Read ‘Game On’ — and avoid game over
Now that we’ve settled into the 2011-2012 sports season and everyone’s having fun, how about a little perspective ...
In 2008, early on a Saturday afternoon before the Crosstown Kickoff Classic football game at Glenbard West, Glenbard South assistant Lee Halberg and this writer were solving the world’s problems while leaning on the chain link fence surrounding the field.
The specific topic escapes me — it may not have been anything specific at all — but it concerned some flaw, we believed, in the current athletic culture. That’s when Halberg, a 2001 Illinois Track and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee, suggested I read a book, “Game On” by ESPN’s Tom Farrey (2008; ESPN Books).
“I consider it to be informative, entertaining, amusing and somewhat alarming all at the same time,” Halberg says now.
Now, I’ve been slogging through a leviathan Orson Welles biography since my wife gave it to me as a gift, along with a health club membership so I could lift it, since about the time Halberg was delivering his Hall of Fame acceptance speech. Between work, chauffeuring kids, household chores and work, reading anything more contemplative than, say, William Shatner’s memoirs sort of got lost in the shuffle.
Over the next couple years whenever Halberg and I met he’d patiently ask if I’d read “Game On.” No, the writer would say, sheepishly. Thankfully not writing me off, finally last spring at the annual Jim Arnold boys track invite also at Glenbard West, he produced a crisp copy. It was not the first he’d handed out, Johnny Appleseed-style. No more excuses.
The subtitle of the hardback version is: “The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children.”
“I feel like the title speaks for itself,” Halberg said.
Obviously the award-winning “Game On” is not a pollyannish polemic about the status quo, though Farrey seems to be a fan — and as the father of sports-minded children, he is emotionally and financially invested in the subject.
The subhead of the paperback version is: “How the Pressure to Win At All Costs Endangers Youth Sports and What Parents Can Do About It.” The “parent tips” are offered in boxed asides contained in each of the 14 chapters, or chronologically-suggested “ages,” as well as by prologue talking statements and forward-looking examples in the epilogue.
Parent tips such as: “Encourage members of your community to hold off creating travel teams until children are of middle school age.”
Right.
It all is presented in meticulously researched yet enthralling copy on different facets of a subject with significant relevance considering the obesity problem in this country.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2008 33.8 percent of the adult population was defined as obese (a body mass index of 30 percent or higher); a 2007-08 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that 16.9 percent of United States children and adolescents between the ages of 2-19 were obese. That’s bad news for a nation struggling with medical costs.
That juxtaposes a stat Farrey presents in “Game On”: since the 1970s, unstructured play and outdoor activities for children ages 3-11 has decreased by 40 percent.
Halberg offers another one: studies have shown that 70 to 80 percent of children who begin playing a sport at an early age have dropped out by the time they turn 15.
“Thirteen is the age at which kids start to fall away from sports in droves,” writes Farrey, corroborating Halberg’s statement.
Chapter by chapter Farrey investigates why. He examines the usual suspects — finances, specialization, pushy parents, the concentration on competition and individual excellence (read “winning”) over full participation, even and perhaps especially the trickle-down affect of focusing on professional and college athletics in lieu of youth sports.
These are topics that most of us, even as we continually (must?) embrace them, realize hopelessly in our gut may be detrimental to the atrophied concept of “sports for all.”
Not interested in pointing fingers, however, Farrey sympathetically reports that in his research expeditions many if not all the myriad folks he interviewed did what they thought was best for children.
On that note, one handy excuse Farrey didn’t seem to fully explore is simply how swollen suburban populations, rampant sprawl and the increased necessity, for many, of the dual-income family has diminished the ease of kids to set out on their bike with a glove, a bat and a ball. Regardless of where Main Street is — St. Charles, Naperville, Geneva, Lombard — constant streams of traffic makes accessing open public space an often dangerous proposition.
And check out a map of registered sex offenders in your area, some of whom may live right in your neighborhood; while both mom and dad are at work it is more reassuring to delegate responsibility of particularly younger children to park district “camps” or travel-team coaches than to let the kiddies fend for themselves.
Farrey, who tested the laxity of AAU basketball by registering his dog as a coach, begins his journey considering the “nature vs. nurture” argument — and comes away realizing the best athletes need both — in Los Angeles at the California Cryobank where reproductive tissue is for sale. Athletic-minded buyers of $350 vials of highly purified sperm hope to land a sample from, perhaps, a UCLA swimmer to provide his own offspring with a head start.
Farrey investigates the Tiger Woods-fueled boom in kids’ golf, where world championships are offered for parent-driven children as young as 6 years old. Interestingly, while Farrey writes, “Tiger Woods seems the very picture of prefabricated excellence,” subsequent events suggest a piece may have been omitted.
The author goes on to explore how, for example, as publicly financed sweetheart deals for professional stadiums have flourished, resources to public recreation have withered; how the pursuit of college scholarships can A) marginalize the less talented and; B) often burn out the winners.
Nuggets abound: a reverend in Miami says the local high school football team is “bigger than the school”; specialization is not advised until 11 for girls, 12 for boys; the top 25 percent in socioeconomic status were (in a 1990 study) 10 times more likely to play Division I sports than the bottom 25 percent.
Most damning to our local sports sphere, Farrey writes in the epilogue: “The U.S. educational system, from the middle schools on up, needs either to bring athletics into the mainstream of its teaching culture or to get out of the enterprise entirely.”
For this prep sports-lover, the point of this column is to recommend this book as food for thought.
“Its value may be that it forces you to step back as a parent, coach, administrator and fan, and reexamine what we’re doing and consider how we might do some things differently,” Coach Halberg said.
The brief Appendices section in “Game On” includes a 1989 poll by Michigan State researchers of 8,000 boys and girls involved in school and nonschool sports, asking their motives for playing.
“To win” was listed only once, ranking eighth of ten responses in boys participating in school sports.
The No. 1 answer in both categories for each sex?
“To have fun.”
doberhelman@dailyherald.com