4 Shifts Needed to Fix Youth Sports

Fellowship of Christian Athlete staff member Gary Warner said that “If our goal is to produce skilled professionals and Olympic champions at the expense of play and fun, youth league sports are on target. If our goal is to produce a nation of playing, active, sport-involved-people-for-a-lifetime, then the youth sport concept needs overhauling.”  

Warner is right. As my kids have entered the fray of youth sports over the last six years, I have had a front-row seat to the hysteria. And that’s not to say I see it in everyone else, which I do. But I also see it in myself. 

Just about everything that frustrates me about youth sports can be witnessed if the iPhone was pointed toward me, watching and coaching from the sidelines.

I am absolutely part of the problem.

But I’m also trying to be part of the solution. 

That quote from Gary Warner just a few sentences above this was written in 1979. Over 40 years ago youth sports were broken. The fractured system remains today, growing faster than ever—driving parents crazy and kids away from the sports they once loved to play. 

Today, the estimated value of the youth sports industry is over $20 billion. That’s more than the entire National Football League. While an overhaul is needed, with money like that on the line, it would be naive to think it’s coming anytime soon.

So, how do we begin to redeem youth sports for the sake of our kids, our sanity, and God’s glory? 

It starts with us as parents and coaches. There are 4 shifts that we can start making today to best position our kids to thrive and lay a healthy long-term foundation for their relationship with sport. 

A shift from driving to riding

It’s amazing how much time we spend driving our kids to practice, games, and even private coaching sessions. On many occasions, we’re flying our kids to national competitions all over the country. 

How many of us are metaphorically driving our kids as well? That is to say, do our kids really want to play and improve, or are we the one’s wanting it for them? 

I’ve spent enough time in sports ministry working with college athletes who are burned out from playing their sport and can trace their frustrations back to well-intentioned parents who pushed (or drove) a little too hard. 

I also feel it inside me as a parent of a kid who is above average at sports. I’m trying to keep the voice inside my head from becoming audible words to my son.

“If you just practiced a little more you could be so much better.”

“What if you just focused on wrestling this year instead of basketball?”

“If you gave all your effort towards one sport, you could really excel even more.”

The shift that needs to happen is this: our kids need to drive the bus of their youth sports experience and we need to be the passenger helping with directions. To clarify, we still get to be parents. This is not giving full control to our kids. That’s not wise. This is giving them appropriate ownership. It’s asking questions like:

“Do you want to play sports this fall?” 

“Is there a different sport you want to try this spring?”

“Would you like someone else to coach your team this year besides me?”

You may be surprised by their answer. 

In his book, Do Hard Things, sports psychologist Steve Magness talks about the power of choice in developing toughness: “Whether on the athletic fields or in the workplace, if your goal is to train toughness, you have to give people a degree of autonomy.”

He goes on to talk about the power of choice in sports: “By putting the athletes in a position to choose—whether to speed up, slow down, lift another rep, or call it a day—we can take advantage of the power of choice. When we put people in a position to choose, we can ‘switch on’ and train their prefrontal cortex, allowing them to understand and regulate the sensations of pain, fatigue, and anxiety that often come with such difficult moments. We allow them to try, adjust, perhaps even fail, but above all, learn.”

In our attempt to coach our kids towards toughness and skill, we need to shift our approach. By giving them more autonomy, we allow them to drive their experience—and build in themselves an internal motivation to activate on their goals, instead of the ones we set for them. 

Practical action steps 

I tried this shift during the first week of coaching my son’s middle school football team this fall. At the end of the first practice, I had the team circle up and I asked them “What are your goals for the year? What are you hoping to experience and accomplish?” The answers were fairly predictable: get better, make friends, win, and “blow somebody up.” After they were done, I looked at them and said “Our job as coaches is to help you reach your goals. So everything we do in practice moving forward is to help you get better, make friends, win games, and knock some people on their butts. Sound good?”

And then the rest of the year, when practices got hard, we reminded them of their goal. 

As a coach, this is something worth trying out because it also holds you accountable to their goals, not yours. As a parent, while you can’t control practice, you can still ask the question and then remember their goal throughout the season as you cheer them on. If their only goal is to make friends, the car ride home after practice or a game should not center around what they did well or poorly, but who they interacted with and who they encouraged.

Knowing their goals allows us to sit in the passenger seat, ask appropriate questions, and allow them to drive to the destination of their choice. 

A shift from stats to sonship

With 5 seconds left to play in a game a couple of seasons ago, our team was down by a touchdown. The ball was at midfield. What other play is there than to chuck it deep and hope for the best? My boy sprinted past his defender and waited for his cousin to throw it his way at the 30-yard line. Because this is youth football, the ball travels about 20 yards in the air. Nowhere close to the end zone. 

