PROJECT PLAY SUMMIT 2020 | DAY 4
Bestselling author Michael Lewis was obsessed with his daughter Dixie’s travel softball experience. He knows the exact number of games she played (1,610) as it took them from their home in Berkley, California, to tournaments in Portland, Denver, Las Vegas, Orlando, Boston, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Dixie spent 27 nights in hotel rooms in Irvine, California in one year, and became an A list member of Southwest Airlines.
Lewis reflected on their adventures at the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Summit 2020, a day after Amazon Audible released his latest project, the audiobook Playing to Win. “If all you knew about her was her itinerary, you might guess that she was an overworked salesperson for a midsized American company based on the West Coast, but a company with peculiar national ambitions,” Lewis said
Lewis studies markets while writing books like The Blind Side (the value of the left tackle in pro football), Moneyball (how the Oakland A’s used data analytics to change baseball scouting), and The Big Short (the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble during the early 2000s). Those markets differ from what he experienced in travel sports.
“There’s no way for a parent to navigate this,” Lewis said. “It’s a market that’s broken is what it is. It’s a market for lemons.”
Lewis witnessed obsessive parents screaming at coaches and umpires while forking over $20,000 to $30,000 in the chase for a scarce resource – a college athletic scholarship, or less often spoken publicly, preferential admission to an elite university as an athlete. “If they just took the money that they were spending on their kids’ athletic career and put it in 529 plans, they would come out so far ahead than where they come up with a partial scholarship to play in college,” Lewis said.
But Lewis believes the chase for the college scholarship is a cover for why parents become so obsessed with travel sports. “What was really going on was this odd sense of ticking the box that I’m being a good parent by diving into this world up to your eyeballs, and this sense that your job as a parent is to help your kid win a brutal competition,” he said.
At the peak of his daughter’s softball career for six to seven years, Lewis estimated he “easily” spent 30 hours a week as her coach, league commissioner and organizer of local travel teams. He devoted as much time to his child’s athletic career as he did his own literary career, even once skipping the chance to spend more time with President Barack Obama because he had to catch a flight home to organize a 10-year-old softball tournament.
“My wife (artist and former MTV host Tabitha Soren) said for a period of time that she thought it actually changed my brain chemicals,” Lewis said. “What she was seeing was a version of me playing sports. It was joyous for me, but it got out of hand.”
There were perks, such as spending lots of time with his daughter. Lewis said the travel sports obsession especially hits dads who, prior to their child playing sports, were not equally involved in parenting.
“I think we’ve got to figure out how do we mitigate the realities of this fragmented environment and try to work more effectively collectively to take some corrective action in advocating for sport at the development level all the way up? That is hard. We have seen some small wins, but I think in the next few years we have an opportunity for big wins. Frankly, we need them."
— Sarah Hirshland, U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee CEO, on how to prevent youth sports participation from collapsing due to COVID-19 as it did after the Great Recession of 2008.
Hirshland said there is more the USOPC and National Governing Bodies can do to create a “system of accountability” that trains coaches through the American Development Model while factoring in the mental and emotional development of youth.
“When the daughter hits age 6 and there’s this thing that I’m uniquely qualified to take 100% of the responsibility for, my wife says, ‘Thank God there’s something, go do it,’” Lewis said. “It becomes this slippery slope. … Pretty soon, the dad’s entire identity becomes wrapped up in how his kid is doing. That was me.”
Those emotions of parents combined with their ignorance about travel sports make the market very difficult to self-correct, Lewis said.
“You can only look at it like a market for addicted drugs,” he said. “The behavior of the consumer is a bit like that – endless supply of anxious parents willing to cough up whatever it takes to give their kids an edge in this hypercompetitive world in a mix of toxic and benign actors. There are really good coaches, there are really bad coaches. There are really horrible travel sports organizations, there are really good travel sports organizations.
“The ability of the consumer – the parent – to sift among them is very weak. When you’re shopping for these organizations, there’s just not a lot of good information. It’s word of mouth, anecdotes, a lot of unreliable stuff. So, the market doesn’t sort the good from the bad because the consumer doesn’t sort the good from the bad. There’s nothing driving out the bad softball organizer or coach and nothing really lifting the really great organizer or coach.”
