Accountability Problem in Youth Sports

BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN

“Thanks so much for your talk the other day,” wrote a coach from Calgary, Alberta to us recently. “It was so refreshing to hear that message, especially in light of the news I returned home to.”

“My friend spent the weekend coaching his son at a spring hockey tournament for 9 and 10 year olds,” he wrote. “He’s a pretty level headed guy and cares about the kids a lot, but the stories from the tournament were scary. He told me about three coaches getting kicked out for arguing with refs. He told me about a grandpa getting kicked out for arguing with refs. He told me about parents from his team asking other parents to please stop swearing at the kids from the stands. He told me about one kid cold-cocking another off a faceoff.”

“Finally,” he wrote, “he told me about another kid who jumped on his own son and started punching him in the head. The other team’s kid was was kicked out of the game and as he was skating off the ice, he skated past our bench, turned to our team and yelled “F— You!.”

“But here is the crazy part,” he wrote. “The 9-year-old who started a fight, who was kicked out and was cursing at the other bench, was allowed to play in the rest of the tournament! When my friend approached the tournament organizer about this, he was told ‘Well, that’s hockey.”

Really? Is that what 9-year-old hockey is about: swearing, fighting, and the adults involved not only turning a blind eye to these situations, but actually encouraging them through their own poor behavior? Hockey is far too beautiful a game for that. Every sport is.

I love competing, and I love competitive sports. Heck, I don’t even like when someone finishes their pizza slice before I do. But this is not about competing. This is about a youth sports industrial complex gone mad. It’s about a place where organizers are afraid to toe the line on behavior, lest their tournament or player numbers dwindle. It is a place where coaches, schools and sports associations are afraid to stand up to unruly parents, lest they pick up and leave, or because “they are the customer, right?” And it’s about parents and leagues allowing disrespectful coaches to create environments of fear, intimidation, and poor sportsmanship, so long as they keep winning.

And we wonder why so many kids quit?

This is not a hockey problem. This type of behavior exists across all sports, and is spreading across the globe.

We have an accountability problem in youth sports, and if we do not change, if we allow the type of status quo described above to continue, our sports will continue to suffer and die!

The problem in sports is that everyone makes excuses. Coaches blame parents. Parents blame coaches and leagues. Organizations say “Well, that’s hockey.” And we wonder why our athletes make excuses?

It is high time we had much more accountability in sports, as this would solve so many issues. Here is a start:

Coaches, you are accountable to your athletes to give them what they want from a coach, such as:

• Treat them with respect and encourage them as they learn
• Be a positive role model
• Be a clear, consistent communicator and listener
• Know about the game you are teaching
• Make it safe to fail and learn

You are also accountable to parents, to treat their child with the respect and dignity. You need to be an encourager, not a discourager. You need to coach the child, not the sport. You need to value the human being, not the athlete. You are accountable for building an environment of love and respect, not fear and intimidation.

Any coach who does the opposite, who says “I have done it this way for 30 years, I am not going to change,” should scare you! Why? For the same reason that you would want your ER doctor to use the latest and greatest techniques on you if your life was on the line. “Oh yeah, I know the research says we shouldn’t treat heart attacks like this anymore, but I have always done it this way, so I am not going to change.” Wouldn’t you ask for another doctor? Coaches should be accountable for being life-long learners, modeling respectful behavior, and developing both better athletes and better people. We should not expect them to be perfect, but we shouldn’t excuse bad coaching either.

Parents, you are accountable to your athletes to give them what they ask for and what they need. Some ideas are:

• Do not coach from the sidelines
• Perhaps do not even cheer from the sidelines (nearly 100% of high school kids tell us they would rather their parents say nothing during games)
• Do not disrespect the officials, the coach, or the opposing fans
• Surround kids with positive role models
• Help them find their passion instead of deciding what they should be passionate about
• Ensure they have balance, a life away from sport, and they become quality human beings
• Ensure that sports are an extension of the things you value at home, such as integrity, effort, and sportsmanship
• Value their effort, focus and the process of learning, not simply results
• Be patient, as talent development is ugly
• Just be a fan and love watching them play

Parents are also accountable to coaches, sports organizations, and officials. They must not interfere with the coach/player relationship (unless it is unsafe). They must support our great coaches and stop micromanaging every aspect of our kids’ teams, who plays, what position they play, etc. Great coaches can change a child’s life for the better if we let them do their work! Struggle is good, and talent needs trauma, so embrace it!

