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.

Justifications of a Youth Sports Politician

Following up on my recent post on youth sports, I want to tackle the issue of politics in local youth sports organizations.

I've been involved on the Boards of two youth sports organizations in my town, and I've coached both sports for almost ten years.  I constantly hear about people in town pulling their children from various sports due to the "politics" of the Board.  I don't know how often I've heard someone pontificating about the outrageous unfairness of his/her child being blackballed from the travel team due to a political decision, while a gaggle of other parents nods in understanding, often contributing their own unjustices to a sympathetic audience.

And it's often quite true!  So as I entered leadership roles, I was determined to use objective decision-making processes in choosing travel teams.  I was also determined to make sure coaches were chosen based on one criteria only: Who will provide the best experience for the kids.  Nobody "deserves" a coaching position based on what he's done for the organization or (obviously) based on his relationship with the leadership, or because he's coached that team in past years.

So that's what I did.  On more than one occasion I replaced an incumbent head coach with someone who hadn't done it before, in response to complaints from families of kids on the team, or because a better candidate presented himself.  Each time the incumbent coach has gone completely ballistic, accusing me of destroying him for some nefarious purpose.  Sometimes "politics" is thrown out as the reason for my transgression.  But of course what's really happening is that the incumbent coach is requesting that politics be used to tip the scales, in his favor.

And just the fact that the coach gets so outraged about the stealing of his birthright is itself confirmation that he's in it for the wrong reasons.  He may say he wants to be part of his kid's experience, etc, etc.  But I've rarely told a coach he couldn't assist on the team- there's plenty of opportunity for him to be involved just as much- he just wouldn't be in control, which is what it's really about.

When a father (or mother- in my town it's virtually all fathers) commits to coach a team sport, he agrees to coach and provide a positive experience to all the kids on his team, not just his own. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it's a sacred trust.  I want coaches to bend over backwards to make sure they're not favoring their own, whether their own is the best or worst player on the team (when the best player on the team is coached by his father, by the way, I think it's bad for the kid- he's better off being pushed by someone else).

I mentioned in my last post on this topic that I'm more of a fit for coaching Rec level sports.  But I have kids who are travel-level players.  Fortunately, there are a number of great coaches in town who provide excellent competitive experiences to my kids, much better than I could provide.  Why wouldn't I want them doing the coaching?  For some of these experiences I've helped out, been involved with my children. learned a lot about the sport, and watched my kid grow athletically and socially.  I'm really glad I never named myself to coach one of these teams.
Stay tuned for my next youth sports post, about "politics" in the choosing of players for travel teams.

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.