The ball made its way to Hudson, hit him right in the helmet, and bounced right into the hands of a nearby defender. Interception. Game over.

I walked over to him after the whistle blows to find him in tears. This isn’t abnormal. I did the same thing when I was his age. But the loss wasn’t why he was upset.

“What’s wrong buddy? You played great!”

“Derrick is being a butthead,” Hudson tells me through his tears.

“Why?”

“He just told me it’s my fault we lost the game.” 

My heart sank. How do you respond as a dad at this moment? Hopefully better than I did.

“Buddy you did not lose the game for your team. You made more plays than Derrick. Did he make any tackles? Did he catch any passes? No, he didn’t. But you did! If anyone lost that game, it was Derrick.”

Not my finest moment. 

Now, I wasn’t vicious toward Hudson’s teammate. But my response was anything but helpful—or biblical. 

I affirmed my son’s worth by comparing him to someone he played better than on that particular day. 

Hudson was wounded by the words of a teammate and my band-aid for the situation was to essentially say, “Don’t worry about it, you’re better than him. Just look at the stat sheet.”

Will this interaction ruin Hudson’s life? Of course not. It actually made him feel better momentarily. But if I continue to layer interactions like that on top of one another, I’m teaching him a dangerous lesson: that his identity is measured primarily by how he stacks up against those around him—that his worth is found by comparing his stats.

Our job as parents is to help our kids understand that their worth is not measured by us comparing them to someone else. It’s not something that can be earned. It’s a birthright. It’s a love that’s freely given. It’s grace. 

We don’t want our kids running around as adults still trying to win our approval through performance. Our kids need to play youth sports from love, not for it. 

Beyond that, our kids' view of God is initially shaped by how they experience us as parents. If we prioritize comparison instead of grace when it comes to their performance, their view of God could take on a similar flavor. That makes for a dangerous cocktail of bad theology and bad parenting. 

With the prevalence of social media reinforcing a comparison-type model to our kids, youth sports have the potential to compound the problem. But they can also be the antidote if we show renewed intentionality as parents and coaches in this area.

Practical action steps

If I could have a do-over with my son at the end of the game, here is how I would want it to go:

“Look at me, buddy. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he is acting like a butthead for saying that (let’s be honest, I’m not perfect). Football is a team sport and one person cannot lose the game for their team. I loved watching you play today. I’m so proud of you. Who’s opinion are you going to listen to? Mine or Derrick’s?”

What I should have done is draw his attention back to his dad’s opinion of him. What our kids need to hear from us over and over and over again is how much we love them and how proud we are of them—not how happy we are that they played better than someone else or amassed an insane amount of stats. 

At that moment, what I wanted was to protect my boy’s heart. But the best form of protection for him should not have been the comparison game. It should’ve been his dad telling him that my opinion matters most and that I think the world of him and I’m proud of him. It should have been me reaffirming to him that I loved watching him play and give his best effort. 

We have the opportunity to reaffirm a grace-based love and positional self-worth (not performance based) for our kids as our sons and daughters. After each practice and game, they are looking at us and asking questions (without actually asking them) like “Do you love me? Am I enough? Am I worthy?” 

And the shift we need to make is communicating yes, we do love them, because they are our sons and daughters—and that’s enough. 

Luckily, God gives me (and us) grace to do it better next time. 

Because there will be plenty of buttheads like Derrick in our kids’ life.

A shift from performance to play

What is the role of play within the culture of youth sports? Is there still room for it or have we drifted so far towards a model dependent on high level structure and a brand-vibe the bleeds “elite” that we refuse to place value on the idea of fun for our kids?

I would argue we have not only drifted toward the elite model but maybe that’s always been our default as parents. In the 1970s, sports psychologist Dr. Thomas Tutko noted that “Children use play as one way of growing up, of ‘trying out’ life on their own level, at their own pace, among their peers. Play is necessary for their development and should have a serious place in society. Instead, adults have taken over children’s play, as if to say that unstructured, unorganized sandlot games are no longer possible or important in today’s society.”

Adults have taken over children’s play. That part stung.

Last summer we had six boys over at our house for the afternoon. They started playing a basketball game on our court. Within twenty minutes, a couple of us parents made our way to the court and started coaching each team, calling fouls, and shouting words of “encouragement.” What started as play morphed into a heated competition that ended in unnecessary intensity and tears. What started as fun was ruined within a matter of minutes.

All because us adults got involved.