Finally parents, we must start holding each other accountable in the stands for our behavior. We must create an environment where unruly behavior is no longer tolerated. We must leave the officials alone. We lose 70-80% of first year officials in youth sports because it’s just not worth it to them. If we want good officials, we better create an environment where they want to work. We have the power to change things if we are first willing to change ourselves.

Athletes, you are accountable to make the athletic experience a better one, one that will serve you for your entire life. You can do this by:

• Do not act entitled, and for your own sake realize that everything you get in life will need to be earned.
• Show up early, stay late, outwork your teammates and the opponent, and expect nothing except the opportunity to compete.
• Be positive, and don’t be, as Jon Gordon calls it, an “energy vampire.”
• Learn to be a teammate who focuses on what she can give, instead of what she can get
• Ask to be held accountable for the commitments it takes to achieve your goals
• Thank a coach who never lets you give less than your best
• Be patient, and embrace the struggle
• Use your influence as an athlete to better the lives of others in your school, especially when it comes to bullying, and befriending the friendless.

Athletes, you are also accountable to let coaches and parents know what you want, and what you need from this experience. At the last high school I spoke at, nearly 50% of the kids said their parents had no idea what their goals were in sports. Stand up for yourself, be willing to struggle and fight for the things you want!

Schools, clubs and sport associations, you must start being accountable for this environment as well. Start with these ideas:

• Adopt a comprehensive parent and coaching education mandate in your organization, and demand more of yourselves, your coaches and your members. Check out US Club Soccer’s “Players First” Initiative as a model.
• Adopt some organizational core values, so you know where you are going, what you are teaching, and when it’s time to tell a coach, parent or athlete “thanks, but perhaps this isn’t for you.”
• Adopt a strict policy for any parent, coach or athlete who breaks your code of conduct and enforce it! Sadly, most organizations have a code of conduct, and it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on because they are afraid to hold people accountable for it.

As sports organizations charged with developing our youth as people and as athletes, we must do better. Zero tolerance does not always mean one bad decision and you are kicked out, but it must have teeth. An adult fighting another adult should not be allowed back on the sideline, ever. Your kid is welcome, dad is not. No one has the divine right to be a spectator at their kids’ events, yet we continue to allow this behavior, and it is very sad.

When I think of the story above about the 9-year-old hockey tournament, or others I have heard about basketball, soccer, softball, you name it, I can’t help but think that all those adults have no place around kids’ sports. Coaches who encourage poor behavior don’t. Tournament organizers who condone fighting and cursing by 9-year-olds by saying “that’s hockey” don’t. And parents who turn the sidelines into toxic places for our athletes, officials, and for those who want this experience to belong to the kids, have no right to continue to destroy the experience for the majority.

Here is the thing: they won’t stop until everyone becomes accountable. Every athlete, every coach, every parent, and every club must stop making excuses and say “This ends today.” You can start by having everyone watch and be accountable for online courses such as our new one “Respect the Kids, Respect the Game.” You can bring in great speakers from Changing the Game Project, the Positive Coaching Alliance, Proactive Coaching or others who are making a difference. You can do a lot of things.

But first, you must say “I am accountable, and I am going to help change this, because I love this game, and it’s the right thing to do.” It’s time for the responsible adults to demand to be put on the hook, instead of let off it!

Yes it is scary, but be brave. You are not alone, and there are millions of us out there who got your back! Let’s stand up and be counted.

