a high thread count.
Those days are gone. Now parents watch the game with one eye on the competition and the other on their check book.
I paid $250 dollars for dues in July. We didn’t play a game. We didn’t practice. I never saw another child in a soccer uniform.Where was the coach? For all I know he was in a Mexican jail.
$250 dollars! Parents were grumbling like they had a tooth pulled without Novocaine.
$250 dollars! What’s that for we asked. Coaching fee, someone says quoting from the bible of youth sports.
Coaching fee? You mean bail money? You mean American highway robbery? You mean extorition?
Who the hell is running this league? John Gotti?
If America needs a bailout, just get some unified soccer moms to run the world bank, and the debt clock will start ticking backward in no time.
And perhaps this is what is wrong with athletics in this nation. When you have to decide whether to pay the light bill or send Johnny to soccer camp, then something is seriously askew.
As I wrote this latest check I thought about the greatest players on the greatest teams in the world.
Did Renaldo’s mom and dad stop paying the rent so he could kick a ball? Did Pele’s dad take a 2nd job so his son could play a game? If they did, then they eventually got their money’s worth. But that ain’t how it usually works.
Ask yourself; how many African parents are shelling out 250 coconuts so their children can play the nation’s only sport?
ZERO that’s how many.
The kids in Angola find a duct tape ball in a dumpster and they start kicking it through the street.
How much does that duct tape ball cost? Zero. How bout the fancy cleats? Zero, since most of the kids are barefoot.
ZERO. ZERO. ZERO.
And that’s the way it should be. But here in the land of the thousand dollar toilet seat, everything costs.
So what do we do? We form sport leagues run by committees and coaches and parents and all of it governed by people who take checks from parents who work awfully hard to write those checks.
We love our kids and we want what is best for our children, so we scrounge and sacrifice and write those checks. What we don’t realize until it’s too late is that we have been sucked in to the sporting quicksand.
We start sinking, slowly, writing one check after another after another.
It’s the cost of doing business. It’s the American way. That’s because youth sports is a business. It’s a factory where the furnace is fueled with hope and love and dreams of what might be.
While the games can still be fun, sadly they can also be time consuming, fist full of dollars, alka-seltzer cocktails of stress.
I admit, I’m a junkie. I need my fix of kid’s athletics. And like the soccer crack head I am, I will pay my dealer to get it. But sometimes as I sit in my easy chair too close to the side line, I find myself ruminating about a Saturday a long time ago when athletic competition came without a price tag.
I think back to the day when sport was pure and easy like Sunday morning. It was Buffalo ball played with a K-Mart soccer ball with plastic baby cleats in a dandelion filled field that smelled like fresh cut grass.
It was easy like a duct taped soccer ball pulled from a dumpster.
And that’s crazy.