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Friday Night Tykes: Meet the Junior Broncos

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Mayo Clinic Minute: What are the health benefits when kids play sports?

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Mayo Clinic Minute: What are the health benefits when kids play sports?

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Mayo Clinic Minute: What are the health benefits when kids play sports?

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Psychological and Social Benefits of Sports for Kids

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The Benefits Of Competitive Sports For Kids - Natalie Hawkins

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Youth Sports: The Good, Bad, and Ugly | Harlan Banks & Anay Nagarajan | TEDxSaintFrancisHS

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What Role Do Sports Play in the Mental Health of Children? - Child Mind Institute

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Kids who play sports have fewer emotional and behavioral problems and are less likely to do drugs or have bad body image.

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Negative Effects of Youth Sports on Mental Health

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Potentially negative mental health outcomes of youth sports and where to get help, courtesy of Kindbridge Behavioral Health Services.

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The Good and Bad of Youth Athletics on Your Child’s Mental Health - Mission Harbor Behavioral Health

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Youth sports come with many benefits, and recent studies show that sports participation has a positive effect on wellbeing, as long as a child’s maturity level is considered, and their training load is appropriate for…

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By Michael Klinkner, Licensed Clinical Social Worker

As parents, we know organized sports are a great way for kids to stay active and decrease their risk for obesity. There are also distinct benefits to getting your kids involved in sports like increasing cardiovascular exercise, improving coordination and balance, cooperating with teammates and following instructions, just to name a few.

But did you know playing sports has significant mental health benefits, too?

Here are a few psychological benefits of playing youth sports:

Sports are a positive outlet for kids struggling with anxiety, depression and other behavioral problems. When kids swim, run, shoot hoops or dance, they're naturally stimulating chemicals in their bodies like endorphins, which help improve mood. Being active also reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Win-win.

Sports help kids with the ability to receive constructive criticism and get better at difficult tasks. Research suggests that children who engage in athletics become adults who are better equipped to handle critique and stress. Playing sports can help build internal resources that will benefit kids well into adulthood.

Sports can help a child develop a good work ethic. Sports require sustained effort and commitment. Your child can learn the more effort they dedicate to a sport, the better they become at the activity. Perseverance is a lesson that will serve them very well their whole lives.

Joining a sports team of any kind helps kids cultivate relationships and participate in social activities. Participating in properly structured programs can provide a safe and nurturing environment for children and teens and instill a sense of community.

Combining sports, school and social obligations requires an ability to self-regulate and manage time. Getting to practice with everything they need, organizing their day to get their homework done and maintaining a social life can lead to very busy days. But this helps active kids and teens learn how to schedule, manage stress and avoid getting overwhelmed.

There are also some concerns about playing competitive youth sports that parents should keep in mind. While these things should not deter you from signing your child up for the next t-ball season, they are things you should address with your athlete, coach and co-parent.

Things to keep in mind when a child is playing a sport:

Self-esteem can mistakenly be tied to winning. It's important to teach your child the outcome of the game or competition is not what's important; it's about the effort they put in and having a positive attitude - win or lose.

A great coach can do wonders for a child's development but a terrible coach can do plenty of damage. Be sure to check with your child about their experiences with their coaches. If your child is having a rough season with a coach, use it as a teachable moment about the importance of advocating for themselves.

As parents, we need to avoid placing inappropriate pressure to perform on our children with the hopes they will get a college scholarship. Very few athletes receive scholarships to any level of college athletics. Help your child - and the influencers around them - keep in mind that they are not participating in sports with the sole intention of receiving a scholarship.

Remember, above all else, sports are supposed to be fun. When athletics stop bringing joy, they have the potential to hurt your child. Keep yourself and your child's wellbeing in mind and work towards building memories that can last a long time.