---

John O'Sullivan

Founder, CEO

John started the Changing the Game Project in 2012 after two decades as a soccer player and coach on the youth, high school, college and professional ...Read More >

Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

By VICKI ABELES of www.nytimes.com/

STUART SLAVIN, a pediatrician and professor at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, knows something about the impact of stress. After uncovering alarming rates of anxiety and depression among his medical students, Dr. Slavin and his colleagues remade the program: implementing pass/fail grading in introductory classes, instituting a half-day off every other week, and creating small learning groups to strengthen connections among students. Over the course of six years, the students’ rates of depression and anxiety dropped considerably.

But even Dr. Slavin seemed unprepared for the results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.

“This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.

What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers. Even those not bound for college are ground down by the constant measurement in schools under pressure to push through mountains of rote, impersonal material as early as preschool.

Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.

Nearly one in three teenagers told the American Psychological Association that stress drove them to sadness or depression — and their single biggest source of stress was school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vast majority of American teenagers get at least two hours less sleep each night than recommended — and research shows the more homework they do, the fewer hours they sleep. At the university level, 94 percent of college counseling directors in asurvey from last year said they were seeing rising numbers of students with severe psychological problems.

At the other end of the age spectrum, doctors increasingly see children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers. Many physicians see a clear connection to performance pressure.

“I’m talking about 5-, 6-, 7-year-olds who are coming in with these conditions. We never used to see that,” says Lawrence Rosen, a New Jersey pediatrician who works with pediatric associations nationally. “I’m hearing this from my colleagues everywhere.”

What sets Irvington apart in a nation of unhealthy schools is that educators, parents and students there have chosen to start making a change. Teachers are re-examining their homework demands, in some cases reviving the school district’s forgotten homework guideline — no more than 20 minutes per class per night, and none on weekends. In fact, research supports limits on homework. Students have started a task force to promote healthy habits and balanced schedules. And for the past two years, school counselors have met one on one with every student at registration time to guide them toward a manageable course load.

“We are sitting on a ticking time bomb,” said one Irvington teacher, who has seen the problem worsen over her 16 years on the job.

A growing body of medical evidence suggests that long-term childhood stress is linked not only with a higher risk of adult depression and anxiety, but with poor physical health outcomes, as well. The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study, a continuing project of the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, shows that children who experience multiple traumas — including violence, abuse or a parent’s struggle with mental illness — are more likely than others to suffer heart disease, lung disease, cancer and shortened life spans as adults. Those are extreme hardships but a survey of the existing sciencein the 2013 Annual Review of Public Health suggested that the persistence of less severe stressors could similarly act as a prescription for sickness.

“Many of the health effects are apparent now, but many more will echo through the lives of our children,” says Richard Scheffler, a health economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We will all pay the cost of treating them and suffer the loss of their productive contributions.”

Paradoxically, the pressure cooker is hurting, not helping, our kids’ prospects for success. Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors, only 14 percent of whom believe that their students are prepared for college work, according to a 2015 report. Just 29 percent of employers in the same study reported that graduates were equipped to succeed in today’s workplace. Both of those numbers have plummeted since 2004.

Contrary to a commonly voiced fear that easing pressure will lead to poorer performance, Saint Louis medical school students’ scores on the medical boards exams have actually gone up since the stress reduction strategy was put in place.

Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

At Irvington, it’s too early to gauge the impact of new reforms, but educators see promising signs. Calls to school counselors to help students having emotional episodes in class have dropped from routine to nearly nonexistent. The A.P. class failure rate dropped by half. Irvington students continue to be accepted at respected colleges.

There are lessons to be learned from Irvington’s lead. Working together, parents, educators and students can make small but important changes: instituting everyday homework limits and weekend and holiday homework bans, adding advisory periods for student support and providing students opportunities to show their growth in creative ways beyond conventional tests. Communities across the country — like Gaithersburg, Md., Cadiz, Ky., and New York City — are already taking some of these steps. In place of the race for credentials, local teams are working to cultivate deep learning, integrity, purpose and personal connection. In place of high-stakes childhoods, they are choosing health.

---

Vicki Abeles is the author of “Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation,” and director and producer of the documentaries “Race to Nowhere” and “Beyond Measure.”