I admit. I’m old. During the summers when I was growing up, I would announce to anyone in earshot “I’m going to the park,” and I would then leave the house, walk the full block to the park, spend the day playing whatever games whatever friends had gathered on that day decided we’d play, and eventually make my way home. Or maybe to a friend’s house. It was totally unstructured, it was totally spontaneous and it was totally unsupervised.
By now you doubtless know that the Chicago-based team that last year became the first all-black contingent to win the U.S. Little League Baseball championship was stripped of the title on Wednesday for cheating by using players who lived outside the geographic area set for the squad. This brings to an ignominious end what had been a truly uplifting story, complete with victory parades and a trip to the Oval Office.
This is, of course, not the first time that there’s been cheating in youth sports. Forty years ago, the winner of the World Soap Box Derby Championships was discovered to have relied on electromagnetism (not gravity and aerodynamics), and was forced to forfeit the title. The Little League itself was the subject of scandal when, in 2001, it was discovered that another rags-to-riches team, this time a team from the Bronx, had used a pitcher who was two years older than the legal maximum age. In fact, evidently the whistle-blowers who complained about the Chicago-based team had themselves cheated by using players from outside the geographic area. One writer makes a convincing case that cheating is endemic in most high-level youth sports.
As someone who has, at one time or another, coached youth soccer, baseball, football, basketball, softball, cross-country and track, I have long believed that the worst thing about youth sports is grown-ups (and this criticism is not just levied at coaches and parents; don’t you think that the Little League organization, which in 2013 announced that it signed a deal with ESPN to televise its games to the tune of $60 million, might be part of the problem?). I can assure you that there wasn’t much cheating going on when we were playing four-square or pick-up baseball or kill-the-guy-with-the-ball on the playground. Why not? Because there were no adults there to make us care about the result of the game. We were PLAYING. Meanwhile, today kids as young as five or six are being pushed into competitive sports programs.
Which brings me back to my childhood days. If today I did what my parents did — if I let my 10-year-old leave the house for the entire day without my knowing where he was at every moment while he engaged in supervised, unstructured play — I imagine I’d probably be getting a visit from the Division of Children and Families. But I would avoid the department’s wrath if I enrolled my child in a youth sports program with a maniacal coach.
I’m not sure what this all says about where we as a society are heading, but I can tell you I don’t like it.