Please click on the book cover to pre-order. The New York Times recently ran a front-page story on how youth sports in America has become a $60 billion dollar industry and followed with a survey of young athletes who almost uniformly said that pay-to-play has become pay-too-much-to-play.
It stands to reason that the pressures being applied to young athletes--and I mean young as in early grammar-school age--by for-profit business has become considerable. The issue is an underlying narrative in my forthcoming middle-grade readers novel, "The Goal of the Game," which publishes December 16.
Where and why did this all begin? I don't exactly know but I do remember when it hit me that the commercialization of kids was underway.
It stands to reason that the pressures being applied to young athletes--and I mean young as in early grammar-school age--by for-profit business has become considerable. The issue is an underlying narrative in my forthcoming middle-grade readers novel, "The Goal of the Game," which publishes December 16.
Where and why did this all begin? I don't exactly know but I do remember when it hit me that the commercialization of kids was underway.
In 2002, a year after an overage pitcher named Danny Almonte from a Bronx team rocked the Little League World Series, I wrote a column in the Times about the wildly expanded television coverage by ESPN and regional networks of Little League Baseball. The question I raised: was television, for programming and profit's sake, celebrating kids, or exploiting them?
Old enough to remember when the L.L.W.S championship game was a sweet one-day spectacle on ABC's Wide World of Sports, I asked Stephen D. Keener, then president and chief executive of LLB. Here's what he said:
Old enough to remember when the L.L.W.S championship game was a sweet one-day spectacle on ABC's Wide World of Sports, I asked Stephen D. Keener, then president and chief executive of LLB. Here's what he said:
''It is a fair question, how far to go with television coverage,' If we were doing it solely for financial gain, I might agree with the criticism. We have a confidentiality agreement with the network -- I don't know why, it's not a lot of money, several thousand per game. We just view the TV coverage as a way to let people see the Little League program, understand it better.''
Fair enough. But then I called Dr. Darrell Burnett, a clinical psychologist in Southern California, specializing in youth sports. Here is what he said:
''The exposure can be very dangerous at that age level. Kids being put on national television like that, scrutinized, interviewed -- how can you expect them to process the positive aspects of youth sports when the adults are all into: Who won?
''No question, some of the kids will thrive under that pressure, but televising these games plays right into the end-product mentality that has overrun youth sports. These kids are being pushed so hard at such young ages to make it to the nationals, to get onto ESPN, that by 13 or 14, many have the attitude 'Been there, done that.' I can't tell you how many kids are dragged into my office by parents who say, 'I need you to motivate my child.' ''
He said he had treated a teenage football player who blew out his knee and tried to commit suicide, a golf prodigy who quit by telling his father, ''It's your game, not mine.'' Burnett's point was that it is not necessarily the television images that will do the damage; it is the growing obsession with just making it in front of the camera.
That was a quarter-century ago. Good or bad or both, the message from the boardroom was clear--there was money to be made, big money, in youth sports. Now it has escalated to what many believe is much too counter-productive to the early development of body and mind, not to mention the finances of families being tempted to get their kids on board before the ship sails to the land of Division I scholarship, or to professional riches.
The question resounds more than ever: Celebration or exploitation?
That was a quarter-century ago. Good or bad or both, the message from the boardroom was clear--there was money to be made, big money, in youth sports. Now it has escalated to what many believe is much too counter-productive to the early development of body and mind, not to mention the finances of families being tempted to get their kids on board before the ship sails to the land of Division I scholarship, or to professional riches.
The question resounds more than ever: Celebration or exploitation?
