Parents Ruining Youth Sports

The competitiveness in youth sports is growing to an insane level, and it’s rarely between the kids. The amount of screaming, verbal attacks, and offensive behavior from parents at youth sports events when I played is still burned into my memory.  My parent’s joke that what started off as CCG, a.k.a. Cal’s College Fund, slowly turned into Cal’s Counseling Fund from all the stress of youth sports and they still laugh about it today.

Naturally, every parent believes that their kid is the best on the field and they should be treated as so.  Looking back I can see how most of the parents read the statistics on how many kids go play D1 after high school and how much money parents pay to give their son or daughter a chance at the next level.

were trying to live their unfulfilled sports life through their kids. If they weren't living vicariously through the youth they were already certain that their precious child was going to be earning that big sports scholarship. Apparently these parents haven’t

They say championships are every athletes dream. However, I don’t find this applicable to the average nine year old running around on the soccer field. Children are there for the love of the game, and the game should return to the original purity that made each individual sport great to begin with. There are plenty of reason to not overrun children with sports from a young age.

As joked about earlier, the psychological effects on children from the drama and hype of sports at a young age is a real game changer.  Many kids end up being crushed from the pressure never to return, others feel like sports becomes a job except they don’t have the option of quitting. Negative physical effects are also a dangerous partof youth sports. It’s common for talented but young athletes have to leave the game due to injuries from overuse before high school. It’s even more common for kids that make it to college or professional arenas to have serious health problems only in their 20’s.

Instead of pressuring children to perform to our expectations, maybe it’s time we sit back and watch what we all originally loved about the game to begin with.