Mike Burke
Pee-wee football players have their names on the back of their jerseys. Their names on the back of their jerseys that bear their “team” colors. Just like the pros.
Area pee-wee and youth-league coaches wear their ballcaps backwards and sport that arm-band thing with their plays written on them and frantically flip it up and down before calling the play Ron Jaworski will surely break down this week on Monday Night Football. They don this attire and they act this way while on stage during a little kids’ game. Just like Tony Romo does in that ESPN commercial.
They hold pep rallies for upcoming youth-league games. Pep rallies for youth-league games. Regular-season games. Just like they do in high school and college ... for big games.
They pay for airplanes displaying team banners to fly overhead for pee wee games, so the entire community can see for itself which team rules, which cheerleaders rock, and who is the most awesome. All for the sake of poking their finger into the chest of the other side, that either A.) didn’t think to rent a banner-waving airplane, or B.) thought of it, but decided it was all just a ridiculous waste of money.
Parents flood high schools to paint signs and decorate lockers — of and for their children. Just like they painted their own signs and decorated their own lockers — when they were in high school.
It’s not enough to have one Homecoming weekend per year per school. There has to be a Homecoming for each sport, and, of course there has to be Little Homecoming because it’s not fair for the underclassmen not to have a Homecoming when the seniors have one every year.
Uh, hello. The idea is for the underclassmen to do their work in school and stick with the program, so they, too, one day will become seniors. I’ve never known anybody to come home to watch a freshman or junior varsity sporting event of any kind. How does that promote the oneness of school and community? It doesn’t. It simply perpetuates the participation-trophy pox that “organized youth sports” infected us with so many years ago.
I see all of this going on year-round, and I mourn for the sandlot days when kids simply rounded up a game of any kind amongst themselves, went out amongst themselves and just played ball amongst themselves; learning about the team concept amongst themselves, finding out about themselves amongst themselves; discovering the leaders amongst themselves, what it took to become a leader as well as what it took to do what was necessary to help the team.
What I see are parents and aspiring coaches getting in the way. I see adults ruining sports for kids before the kids are even old enough to appreciate sports. I see too much structure, too many rigid time tables, and far too much specialization on one sport for the sake of that college scholarship that will surely be awarded years from now to the leading rusher or scorer in the pee wee league.
I see madness, and I see the kids saying “Enough!” by the time they’re in the 10th grade. I see even the top high school prospects in America saying, thanks, but no thanks to that college scholarship offer from the top programs in the nation.
This time last year, Elena Delle Donne, a 6-foot-5 freshman middle hitter for the University of Delaware volleyball team, was the nation’s top female high school basketball player. She signed with the University of Connecticut Huskies, one of, if not the best women’s college basketball program in the country. Yet after two days of summer classes, Delle Donne decided she was burned out on basketball and renounced her scholarship. She said she loved the people at UConn, but she saw the commitment it was going to take to contribute at the UConn level and determined the commitment she had given for her entire life to reach the heights she had was no longer there.
Most of all, 19-year-old Elena Delle Donne says she wasn’t happy.
She enrolled at Delaware and walked on to play volleyball, a sport she played for the first time in her senior year of high school.
“She seems a lot happier; she laughs a lot,” Meghan Bonk, a high school and college teammate of Delle Donne’s, is quoted as saying in the Oct. 19 New York Times.
In the same Times article, Delle Donne, who received her first college basketball scholarship offer in the seventh grade, says, “I love what I’m doing; I don’t see any reason to change as of now. If I ended up missing a sport, I wouldn’t mind just playing here and maybe doing two sports. Or if I really, really missed it and I wanted to go back to Connecticut, that’s always a possibility, too. But right now, I’m happy, so I’m going to stick with what I’m doing and enjoy it.”
Guess what coach Bonnie Kenny believes is the reason the best high school basketball player in the nation last year plays on her Division I-AA volleyball team this year? Uh-huh.
“No kid should have to go through what she went through,” Kenny, a past president of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, told the Times. “Adults need to pay attention. It’s a problem in youth sports. These kids are burned out. From 12 to 18, I bet Elena can count on her hands the amount of weekends she didn’t have anything to do related to sport. She’s missed the opportunity to be a kid.”
Too many adults out there apparently feel the same way — about themselves. If that’s the case, we’re real sorry to hear it, but it’s too late now. You’ve got to go to work in the morning, so back off. Let them discover for themselves. Stay out of the way so your kids don’t miss their opportunity to be kids.
As the great Willie Stargell said, “The umpire says, ‘Play ball,’ not ‘Work ball.’ ”
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.
