Somewhere in the last thirty years we decided youth sports needed improving. So we improved it. Paid coaches instead of somebody’s dad. Year-round leagues instead of a season. Travel teams, tournaments two states away, showcases, national rankings for eleven-year-olds. Every one of those was somebody trying to make it better.
And it did get better, at the thing it was measured on. The top end of youth sport is more skilled than it has ever been. The coaching is real. The facilities are real.
It also got worse at leaving a kid with something that felt like theirs. And most of the kids who left didn’t leave over that. They left over money. When the neighborhood league becomes a club with a real invoice, the ones who go first are the ones whose families can’t follow, and that is the biggest part of this story by a wide margin.
There’s a second cost though, and it lands on the kids who do get to stay. We cared, we built a machine around the caring, and the machine came with a price nobody put on the ledger.
When I was nine and ten we were living in the Philippines, my brother Neil and I, and most of what we did was invent things to do. Foot races and bike races. Basketball. Shooting competitions with slingshots we made ourselves, rubber band guns, bows that mostly didn’t work. We built carts out of whatever we could find and raced each other sitting in them. A makeshift boat, for catching tadpoles. We laid out courses in the fields around the houses. Somebody’s yard, our yard, the street, the empty field across from it. Wherever there was an open space for us.
We called the whole thing our own mini olympics, which is about what you’d call it at ten.
I asked Neil this week what he remembered of it. He reminded me what we were known as around there. The feral May boys. There was a nanny in the house, and by his account keeping track of the two of us was a tertiary objective at best.
That part matters more than it sounds. No adult was coming to settle anything. Most of the kids were the children of servicemen and women, and sometimes local kids joined in. We decided together how to keep score and what the rules were. When we disagreed we went with the oldest kids, and that was the appeals process, because there wasn’t going to be another one.
Neil was a year and a half younger and he was in all of it. We gave him a role, and more than once the version we kept was his.
Nobody had to keep us interested. We came back the next day because we wanted to, and that was the whole engine.
I want to be careful about what that’s evidence of, because it isn’t that we were running around free of structure. We had a great deal of structure. Events, scoring, rules, a court of last resort, courses we laid out on purpose. Every layer somebody would sell you now, we built.
What mattered wasn’t how much of it there was. It was that we made it. Which meant it was ours to change, and it meant the youngest kid in the group could change it.
Now put that same kid on a team that costs a few thousand dollars a year. Almost everything about the experience improves. The coaching is better. The fields are better. They get more skilled, measurably.
And the game stops being theirs. They are executing a plan an adult made. Practice is on the calendar whether they feel like it or not. Playing time is a decision somebody else makes about them, in a conversation they aren’t in. The rules come from somewhere else now, and so does the reason to show up. The love of it, which was most of the engine, is supposed to arrive by way of winning … and winning is not something they control either.
The cost prices a lot of families out, and that is the first thing to say about it, not a footnote. It decides who gets to play at all. What I want to add is what happens after the money question is settled. Even in the family that can pay it, something gets taken, and it goes quietly. What people own is what they keep.
I’m not standing outside this one. I do the same thing at work, and I do it for the same reason. When something matters to me, I add process to protect it. Another check-in so nothing gets missed. A clearer template so the quality holds. One more step in the review because last time something slipped. Every single piece of that is defensible. But somewhere in the middle of all the protecting, the work turns into something people execute rather than something they own. And then I wonder why the energy went out of it, as though that were a mystery.
I recognize the shape in both places. It isn’t that structure is the enemy. It’s that structure somebody else built, for you, tends to arrive with your part already decided. The good intention doesn’t save you from that. It’s what makes it hard to see, because every step was reasonable and every step had a reason.
I don’t think the answer is less caring, and it isn’t nostalgia either. There were plenty of kids the old pickup version left out, and coaching that was genuinely bad. The answer is being honest that structure people can’t shape has a cost, and putting that cost on the ledger next to the benefit. Before you add the step, ask what it takes away, and ask it as seriously as you asked what it protects. Then ask who gets to change it later, because that’s usually the whole difference. Sometimes the honest answer is that the step is worth it. Sometimes the honest answer is that you’re about to make something yours that was working fine as theirs.
Skill is what the money buys, and it does buy it. Whether they still want to play at twenty gets decided earlier, in the stretch when the game was still theirs to change.