How Gen X Broke Youth Sports

The days of the Bad News Bears are long gone. No longer can a drunk, a bail bond company, and a cigarette-smoking teenager propel an underdog team to victory in the world of youth sports. Today, it’s all about time, money, and travel. Mostly, though, it’s about over-involved parents, ones who are too often living vicariously through their little athletes.

I know this because I spent years as a soccer dad, even if our experience wasn’t quite as harrowing as the ones described in “Pay to Play Childhood,” written by Caitlin Moscatello for New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer.” In her piece, she details much of what I saw. Actual team members get benched for guest players, aka ringers. Parents scream at other kids, coaches, and the refs. Families spend holidays and vacations to go to even more specialized tournaments around the country and the world. And kids, once they become teenagers, get burned out and more prone to injury.

If it was all a result of private equity, I didn’t see it. Or, perhaps, when my daughter decided to quit to dedicate her energy to choir when the club got too focused on getting the players to college ball, it was before the effects of private equity were noticeable locally. Regardless, her 12 years of soccer were not cheap. Exactly how not cheap they were, I couldn’t tell you. Sometimes it’s mentally easier to not total up every line item in the budget.

Which isn’t to say private equity isn’t coming for youth sports. It most certainly is. People tend to recoil at the term, but there’s no guarantee it’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s neutral. The important part is that money men started looking at all the cash being spent on youth sports and decided it was a worthy investment. We definitely contributed to that.

Not that we ever expected a return on investment. We were also outliers. Smart, successful people, often in careers with objective goals and low risk tolerance, were convinced their kids were going to beat the odds. Maybe it was the former player whose college career was derailed by an injury, maybe it was the mom who came from nothing and wanted to give her daughter every advantage possible, ones she didn’t have growing up. In either case, while private coaching and better clubs help, you can’t teach raw talent, and raw talent is what’s going to get kids into college on a scholarship and a Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) deal.

I also never saw much point in getting too caught up in the stats or the losses, so long as my daughter was having fun. She’s naturally competitive, she’s smart, and she likes rules, order, and schedules. Club soccer made sense for her even if college was never the goal. She had to stick to goals, learn to work with a variety of personalities, and follow rules, all while spending lots of time outside. The traveling wasn’t even bad. It definitely wasn’t as costly for us as others have reported, which is too often downplayed because it’s so excessive. We’ve spent many hours between games in various museums, zoos, and aquariums. Sometimes we’d walk historic downtowns, look at the architecture, and get the flavor of the area.

The only time there was ever a fight over a performance, it was my fault, I must admit. I told her, “Good game,” after a controversial loss in the final. As Moscatello writes, there’s a tendency to blame the refs. In this case, there was some merit to blaming the ref. My daughter was playing keeper and had the ball securely in her hands. The opposing team managed to knock it out, which is a no-no, but no foul was called. They scored and won the tournament because of that no-call.

She didn’t talk to me for 30 minutes for my insane suggestion that she’d played well, not breaking her silence until she got hungry. That’s when she sheepishly asked from the backseat, “Can we stop and get some food?”

On the field, though, the players constantly critique one another. Parents, despite club rules to the contrary, coach from the sidelines. Some pick fights in the group chat about coaching strategy mid-game, then storm off when the final whistle is blown, only to never be seen again.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that the money isn’t really the problem; parents are. Clubs wouldn’t charge what they charge if parents said no. Private equity wouldn’t be interested if the money weren’t there, because parents don’t say no. Those guest players, the ringers, wouldn’t magically be on the field without having to pay for uniforms, club dues, or tournament fees if profit were the only motive. But there are also parents who will pick up the financial slack for those guest players.

It’s also not the lack of rec leagues, which is more a symptom than a cause. The growth of the club monster has two primary culprits: birthrates and overcorrection. When I was a kid, there were still enough of us to support not just rec leagues, but the impromptu neighborhood games that sparked interest. By the time I was a father, there weren’t enough children within a mile radius to put together a decent pick-up game. Travel brings together a dwindling number of children.

When I say overcorrection, that’s about Gen X, primarily, constantly extolling our toughness, our feral upbringing, our lack of rules, and doing so while giving our own children the exact opposite experience. We complain about helicopter parenting and participation trophies while not thinking about where those problems came from, then get mad and try to organize our way out of being overly organized.

Travel clubs, which leave no time for being feral and getting into the trouble that being feral invites, are also hyper-competitive and devoid of any sort of participation trophy, which is actually one of the best things about club sports. And because we overcorrected and didn’t procreate enough, we end up driving a few hours to play tournament games that include a final against a team from the same town as we drove from. If it seems silly, it is, but kids also don’t want to play in a tournament that features a grand total of three teams, which is what would happen if there were no travel.

America is awesome, and our desire to be amazing isn’t an impulse we should squander, even if it sometimes produces insane results like youth travel sports, which no one could afford if it weren’t for our proclivity toward being amazing. That impulse also needs to be periodically evaluated. Famed UCLA Bruins head coach John Wooden had a saying: “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

When it comes to travel ball, even if winning is the ultimate goal, activity is often mistaken for achievement. We just need one more practice, one more session with the coach from the local university, one more night watching game tape. What the kids actually need is for their parents to let them be kids, instead of seeing them as a product to be developed through relentless activity. Earl Woods is not the example to follow here.

We never pushed our daughter into soccer. She started in a program called Happy Feet, offered at her daycare. She fell in love. Happy Feet was a feeder league for Legends. Legends wasn’t concerned with winning or team play to the point that the kids would be twirling circles on the field, trying to complete their required foot skills tasks, while the opposing teams racked up double-digit victories over them. This led to a schism and the creation of a new club, which meant new uniforms, new backpacks, and the like. If you think the kids led this uprising, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

My kid was eventually cut from that club and then ended up on the greatest team she ever played for. They won, sure, but they were all having fun doing it, mostly because the parents never made it about us. We never treated it like the most important thing in the world. It was just soccer. For example, the night before the finals of one tournament, the coach and some parents spent a few late-night hours at a burlesque club across the street from the hotel rather than obsessing about the next two games, games we ended up winning to take home the championship.

The club ended up disintegrating after some defections to other sports and an influx of new parents — and if you think it was the kids who led that uprising, you’d again be wrong — and my daughter ended up back on the team from which she’d been cut years before, although the paid coach had been replaced by two passionate fathers. This time, she was recruited … after playing a couple of matches as a guest player. She just wanted to get out there and have fun. And then, when the focus wholly turned to the next level rather than the current one, when it ceased being any sort of fun, she retired. We didn’t argue with her.

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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4