The Grand Rapids Press

Perspectives Section                                                                                         Sunday, January 7, 2000

We are Burning Out Our Babies…..

By Jay M. Bylsma

     When I tell you that my son Dan plays hockey for the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, you could rightly conclude that youth sports played a big part of our family’s life.  If it could be thrown, kicked, pitched, hit, or caught; we did it, watched it, coached it, or refereed it.

    Now all the kids are grown and we’re reduced to watching Dan’s games on TV or an occasional trip to Detroit or Chicago to watch him play.  My wife and I are starting to take our life back.  We’ve even begun to make friends our own age who don’t have kids that throw, kick, pitch… you get the picture.

    Recently I dropped into a local ice rink for old time’s sake; to see my breath in the frosty air, hear the crisp crunch of sharp blades against the ice, hear the thwack of the stick hitting the puck, and watch young lads in the swift ice ballet that hockey well played can be.      

    I was unprepared for what I experienced.  Oh, I saw my breath and watched the ballet.  But what I also saw was anger, rancor, and bitterness – from the stands.  I had to remind myself this was Squirt hockey game – not a Middle Eastern funeral.  I don’t see that kind of intensity at NHL games in the third period (even after the beer taps have run dry).

    An old friend, there to watch his grandson, spotted me and clamored down from the stands.  “Can’t stay away, can you?  You miss this?” he asked. 

    “I’ve never experienced this before,” I replied shrugging toward the stands.

    He nodded in agreement.  “Sompun’ ain't it?  But then, our kids and us were just in it for the fun, am I right?  These kids and their parents are here to make the NHL.  That’s all my son talks about: his Johnny playing for this coach not that one, in this league in the winter, and this one in the summer.  This summer camp, then that.  He’s got ‘er all mapped out.”

   “Things have certainly changed in just a generation.  Is the boy having fun?”

   “He better be with all the money they’ve sunk in him.”

   And while my experience is with hockey, I am aware that this kind of intensity pervades most of youth sports with travel leagues, player ratings, etc.  It’s yet another sign the apocalypse is upon us.

   There are only two reasons why kids should be involved in youth sports: to teach them life lessons and for them to have fun.  To participate in sports to generate a professional athlete is counterproductive at best and often destructive.

   Why is it counterproductive?  There are incredible odds stacked against success.  At the present time, the odds of an American born hockey player to make it to the NHL are 1 in 3,333. In baseball, the odds of making it are 1 in 6,666. In both sports, despite the increase in youth participation in this country, the odds are diminishing.  In hockey, for example, last year the percentage of rookies entering the NHL from Europe was 38%.  This season it was 51% and experts expect that trend to continue.  The disproportionate number of non-North American NHL players is especially troubling to our hockey establishment considering that North America has six times as many players in youth hockey as Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined.

   The question that should come to mind (but which few parents caught up in the youth hockey frenzy address): why are the Europeans producing so many NHL players?  This is especially puzzling when European players do not play organized games until age 9 or 10, play far fewer games in their season, they don’t play year around, and they play other sports. 

   The conventional wisdom in our country is to become successful you must start kids very young, play ever more games, play year around, and concentrate on one sport.  And the youth sports establishment perpetuates this mantra despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, its enormous economic cost (up to $4,500 per year for a travel hockey player), and medical warnings from the American Pediatric Association advising of the developmental and  physical dangers of this path[1]- warnings which were printed in the Press and in newspapers coast to coast.

   Consider the example of Wayne Gretzky who says: “When the season was over, sometimes he’d (Wayne’s dad) hide my skates.  He wanted me to play other sports, to just be a regular kid having a great summer. Hockey was the focal point, but it was what I did in the winter.”  Wayne ran track, was a pitcher and shortstop in baseball, and was an A student who always did his homework when he got home from school and before he went off to play hockey according to his father.[2]

   Consider the draft data in Pavel Bure's draft year. His stats were 25 points in 30 games of league play at the age of 18.  Typically kids in travel hockey start in the fall and will have played 30 games before Christmas.

   Consider that the NCAA, taking into account the demands of getting an education, the amount of travel, and the physical stress on college students (young adults who are physically and emotionally mature), limit the games they can play to 34 per season.  It’s not uncommon for kids 9 and 10 to play almost three times that many games and travel just as far, the logic and benefit of which apparently escapes the NCAA.

   And sadly, for all the time, money, and travel spent, it isn’t working - it’s counterproductive.  In this intense involvement we are burning our babies out as surely as the Canaanite worshipers of Molech burned theirs up.  I say “we” because it’s not an 8 year-old child’s idea to dress up in matching uniforms, jackets, and equipment bags and travel 120 miles packed in the family van to play three or four games on the weekend against kids he doesn’t know and will never meet again.  That’s an adult idea.  Furthermore, it’s a schedule and regimen that NHL players wouldn’t abide for minute or for $2,000,000 a year.

   Dan has concluded, based on what we all would agree is insider information to which few of us are privy, that professional athletes are almost always created by default, very rarely by plan. He notes that like myself, most parents of NHL players never thought, never planned that their kid would play in the NHL.  His experience confirms the Sparky Anderson quote that “your son will play (professional sports) in spite of what you do for him, not because of what you do for him”.  Dan’s translation: if your son has what it takes to make it to the NHL, you’ll not be able to stop him.  If he doesn’t have what it takes, you can’t give it to him.

   But I argue further that the youth sports frenzy our society is drawn up in is more than benignly counterproductive.  It is all too often destructive.  There’s the recent obvious example of the father of a player out east who beat another player’s father to death over “too much physical contact” in a pickup hockey game (I don’t think any more irony could be packed into a fictional sentence). This past week, the father of a 14-year-old hockey player in Massachusetts has been arrested and charged with assault and battery.  He had attacked his son's high school coach in a locker room after a game because, “The coach has been after my son for a long time."  And I found very little to commend in the behavior of the parents I saw at the local rink. 

   Sadly, I think it’s more insidious than these blatant examples. I’m troubled by the values we teach a child when we would make this kind of an expenditure of time, money, and emotional involvement for what should be a child’s pastime and we haven’t the time for parent/teacher conferences or the money for a math tutor.  What are we saying when matters of spiritual importance and the ultimate realities of life are well behind a hockey or a soccer schedule in our list of priorities?   What impression to we leave when we choose to travel to the other side of the state for a hockey game instead of going to a Christmas celebration with our extended family?

   And for what?  A 1 in 5000 chance he could become a Darryl Strawberry?  More chilling - I wonder if these kind of values isn’t a factor in producing Darryl Strawberry’s in the rest of the 4,999.

   If we think that success in athletics is what we should be valuing as a society, perhaps the Europeans’ success in hockey should give us a clue as to how to achieve that success.  That would be: not play organized games until age 9 or 10, play far fewer games in the season, not play one sport year around, and play other sports.  In short, let our kids be kids and have fun and let parents heed the advice of Sparky Anderson.  

It’s a novel concept these days, but I know it worked for Dan and for lot of his teammates in the NHL.