Lewis said some tournament organizers lie to coaches and families by saying college coaches will attend when they don’t, or organizers bribe coaches to appear without any intention to recruit players. He also quickly discovered that travel sports turn what should be a level playing field into an economic competition. Those who have money are privileged to play.
“Who says it’s OK to force 25 softball teams from the Bay Area to fly to Colorado to play each other and bankrupt families?” Lewis said. “Why does that make sense? Who says it’s OK if you basically weed out all kinds of kids who should be playing but they can’t afford to be playing?”
Lewis isn’t sure what the answers are. He suggests ratings or a seal of approval could drive out the more toxic coaches and tournament organizers. He thinks college coaches could insist on seeing athletes play at high schools so youth without resources can play and be scouted. “Every market that really works is well regulated,” he said.
As for Lewis’ daughter Dixie, she now plays college softball at a Division III school. The journey to get there “was fun in the way that professional sports are fun for the people who play them,” Lewis said. “It was much more like a business.”
NCAA official: Many Division III colleges may not survive pandemic
“I remember specifically my mom stressing about the costs of (club soccer) for my older brother to play. I didn’t play on the club because there was no way for both of us to be doing that. … Just that alone can discourage tons of kids who may want to play. They could excel at soccer, but if their club team in their area is very competitive, they’re not ever going to get to that level."
— Eric Kendricks, Minnesota Vikings NFL player, on what leveling the playing field means to him
Forget for a moment about the financial impact that the pandemic is having on athletic departments, such the NCAA cutting revenue distribution to schools by more than 70% after the Final Four was cancelled last spring. “We’re probably at a place where 20% to 30% of Division III schools may not survive the pandemic, and that’s a whole other thing we need to think seriously about,” NCAA Chief Medical Officer Brian Hainline said. “At the D3 level, 25% to 50% of students are actually student-athletes. That’s very different than say a D1 school at Ohio State with 50,000 students and maybe only 700 athletes.”
Hainline said that American society has not reopened properly since there’s still no quality national contact tracing and testing. “What’s happened is those with more money have carried things out because they can afford what testing is available, and those without are struggling,” he said.
Colleges have cut hundreds of athletic programs during COVID-19, moving some to club status. As Tom Farrey noted this week in the New York Times, “Since April, more than 250 teams in about two dozen sports have been eliminated across collegiate sports, including all three N.C.A.A. divisions, affecting schools like Minnesota, Iowa, Dartmouth and Connecticut. To keep some nonrevenue sports from being cut, Hainline said they must become financially independent, perhaps through relationships with each sport’s national governing body. For instance, Hainline wonders if college tennis could become financially sustainable by incorporating year-round, community-based tennis through partnerships with the U.S. Tennis Association and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
“Most of the financial projections – and it’s not just for the NCAA, it’s for schools, it’s for theater – is that things will probably start turning around in 2023,” Hainline said. “That seems like a long way away and it really is. But as a society we’re going to be struggling to keep up over the next couple years.”
Why the U.S. needs a Children’s Rights in Sport document
Over the next year, Project Play will create a Children’s Rights in Sport statement, in partnership with University of Baltimore School of Law professor Dionne Koller and Athletes for Hope, a nonprofit that assists pro athletes in their efforts to engage community and charitable causes. The idea is that play is a human right every child is born with, a concept recognized in Project Play’s platform for action.
“One of my biggest fears of the Paralympic movement slowly but surely growing is that it will become less of the differently-abled Olympics and more of the privileged Olympics. … These prosthetics are insanely expensive, and when you’re a child developing in sport, you need a prosthetic at least once a year. We don’t have a lot of good access to pediatric prosthetic sports-specific care. There’s going to be a lot of hidden talent that never gets an opportunity because they don’t have the access to equipment to even try."
— Lacey Henderson, U.S. Paralympian, on access issues for youth with disabilities
The United States is a rare country in the Olympic movement that lacks guiding principles on what sport should be. Youth sports here is largely left to the private sector, which has created great opportunities for elite athletes but also sidelined millions of kids while not meeting public health interests. Koller said a Children’s Rights in Sport document could focus on three features:
Inclusiveness: Establish principles that provide participation for all kids. Sports should be about having fun, especially at younger ages.
