Random Youth Sports Post

I am involved in youth sports in my town, as those of you who know me are well aware.  I pontificate often in person about this, but since this is my blog I thought I'd put this down on the intertubes.

Youth sports has two major purposes:

1. Provide recreational fun for all children regardless of ability.  Teach kids healthy living through good exercise, the importance of teamwork, the value of hard work and pushing through adversity.  Make friends.  Create a tighter community. 
2. Develop the top players to be the best that they can be.  Build the high school varsity teams of the future.

The tough part is that these two purposes are sometimes in conflict.  They require very different programming and ethoses.  Specifically, the coaching requires very different approaches.  A "Recreational" coach is focused on the fun; winning isn't a big deal, everyone gets to play plenty, and the tone is relaxed.  A "Travel" coach is tougher, more of a disciplinarian, has to know the game well and be able to teach at a high level.  The Travel coach can and should use playing time as a motivator, and should be focused on winning to a degree.

I'm more of a Rec coach by nature- I think I'm pretty good at setting up the right atmosphere for a Rec team. But that doesn't mean that I think the atmosphere I set up is right for higher level players.  I have children who can play some sports at a high level, and I'm glad they have coaches for their travel teams who are more intense than I am.  That's what they need to grow both as athletes in their sports and as people striving to reach their maximum potential.

One problem in youth sports is when a guy (at least in my town they're always male) displays the attitude and intensity of a Travel Coach while working at the Rec level.  This is exacerbated when the coach doesn't know much about his sport, so his intensity is often misdirected and he blames the wrong people for mistakes.  [To be clear, it's totally fine for a coach to be relatively ignorant of the intricacies of the game at the Rec level, as long as he is self-aware enough to understand this and coach accordingly.]

Another problem in youth sports is that many organizations get too focused on the Travel players and give Rec players the message that they're not welcome in the organization.  I'm proud that the organization I'm most heavily involved with keeps many of its Rec players playing up through middle school, while surrounding towns seem to have similar players drop out early.  On the other hand, those towns have strong Travel programs, stronger than ours.  I'd like to think we can do both well, but lately that hasn't been the case.

We'll keep trying though.  Since this is a politics blog, maybe next time I'll post about the issue of "politics" in youth sports.