Recovering Joy in the Youth Sports Industry

DAVID KING and Margot Starbuck are nostalgic for the good ol’ days of youth sports. In Overplayed: A Parent’s Guide to Sanity in the World of Youth Sports, the authors first critique the current youth sports machine by reminiscing about an athletic utopia of the past: One where kids used water bottles for goal posts and flip-flops for bases. Back when parents weren’t paying up to $18,000 in hotel and trainer fees for elite travel teams. Back when kids loved sports.

This book intends to teach parents how to prevent burnout, overuse injury, and a misguided value system for their children. However, I read Overplayed as a young single woman learning to love sports again after suffering overuse injury and burnout right before college. I wish my parents—loving and good-intentioned as they were and are—had read this book 20 years ago.

King, athletic director at a Mennonite university, and Starbuck, a writer and a parent to three teenage athletes, believe that sports has the potential to be a powerful force in the lives of children.

However, often money and myths corrupt that potential. Early on, Starbuck speaks wonders of the ways athletics teach us to know and love our physicality, explaining, “I came to know my body as good because of the opportunities I had to play sports as a girl.” But with early single-sport specialization and year-round tournament schedules, children are coming to know their bodies as injured before they can come to know their bodies as good. The authors note that in 2014, 1.35 million kids suffered sports-related injuries that landed them in the emergency room. “‘No pain no gain,’” the authors insist, “should have no place in youth sports.”

And according to Starbuck and King, participation trophies and scoreboards (before middle school) also don’t belong in youth sports. If parents can’t find leagues that are willing to nix certain givens of youth sports, then the authors explain how parents can set up their own community or church league with parents who share their values.

As the advice becomes more value-driven and theological, it also becomes more challenging. After all, only in an upside-down world where the first shall be last would a university coach suggest that children can also benefit from playing on losing teams with lesser-skilled players. The authors continuously advise parents to decide on their values before deciding on a team—to choose, for instance, where they want to tithe before they nail down their travel-team hotel budget.

While the advice in this book may seem restrictive to some, the authors have no intention of spoiling any of the athletic fun. In fact, the preservation of fun is one of Overplayed’s biggest goals. Midway through the book, the readers meet a college freshman named Katrina who was “made to swim,” just like a fish. Toward the end of her high school career, college scouts came knocking, as eager to get her on their teams as they were to circumvent the 20-hour-per-week practice limit regulations. Katrina turned them down—saying no to the ultimate yet elusive dream of so many youth athletes.

She wanted a life outside the water, and she got it. And because of that choice, “Katrina, the fish, still enjoys swimming.”

There’s just not much room for love and joy in the billion-dollar youth sports industry. Far too often, youth athletics promote a macho culture in which only “one emotion is allowed: anger. The explosive, aggressive emotion, fueling adrenaline” and, ultimately, spoiling the fun. But the authors point out that the cardio-machismo, the overuse injuries, and the constant weekend travel don’t just prevent youth athletes from loving sports, they prevent them from loving their neighbors.

After all, how can a parent teach her child to love her neighbor if she’s never in her neighborhood? King and Starbuck are determined to help us figure out just that.