We Should All Take a Little Timeout on Youth Sports

The ’90s were a wild time for sports. We watched Kerri Strug clinch the team gold at the ‘96 Olympic Games. We saw Michael Jordan in a Gatorade commercial and all wanted to “Be Like Mike.” By the end of the decade, Brandi Chastain's shirt-twirling at the World Cup made her a sports icon.

Unless you count the fact that Strug's heroic vault ended up being her last, all of these moments were positive and inspirational. But now as a mom of five sons (ages 21, 20, 12, 10 and 7) and a 19-year-old daughter, I’m weary of what elite sports encourages.

Thanks to YouTube clips of The Block by LeBron James and content on ESPN’s TikTok, all of my children want to be truly great at sports — and make piles of money, too. As a result, they’re extremely dedicated to the sports they play, and our downtime as a family is all but gone.

I'm a huge fan of youth sports. My husband Joe and I met on the pool deck at Michigan State. He was a scholarship swimmer who won at Junior Nationals, and I was a walk-on. Joe has swam over 30 million yards in his lifetime. That's what happens when you start competing at age seven.

I was captain of both the swimming and track teams in high school.

Our kids’ activities are somewhat less intense, and because we have a huge family, we limit each child to one sport per season. However, three of our five sons have played water polo, a time-consuming club sport that takes up most weeknights. Nearly every weekend of my 12-year-old’s polo season is filled with tournament games. When one 12U session is over, the next one begins a week or two later. That’s to say nothing of the countless hours it begs of parent volunteers.

Our daughter’s horseback riding competitions are not so frequent, but horse shows still soak up weekends and require days’ worth of travel.

Some sports are reforming. Competitive swimming is a lot less yardage-intensive today, but many programs are still exhausting for everyone. None of this dialectic is news to you if you're a Millennial parent.

Our town’s youth baseball league has earned itself a dramatic nickname: The Real Househusbands. The intensity of these programs can get kids drafted to the MLB out of high school, however, little league playoffs end up a tense reality series in which no one — especially the grown-ass parents — can get a grip.

With more organized sports come fewer hours of unstructured free play. That may be part of why torn A.C.L.s are on the rise in young women who play soccer. No 10-year-old should feel like sobbing because his coach is sad he can't pitch a third game today. No 15-year-old should have to retire from backstroke permanently, because she's popping out a shoulder every time she puts on a sweater.

And are kids still having fun, Coach? This can’t be an afterthought.

Some elite athletes are seeing what I'm seeing. Simone Biles stunned everyone at the 2021 Tokyo Games by pulling out of two Olympic final events. She listened to her body, showing kids and caregivers that mental health and personal safety are priorities. I'm cheering harder for her than ever.

We don't have to be those sedentary humans in WALL-E to find balance within our passions. (In fact, let's not do any of the stuff that happens in that movie.) But we shouldn’t root for a situation where youth sports are a $40-billion industry, and search engines auto-prompt the question: Is seven years old too late to start baseball?

Even LeBron James makes his kids take time off. On running our asses ragged, the game clock may be winding down.