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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.

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People always ask how I came to write a book that examines the over-the-top youth sports culture and how it’s affecting kids and families. They wonder if I or my kids had some bad experience so I had an axe to grind. Some assume I’ve yanked my kids out of sports.

In fact, my kids have had almost entirely good experiences and they’re still playing and enjoying multiple sports as teenagers. And I was a youth athlete myself: a competitive figure skater from second through 10th grade, when I quit partially because I wanted to join my high school basketball and swim teams. I know intimately all the good things to be gained from participating in sports: focus, discipline, healthy exercise, learning to work as part of a team, learning to work hard for a goal (literally and figuratively).

But as I looked around me, I noticed the things kids were losing amid all those gains: downtime, unstructured play, time to hang out at home with parents and siblings, holidays at home with relatives, family vacations and even family dinners.

And as hectic as things were for my family, driving two kids around to practices and games, zooming from the soccer field to the volleyball gym for those few weeks when the seasons overlap, I knew it was nothing compared with how it was for families with kids playing on elite travel teams, who were spending weekends and holidays at tournaments. I wondered how we got here, and if it had to be this way or if there was room for change.

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It’s prime time for youth sports -- the fall season, when kids are back in school and parents are back in training: struggling to get their lawn chairs, their commuter mugs and their little darlings to the soccer field on time every Saturday morning. Not to mention getting to practice after school on the weekdays and making sure all their uniform parts are washed and still fit by game time. “I can only find one red sock!” comes the dreaded cry from the bedroom. Or worse: “Uh, Mom, I think I need new cleats. My toes are all the way at the end!”

My son is a senior in high school and still playing soccer, not for his school but for an Under 19 team in a recreational league. My daughter, an eighth grader, moved up to a Division 3 team, one level up from rec, and one level down from Division 1, the most intense and time-consuming kind of travel team. Her team generally doesn’t travel more than 45 minutes from home, and will only play a couple of tournaments this fall.

Being back on the sidelines, we’re reminded of the sights and sounds of soccer: exuberant kids running to the ball, faces contorted with intensity, unconscious grunts emitted when exerting that extra effort to make contact, whoops of joy as the ball crosses the goal line… and out-of-control parents shouting their own coaching orders and trashing the referee.

We don’t often see totally inappropriate sideline behavior, but when we do, it’s ugly. And at my daughter’s game on Sunday, a parent on the opposing team got thrown off the field by a young ref who wouldn’t tolerate it.

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Regan McMahon is our guest blogger during the week of September 24th. If you have any questions for Regan McMahon, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports:

A journalist and mother of two athletic kids exposes the physical and emotional dangers of our over-the-top youth sports culture—and offers practical solutions for positive change.

A decade ago, Joan Ryan’s expose, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, changed the way we look at elite sports, namely figure skating and gymnastics. Today, there is another crisis in youth sports. It may affect any child, from the kindergartner on the soccer field to the high school athlete competing for scarce scholarship money. Regan McMahon’s Revolution in the Bleachers is a wake-up call for parents who spend their lives shuttling their kids from one field and practice to the next and wonder what happened to family life.

Regan McMahon’s book began as a cover story for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Titled “How Much is Too Much?” it got a tremendous response. Finally, someone had dared to say what many parents were thinking! Parents, kids and coaches responded, prompting McMahon to criss-cross the country, doing interviews and research to find out how deep the problem goes and how to fix it.