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Give the Kids a Break -- How About One Sport at a Time? by Regan McMahon

Fri, 09/28/2007

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We are only a couple of weeks into the fall soccer season, and what pops up in my email? A message from my 8th grade daughter’s school volleyball coach suggesting the girls go to an “optional” preseason practice with him, and the next weekend a volleyball clinic offered to buy one of the local elite club teams. Yet volleyball season games don’t begin till November. And this is September.

Minutes after that clinic email, another one appeared from the school basketball coach, advising that a basketball clinic team members should consider as well, even though the girls basketball season isn’t till spring.

I’m all for kids playing multiple sports, but how about one at a time? This constant encroachment is relatively new. Sports seasons used to be discrete. One ended and the other began. Gee, there might even have been a break in between. Imagine that.

Where I live in California, the high school Interscholastic Association makes certain that the high school and club sports seasons don’t overlap, because they want kids on club teams to be able to play for their schools if the want to. But the club team post-season play keeps getting extended, so kids playing high school soccer, for example, are missing weeks of practice with the school team because their club commitment demands it.

As varsity soccer coach J. T. Hanley explains in my book, “This year we’re going to have 15 girls who are not eligible to play in the high school season until after Thanksgiving. Even though the high school season begins on November 7, they’re all going to winter tournaments thru Thanksgiving weekend. The year before there were eight. The year before that there were four. And the year before that there was 1. And prior to that, there was never a conflict. So just in the past four or five years, the intensity of that competition and pressure has gone way up. And a lot of it comes down to pressure to go to a tournament where they’re told there’s going to be a lot of people looking at them, with the opportunity to go to college. And that’s what sells the players, but more the parents.”

Another person in my book, Jim Thompson of the Positive Coaching Alliance, told me he learned as a basketball coach how one can get sucked into always craving more.

“It’s a culture of excess,” he told me. “I remember when I was coaching grade school kids in sports, and we’d have a two-hour practice in the week and then a game on Saturday. So I kept thinking if we could have practice every day, just think how great we’d be. Then I became the girls’ basketball coach at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, and we practiced every day and sometimes also on Saturdays, and we practiced two and a half hours, and still I’d think, ‘Oh, I just need a little more time.’ Once you’re on that treadmill of winning is so important we’ve got to do everything we can to win, then you’re never going to have enough time to practice.”

To learn more about me and my book, check out my web site.

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