Dr. Tutko goes on to explain that “Learning to compete has merit, since one finds himself competing most of his life, either with others or within himself. But adults have a common misconception: that children will not compete unless they are around to take over and show them how. Given free time, they love to get into some kind of activity; they do it naturally.”

There is a lot of nuance to this part of the youth sports conversation. I understand the complexity involved. But for the sake of making a point, I will contrast the far ends of each spectrum, pitting play versus performance against one another. 

Play versus performance. 3,2,1…go.

When our kids play, wins and losses matter, but they are not ultimate.

When our kids perform, a win or loss becomes an extension of their identity.

When our kids play, laughing is encouraged.

When our kids perform, seriousness is encouraged.

When our kids play, they work out fouls and penalties on their own, together.

When our kids perform, they rely on third parties, like refs, and complain when calls don’t go their way. 

When our kids play, sports become a conduit for friendship.

When our kids perform, sports become a conduit for rivalry.

When our kids play, when the final whistle blows, they move on to the next activity.

When our kids perform, when the game ends, they marinate in the outcome for hours.

When our kids play, the hours before practice can be spent running around and tiring themselves out.

When our kids perform, the hours before practice need to be spent resting up and getting ready.

When our kids play, we ask “Did you have fun?”

When our kids perform, we ask “How did you do?”

Ok, so what does this shift look like? Do we just stop encouraging competition and move away from organized youth sports altogether? That’s not what I am proposing. There’s a healthy tension that exists between performing and playing. Our job is to know our kids well enough to help them live in that tension. But it also means knowing ourselves too.

We need a growing self-awareness of how much we are involving ourselves in their athletic lives. When we go play catch with them in the yard and we notice that their throwing motion could improve, do we make the suggestion or just play with them and take care of that stuff at practice? If they are playing with friends the night before a game, are we worried they will tire themselves out and be at less than 100% for tomorrow’s competition? 

The prioritization of play has more to do with us than our kids. Their default is to desire play. Our default is a desire to organize that play into something bigger and “better.”

Practical action steps

When they are at home, don’t interrupt their games unless they are asking for your help. Even then, I would argue erroring on the side of letting them figure it out.

If you are a coach, consider allowing your team to mess around for the first few minutes before and after practice. In past years, for both basketball and football, I have encouraged the teams I coach to line up and start with drills right away. Let’s not waste anytime!

This past fall, we gave the team a little space at the beginning of football practice to mess around and they actually created their own unique game. Kids started showing up earlier so they could play it longer. They would ask to play it after practice. As coaches, allowing some margin to not be so serious and organized turned into one of the highlights of the year for the kids. 

Coaches, it’s ok to let the kids mess around and take half-court shots before practice. It’s ok to let them invent games instead of focusing on the fundamentals the second practice starts. One of the goals of youth sports is to put the kids in an environment where they want to come back and play again the next year. 

Maybe they’ll do so because you taught them how to make a left-handed layup. But more than likely, it will be because you let them mess around, laugh with friends, and chuck half-court shots that almost hit their unsuspecting teammates under the basket.

A shift from enraged to enjoying

It’s ok for kids to laugh in sports.

It’s ok for parents, coaching, and refs to laugh. There should be an aspect of sport, especially at the youth level, that embraces a posture of joy. Maybe said differently: we don’t have to be so freaking serious all the time. 

Again, I am part of the problem.

Last year one of our kids dove for a first down and the referee spotted him short. The opposing team took over possession because of the missed call. Instead of giving the referee grace, I chose to yell at him. I lashed out. I even showed him my phone and asked him to come and look at the video replay since I recorded that particular play. 

I got caught up in the moment and made a mistake. But I am not the one that suffers for it. It’s the kids next to me that see an outburst like that and begin chirping back at the referee…just like the coach. 

At a recent 5th-grade girls basketball game in my hometown, the refs decided to swallow their whistles and let the girls play a more physical brand of basketball. The parents started screaming. The coaches started screaming. “Foul! What are you doing?! Did you see that?!” 

As the intensity increased, can you guess who chimed in? The 5th-grade girls on both sides. They mirrored the emotion of the adults around them, leading two of the girls to start throwing punches at each other. 

We (the adults) care too much about winning. A missed call against our kids is internalized as an act of intentional injustice and we respond accordingly. Winning is important. It’s not the only reason to play a game. But what makes sports fun to watch and play are two teams trying their best towards the same end. The problem is when we (again, the adults) put an inordinate amount of pressure on our kids to win. 

