New comedy genre, pushy youth sports parents

I fear there will be kindergarteners hanging from rims all over the country.

Thanks Ben Hyman.

USC's 13-year-old QB; Congrats to Alan Schwarz

Reading about David Sills last week, I wondered what people who actually study kids would make of the situation. Not football tutors. Not college football coaches. Child advocates, health professionals.

I expected all would be riled up about USC's offer of a football scholarship to Sills, a seventh grader. But that wasn't quite right. Here's my piece from ParentDish.

Unrelated but important: Today Alan Schwarz of the New York Times won the Polk Award for sports reporting. He's responsible for hundreds of important stories about concussions in athletes, from the pros to youth leagues. He has changed attitudes and saved a lot of kids. Congratulations Alan. And thanks.

Sports scholarships and other false promises

Outstanding article in Sunday's Houston Chronicle on the false promise of college scholarships. The Chronicle's Jenny Dial does two interesting things.

First, she computes the percentage of high school athletes who are playing in college AND receiving money. She reports that in men's and women's basketball, men's and women's track and field, men's golf and men's soccer, it's less than one percent.

Second, she speaks with parents in the Houston area about what they spend on their kids' sports educations.

She writes: "A survey of several parents of boys and girls golfers in the area shows that on average, they spent nearly $11,000 a year on the sport. Basketball parents spent an average of $4,900 over six years, and parents of junior and senior soccer boys and girls spent an average of $8,000 for two years."

There's nothing wrong with that, unless parents are counting on a scholarship to balance the ledgers. Many aren't. Some are.

This is from Until It Hurts. I was spoke with UConn men's soccer coach Ray Reid:

"UConn has room to add only six to seven high school players each recruiting cycle, some years just four or five. Reid’s sense is that teenagers often have an easier time accepting the bad news than their moms and dads, for whom a child’s sports career has involved long years of driving carpool, pacing sidelines and writing checks. They’ve done their part. In so many words, they’re taking the position that it’s time to collect on the investment.

"Reid bristles as he recalls many conversations with parents that have followed this tortured path. It goes this way, he says. “Coach Reid, we invested a lot of money in my son’s career - $30,000 in ten years. We’d like a soccer scholarship to get some of it back.

“It angers me. I’m appalled by the attitude. My reaction is: “That’s interesting. Your son is a mutual fund!”

From the business of youth sports department

News flash (from the Baltimore Business Journal):

"Under Armour Inc. is going into business with a global sports marketing agency to create a standardized scoring system for youth athletic performance.

"The Baltimore sportswear company and IMG are planning more than 100 global one- to three-day combines for high school athletes next year at which participants will be scored on a range of metrics, including physical attributes, mental stamina and sport-specific skills."

A tooth implant and a college sports scholarship

An article in Thursday's Washington Post examines a subject that generates a lot of heat among parents of talented young athletes but often not much light: whether it’s sensible to commit to intensive year-round training in one sport in hope of nabbing a college sports scholarship for your child.

The Post story doesn’t answer yes or no. But it draws a startling picture of how all-consuming sports become when kids and parents commit to this wearying path.

These two paragraphs about Sami Kuykendall, one of the elite Washington area players profiled in the article, say it all.

"A 17-year-old junior midfielder, Kuykendall has spent each of the past three spring seasons splitting time between the Vienna high school’s varsity girls’ soccer team and the under-17 McLean Premier Soccer (MPS) Dragons, the sixth-ranked club team in the country. The ball to the face, the concussions, the shattered jaw suffered in an aerial collision during a game last year (and subsequent tooth implant) are just a few notable entries on the list of injuries incurred during basically a year-round soccer season with a singular goal: a college scholarship.

“I made a decision, consciously when I was a lot younger, that this was the way to get to college soccer,” Kuykendall said. That decision has meant she has played approximately 90 games in the past calendar year, including three club league schedules and a barrage of tournaments. By comparison, consider: D.C. United [a professional soccer team] plays approximately 35 to 40 games a season, including exhibitions and club competitions.”

Kids like Sami sacrifice a lot to be soccer standouts. Their lives can become an endless cycle of practices, games, fitness training, private lessons and a like. The constant play takes a physical toll. Their parents give up plenty too. The Post article totes up the annual expenses of Cortlyn Bristol, another elite player. Her mother tells the Post that Cortlyn’s soccer tab the past three years, including such line items as practice apparel, team dues and international travel, topped $41,000.

Whether such choices are reasonable is for parents and their children to decide, without a lot of unsolicited advice from the blogosphere. But before setting your sights on raising a college athlete, it’s worth considering the sobering odds and financial realities.

Fewer than seven high school athletes in 100 play intercollegiate sports in college, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Just 5.8 per cent of high school football players, one in 17, will suit up for a college squad and the odds are bleaker for men’s soccer (5.7 per cent), baseball (5.6), women’s basketball (3.1) and men’s basketball (2.9). Of overall scholarship aid handed out to college students each year, sports awards are a sliver. 18 per cent at public colleges and universities; just seven per cent at private ones, according to research by Sandy Baum of Skidmore College and Lucie Lapovsky of Mercy College compiled for The College Board.. In short, being a gifted chemistry major pays better.

Even players with the talent to land sports scholarships, in all but exceptional cases, are left with tuition With limited scholarships to offer, coaches carve up awards giving less money to more athletes. The average athletic scholarship for the 138,216 athletes in Division I or Division II in 2003-4 was $10,409, about half the cost of attendance at some state universities and a fifth of tuition at pricier private ones.

One mother, whose daughter swims for the University of Delaware offered this sobering appraisal to the New York Times: “People run themselves ragged to play on three teams at once so they could always reach the next level. They’re going to be disappointed when they learn that if they’re very lucky, they will get a scholarship worth 15 percent of the $40,000 college bill.”

