As my children grow older, our family is increasingly drawn into the world of preteen youth sports. As both kids love playing, and have significantly more athleticism and coordination than I ever did, we – and many of the families around us – are being faced with the question: How much is too much? Especially during this season of travel team tryouts and summer training camps, parents may seek your guidance as they try to navigate an increasingly competitive and intense environment.
While there are no easy answers to many of these questions, which are in many ways highly individualized, there are a few guiding principles that I have applied with my own family, and when giving advice to parents.
First and foremost, sports should be fun. Whether your child is an aspiring Olympic athlete or the clumsiest recreational player, they should be having fun. Sports are a wonderful way to teach children the rewards of hard work, physical exercise, teamwork, and perseverance, but it will all be lost on them if they are miserable and dread going to practice. Likewise, even the most talented athlete will burn out and move on to other things if it is not intrinsically enjoyable and rewarding to play. Every child has moments of whining or complaining, but if they are consistently telling you they don’t want to go to practice or seem unhappy, you should listen. On the flip side, if you have a child who seems to love training, who looks forward to practice, and who asks to play more and more competitively, then a more intense environment may be suitable. Just be sure it is really the child, and not the parent, who is having the most fun!
Second, the coaches (and the parents) should be encouraging, positive, and train their athletes in age- and developmentally appropriate ways. It is absolutely reasonable for coaches to require the team to come to practice reliably, pay attention, work hard, and push themselves to do their best. What is not developmentally appropriate – or even productive or motivating in the long term – is for coaches to yell, criticize, or make demeaning comments. After one game where the opposing coach continuously shouted statements to the players such as “What were you thinking?” and “Listen to what I tell you to do, not to the little voice in your head!” my daughter commented, “I don’t think I could play for that team. It would make me too nervous with the coach yelling like that all the time.”Even for the very best and most talented players, the goals of youth sports (in addition to having fun!) should be to develop skills, good sportsmanship, and the ability to understand and implement the strategy of the game. These are the core skills you need whether you ultimately become a professional athlete or a weekend warrior, but they are not things children can learn if they are afraid of being yelled at for making a wrong move, or losing a game or race. On the contrary, it may decrease a child’s confidence and even reinforce opposite behaviors. When considering where and when a child should play, parents should carefully assess the coaching and league environment. Kids should feel more confident as a result of their involvement in sports, not less. The most elite teams may actually have an environment that can do more harm than good in the long run – not only for a child’s skills, but for their self-esteem and character. On the flip side, a less intense team with good and positive coaching may develop a child’s skills in a way that leads to greater long-term success in sports and in life!
Lastly, for children of all ages, but especially prepubertal children, be alert to the dangers of over training. Every child develops differently and can tolerate different levels and amounts of training, but be sure to advise parents on what activities (for example, weight lifting) are and aren’t appropriate for kids of different ages. Children should increase their level of training gradually, be monitored carefully for signs of overuse injuries, and they, their parents, and their coaches need to be willing to back off if injuries begin recurring. Parents should be very wary of teams and coaches who push children through injuries or who are not patient about letting children take time to recover before they return to play. These are the bodies children will have for their whole lives; repeated and chronic injuries at young ages ultimately can be quite harmful.