In his book (again, from 1979!) Gary Warner talks about the dangers of pressuring kids to prioritize winning above all else:

“In a well-known experiment, social psychologist Dr. Musafer Sherif took a group of eleven-year-old boys to an isolated camp at Robber’s Cave, Oklahoma, and split them into two groups to compete every day at baseball, football, and tug-of-war. He followed the philosophy that winning is the only thing. He discovered that although adults might be able to operate under that kind of system, children couldn't. Friendly competition became hostility—first with minor jostling, then shoving and cursing, then outright fights among former friends. To restore harmony, Sherif introduced cooperative competition by having the pipe bringing water to camp turned off and announcing a water crisis. Both groups volunteered to search for the turned-off valve, and they had water in a few hours. After several other joint endeavors, the hostility was replaced by friendship. Sherif's conclusion was that competition is not inherently antagonistic to human behavior, but pressure to win can override natural tendencies.”

Fascinating.

In a controlled environment, when taught that winning is everything, chaos ensued. Today, youth sports is a well-oiled, money-making machine. Travel teams. National championships. Elite teams. Professional coaches. And what does this win-at-all-cost ($20 billion industry) mentality produce? Enraged behavior from parents, coaches, and kids on both teams. 

When winning is all that matters, and you are losing—the rational response is losing your composure. 

I’m not suggesting that the shift we need to make is to just laugh it off or laugh at it in general. I’m arguing that we rediscover the joy of sport by not taking it so seriously. What our kids need from us—and what we need from ourselves, is to enjoy watching our kids play without stressing out about the outcome or worrying about them getting a college scholarship when they’re only nine-years-old. Let me paint a picture of what this shift could look like.

We show up at the Saturday morning game and take our seats in the stands or on the sidelines. We put our phones away and introduce ourselves to the parents we don’t know and ask about which kid is theirs. We remember their names. When their kid does something well, we celebrate with them. When our kid does something well, we celebrate appropriately. When the ref makes a bad call, we stay silent. When our kid needs to run faster, pass more, shoot, steal, or whatever, we stay silent. We let the coach do the coaching. We watch, cheer, and enjoy seeing our kid PLAY. And when they get in the van for the ride home, we turn to them and say “I love you. I’m so proud of you. I loved watching you play today.” 

And they will believe what we say is true because our actions and words during the game back up what we tell them on the ride home. 

What if we all collectively released the pressure we put on ourselves for our kids to be the best and tried with all our might to just enjoy the experience of them playing sports? I think we’d see restored joy as parents and our kids would feel the freedom to compete without the added pressure placed on them.

Practical action steps

Here’s another thing I did this fall that I think paid huge dividends for my kids and my own soul in this area—and I've shared enough of my bad moments for you to realize I don’t have all the answers.

Before each game, even the ones I wasn’t coaching, I would find the referees and talk to them. I’d ask their names, how many games they were reffing that day, and thank them in advance for serving our kids. I didn’t do this to “get more calls for my kid.” I did it because it humanized them—for me. So, when the game started and they made calls I didn’t agree with, I was able to catch myself from yelling something I would later regret because I knew Tom had already refereed 4 games today and has 3 more after this. He’s tired. He cares, but he is also making $10 an hour so he’s not invested in this like I would want him to be. And that’s ok. But without meeting him and talking to him, I know my tendency defaults to dehumanizing him whenever he makes a call that doesn’t go my way.  

As a coach this year, I had my team find the referees after the game and thank them for reffing. Again, as adults, kids will mirror our actions. If they see me enraged at the refs, they will follow suit. But if they see us treating others with honor and respect, guess what they will do? One of the highlights of the year was seeing the referees look of surprise as an entire team chased them down to shake their hands. Knowing my team is going to do that also holds me accountable during the game from being a jerk.

One last tip in this area. We teach college athletes all the time to have a focal point. It’s something that will help draw their attention back to God during practice and competition. It’s easy to forget about God when the whistle blows so we help train them to write something on their wrist or shoe, or use a tattoo. When they see the words or markings, it’s supposed to remind them to use sport as an avenue of worship to God. 

You can do the same thing as a parent. If you know your tendency to become enraged, maybe wear a rubber band or hold something in your hand during your kid’s game. And every time you notice it, rehearse to yourself “This is just a game. Enjoy it. My kid will not play forever. Enjoy it while you can. Breathe.” 

Focal points help redirect our attention back to what matters most.

There’s more shifts

If you made it all the way through, good work. That’s 4,000 words about youth sports. I actually have 6 more shifts that I think need to be made but decided this was enough for now. If this encouraged and challenged you—and you want more shifts to consider, let me know. I want what I write to ultimately serve you, not me.