Sami Kuykendall is luckier than most. According to the Post, she has committed to a 60 percent scholarship to play soccer at Virginia Commonwealth University in fall 2010.

This post also appears at BusinessWeek's "Working Parents."

The college scholarship dream

Grooming a child to play college sports - and earn a full athletic scholarship - is a highly dubious proposition. Shall we review a few of the reasons? Kids who start in sports too early and train too hard are candidates for burnout and overuse injuries. The commitment in time and money - to pay for private lessons, travel squads, summer sports camps and the like - is startling. (See Monday's blog post). Even gifted athletes are prohibitive long shots to pay their way through college with their sports talent. Just one in 100 high school athletes succeeds.

These points and other good ones are made in an excellent three-part series in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The series started Monday with an installment on how elusive athletic scholarships truly have become - answer, very. I'm especially interested in the final installment in today's newspaper explaining the steps taken - and, often, money blown - by parents promoting their teen athletes to college coaches. I confess to having spent far more than was necessary or prudent on just this sort of thing. Anyone interested in a private screening of a professionally produced video: "My older son, the baseball catcher, blocking balls in the dirt"?

Here's a link to Part One. From this page, you'll be able to access the entire package of articles and charts.

Thanks to Lee Engfer, our Twin Cities eyes and ears, for passing along the articles.

Chasing the college sports dream

Many teen athletes aspire to play sports in college believing it will be exactly that - play. They arrive at Liberal Arts U. And reality sets in. Before long they've discovered that college sports -particularly at Division I - are a job, a highly competitive, physically draining, poorly paid job.

I've written about some of these students in my book about youth sports and how they've, in some ways, been hi-jacked by adults. It's called "Until It Hurts," and will be published by Beacon Press in April 2009. (Self-promotion, yes). Sunday's New York Times has a good piece by Jere Longman raising similar issues. Jere tells the story of a hotly recruited high school basketball star who landed an athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut, an elite women's hoops program. In a short time, she realized she was in the wrong place, spending all her time doing something that was not making her happy.

This post, and Jere's story, I'm sure, are not intended as knocks on college sports. The point is that these stories end happily only when the motivation comes from within, not from a coach, a parent, et cetera.

Overuse, burnout and parents

I'd like to see this posted in every high-school locker room and middle-school gym in America. It's a set of simple principles for preventing burnout and overuse injuries in kid athletes.

These guidelines are reasonable. They make good sense. Yet they're violated every day. Raise your hand if you've ever nudged your child over the line (Mine's up. For details, see page 27 of "Until It Hurts").

The following list comes from a report issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics titled "Overuse Injuries, Overtraining, and Burnout in Child and Adolescent Athletes."

-Young athletes should limit training in one sport to no more than five days a week, with at least one day off from any organized physical activity.

-Athletes should take time off from one sport for two to three months each year. Taking a break from a sport allows injuries to heal and the opportunity to work on strength training and conditioning to reduce the risk of future injuries.

-Weekly training time, number of repetitions, or total distance should not increase by more than 10 percent weekly.

-Focus of sports should be on fun, skill acquisition, safety and sportsmanship.

-Join only one team per season.

And rule No. 1.

-Getting caught up in making the professional leagues or Olympics is unrealistic. Children and adolescents train year-round on multiple teams of one sport often with the hope of earning a college scholarship in that sport or becoming a professional athlete, but less than 1 percent of high school athletes make it to the professional level.

Okay, hands down.

The ethics of high school sports

Two items about the ethical lessons our children are learning - or aren't - as high school athletes.

Item One:

The online writing service EssayBay, which sells term papers and essays to high school and college students (which they then turn in as their own work), went public this year with a profile of its customers. According to the company, 45 percent are high school athletes who order term papers so they can make the grades they need to hook college scholarships. Worse, 70 per cent of the students did so with the approval of coaches. (No reference to parents, but it's doubtful they're in the dark).

Item Two:

The Josephson Institute in Los Angeles did an extensive survey on ethics in high school sports, interviewing 5,275 students. Among its findings: 65 per cent of kids on prep teams cheated at least once in academic work in the past year compared to 60 per cent for non-athletes. The most prolific cheaters - 72 per cent of football players and 71 per cent of cheerleaders!

Go team!

Prep basketball: Trouble with transfers

LA Times reporter Eric Sondheimer has written a good column on the troubling spike in high school sports transfers. Talented players in SoCal hop from school to school, year to year. It's all about building a kid's sports resume and cred with college scouts. Lucky schools sometimes add two or three star players virtually overnight. Others lose their big guns unexpectedly, with coaches unaware that a player has transferred until the first day of school. The LA school system has tried to address the problem with stringent transfer rules. But, as Sondheimer points out, they haven't made a dent.

"High school sports has evolved into a multifaceted scene, with increasing focus on what it offers for the individual rather than the team. It's now about branding opportunities, exposure to recruiters and media, and preparing for future stardom," Sondheimer writes.

Read the entire article from Monday's Times here.

Pursuing athletic scholarships

Good article in last Sunday's Dallas Morning News on athletic scholarships. The reporter, Brandon George, asks parents: If you had it to do again, would you go to the trouble and expense of training up your child for college sports?

Answer:

Yes. Parents felt their kids had benefitted from structure, education and "life experiences."

And definitely not...for the scholarship money. When it was there at all, those dollars turned out to be far less than the parents bargained for.

"It definitely wouldn't be worth it from a money perspective if you look at it that way," said Tom Geppert, whose son, Scott, was a senior forward for SMU's soccer team last season, told the Morning News. The full piece is here.
Bill Pennington had a similar piece in the New York Times last March.