Politics and Youth Sports Part 3

Following up on my other two youth sports posts, I complete the trilogy with a discussion of the formation of travel or all-star teams and the constant cries of "politics".

There's something heartbreaking about the transition from recreational sports in which everyone plays the same amount and the focus is on fun, to tryout-based travel and all-star teams.  Parents usually don't feel their kids are old enough to have to deal with the disappointment of being cut from a team when they're as young as eight years old.  In fact, on some level I agree.  It seems wrong to me to be telling someone that young that he isn't good enough to play the sport he loves with his friends. [Note: I'll be using the masculine pronoun in this post for readability, but this certainly applies to girls too].  But unfortunately this is the world we live in- competition starts early, every town is doing it, and if we don't then our players won't be competitive as they get older.

So the big challenge for the youth sports administrator is to set up an objective process for choosing the travel teams.  This sounds easy, but in fact it's tremendously difficult.  Yes, we can bring in independent evaluators who don't know the kids, and they can score what they see in a vacuum, but that doesn't work for many sports.  In soccer in my town the evaluators don't look at goaltending, and may miss out on the best goalie in the group.  And that's a sport in which skills can be evaluated but goal-scoring instincts really can't in a one or two day tryout.  In baseball, evaluators can look at a swing's mechanics, but that's not the same as the ability to hit live pitching.  In basketball it's easier, as one can watch the players scrimmage against each other, but of course they're just running up and down and it's impossible to see how well the player can grasp an offensive set.

So in addition to evaluation scores it's necessary to take into account how an athlete performed during the previous season.  For that coaches need to be polled, and since coaches are human beings they have biases.

A crucial piece of this is that there is generally an incumbent head coach, and in many organizations that person just picks the team.  This is just plain wrong- having one person in a large organization make all the decisions is a recipe for bias and dissension.  Among other things, it puts the coach in a difficult situation when he has to, for example, cut his child's best friend or his best friend's child from the team.  Very often the coach will just take the player, and when everyone can see the dynamic it puts the whole process in a bad light.

But the coach's input is important and needs to be taken into account.  The way to do this is to choose the team by committee, with the coach being a part but not the leader.  Then it requires a strong leader of the process who is disinterested and can head off any obvious bias.  One organization I was involved with had such a leader, who I saw on a few occasions tell coaches "nope, you have to take that player, he scored too high to leave off the team".

So what about when the teams are made with a great process and the best of intentions, but there are still disgruntled parents complaining about how Politics kept their son off the top team?  Well, if there's one thing I've learned well in my years in youth sports, it's that most parents are completely delusional about their children's athletic ability.  Lots of people blame Politics when the fact is that their kid just wasn't quite good enough to be on the team.  There's no satisfying this type of parent short of putting the kid on the team... and then they're generally the parents who complain about playing time!  The most unfortunate thing about this dynamic is that the parents then give the child the wrong message about the result: not "you tried your best, but if you want to make this team in the future you'll have to work hard to improve your game", but rather "you belong there, and you were robbed".  Never mind that hard work thing!

So in the end, the youth sports politician is always left with some disgruntled families, no matter what he does.  This sad fact has to be accepted.  The nature of the process is that there is always a temptation to take the easy way out and put the child of the squeaky wheel or the child of the committed volunteer on the team.  At the end of the day, he has to make the right decision, and be able to sleep well at night even if former friends now think he's a jerk.