Responsiveness: Pay attention to what kids tell us about sports, such as which ones they play and why. Take into account that it’s their bodies and minds playing sports, so include kids in the design process of their experience.
Clarity: Set values, best practices and benchmarks on what youth sports programs should be about. “It stuns me whenever I give a talk about youth sports, I have parents say, ‘Wait, they can do that? Is that true? That’s not the law? No government agency is paying attention?’” Koller said. “The answer is no. We need a lot of clarity around these programs.”
Announcements and Actions
“I notice that when I played overseas different countries have a set of rules or bill of rights of how much training they want their kids to participate and safety protocols. We don’t necessarily have that here in the U.S."
— Kayla Alexander, Minnesota Lynx WNBA player, on the value of a Children’s Rights in Sport document
A Long Talk, which facilitated the workshop on How to Talk about Race in Team Settings, extended an offer to registrants of the Project Play Summit to continue its anti-racism teachings in a free workshop it will host next week. Click here to learn more.
Project Play announced a partnership with The Association for International Sport for All (TAFISA), the world’s umbrella organization for Sport for All efforts. TAFISA will share Project Play’s knowledge and tools with its 360 members in 170 countries, and Project Play will help bring TAFISA’s expertise to North America.
“The challenges ahead of us are so huge and so complex that we love to join forces,” said Wolfbang Baumann TAFISA secretary general. “With the Aspen Institute, we believe we have just the right lead partner for various activities and a very strong hold in North America and beyond.”
Project Play México at Aspen Institute México, one of the Aspen Institute international affiliates that has launched domestic initiatives modeled on Project Play, has formed a partnership with AS México to convey to society the importance of physical activity and sports in children in Mexico. AS México, one of the largest sports media outlets in the country, will join the Project Play México technical committee as the organization’s media partner, promoting Project Play México’s webinars, messages, and athlete supporters.
Aspen Romania is releasing a video series of exercises that parents can use to introduce children to 12 Olympic sports. The materials build on a commitment announced last month by Aspen Romania and the country’s Olympic committee, and ministries of education, youth and sports to make physical literacy an official national priority. At the Bucharest Forum, Sports & Society Program Executive Director Tom Farrey joined the ministers and Olympic committee president to discuss the progress. View some of the videos below.
Call for Leadership — Recognize the Right of Every Child to Play
In a Zoom room co-hosted with the PLAY Sports Coalition, more than 80 leaders discussed opportunities to Recognize the Right of Every Child to Play, one of the four areas of opportunity elevated in Project Play’s platform for action. In a live poll, 31% participants identified the following sector as the one they would most want to deploy the Children’s Rights in Sport framework:
Policymakers & Civic Leaders: Appreciate the mountain of evidence that now documents the myriad benefits that flow to children whose bodies are in motion and to communities which invest in sport and recreation activity. Then, develop policies that recognize the right of children to participate, with that right framed to encourage alignment with youth needs without inviting additional liability risk for providers. Draw lessons from countries that have articulated the values, principles and provisions to guide the sport activities of children through age 12 and reaped the rewards throughout its sport ecosystem and society.
Near-equal enthusiasm (26%) was shown for Community Recreation Groups and National Sport Organizations (21%) for deploying a Children’s Rights in Sports framework, as a tool to create programming that respects the needs of children. Participants spoke of the value of such a document being used to speak to policymakers, sport providers, public health authorities and others and as a “rallying cry” to grow access to quality sport and unlock investments.
Eli Wolff, who directs the Sport and Development Project at Brown University, highlighted groups around the world that have developed frameworks and statements of rights that can be drawn upon as the Aspen Institute begins its work. Jeremy Goldberg, steering committee member for the PLAY Sports Coalition, said the coalition will explore ways to use the document to advocate for its adoption with policymakers.
“One important element of a Children's Rights in Sports (statment) is codifying the inherent benefits of sport, play and physical activity for human development — going beyond seeing sport as something related to just wins and losses."
— Jeffrey Levine, assistant clinical professor, Drexel University