Michael Klinkner is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who specializes in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Neurolinguistic Programming. He is also certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Klinkner provides individual, group and family therapy to children, adolescents and adults in Central Phoenix and Gilbert, Ariz. Klinkner focuses on treating a variety of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, trauma and ADHD. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/michaelklinknercounseling/ or https://instagram.com/michael_klinknercounseling

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5 Mental Health Benefits of Youth Sports - Raising Arizona Kids Magazine

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By Michael Klinkner, Licensed Clinical Social Worker As parents, we know organized sports are a great way for kids to stay active and decrease their risk for obesity.

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As autumn and a new high school sports season approaches, many pediatricians are seeing athletes in clinic or at community events for their preparticipation physical exams, or sports physicals. The PPE is an important time for pediatricians to address some of the unique aspects of athlete mental health with families, as the medical form includes the PHQ-4 to screen for anxiety and depression.

Youth athletes are likely to experience several well-documented mental health benefits due to their participation in sports, but athletes are not immune to mental health challenges. It is important to routinely screen for common mental health concerns, including depression and anxiety, among youth athletes.

Youth athletes with anxiety or depression may present with different symptoms and concerns. Including targeted and specific questions about an athlete's injury history, performance, training schedule, level of competition, and goals in sport, may be helpful and necessary to understand an athlete's situation or symptoms.

Athletes may be more comfortable describing a performance-related issue, like "getting distracted," when ultimately there may be an underlying mental health concern that is impacting their performance, such as anxiety. Youth athletes, who demonstrate perfectionism, including fear of failure, high external and internal pressures and expectations for performance, pose a greater risk of burning out and developing a mental health concern such as anxiety, depression, eating concerns, and substance misuse. These risks are even greater when an athlete specializes in one sport, engages in more frequent training, and as the level of competition increases.

"An athlete whose identity is strongly tied to their sport is also at higher risk for developing mental health concerns, especially when experiencing injury."

Injury is also one of the highest risk factors for depression among youth athletes. An athlete whose identity is strongly tied to their sport is also at higher risk for developing mental health concerns, especially when experiencing injury. They can lose their primary sense of self and the dreams, expectations and benefits that go along with their athletic identity.

Imagine taking care of the state-tournament-bound honors student who is sidelined due to prolonged concussion symptoms. It may take a few conversations and visits to understand how much their identity is tied to not only athletic performance, but academics as well. Even though their concussion symptoms will most likely improve with time, the recovery and return to sports process can be overwhelming, so a multidisciplinary approach with short term counseling may be helpful.

While most athletes will screen negative for mental health concerns, when an issue is identified or suspected, it is helpful to have a solid network of mental health providers who specialize in both performance and mental health concerns. This can be a powerful and preventative referral for young athletes, especially those exhibiting or prone to the risk factors noted above. Licensed mental health providers with a specialization in sport and performance psychology are uniquely trained to assess and treat both mental health and performance-related concerns.

An example of this type of provider is a sport psychologist, who is a licensed clinical or counseling psychologist with a specialization in sport and performance psychology. Alternatively, mental strength coaches or mental performance consultants vary widely in their educational backgrounds and training, are focused on identifying and treating performance-related concerns, not mental health concerns, and may refer to a licensed mental health provider if a mental health concern is identified.

Whether during the preparticipation physical exam, a well-child visit, or while taking care of an athlete with an injury or concussion, pediatricians are well positioned to screen for mental health concerns in athletes and help educate patients, families, and their community about some of the unique mental health considerations in athletes.

Resources:

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How We Can Support the Mental Health of Young Athletes

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As teens head back to school and fall sports, we can look out for anxiety and depression.

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Sporty Aussie kids kick goals for mental health

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A study led by University of Queensland researchers has found children who regularly participate in sports from an early age will have better long term mental health.

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On Thin Ice: Competitive Sports & Youth Mental Health | Psychiatric Times

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What will society do to children in order to make them win? What should be sacrificed in the name of competition? How much pressure is too much? And how do we pick up the pieces when young athletes are pushed too far?

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How frequently do sports injuries occur?

In the U.S., about 30 million children and teens participate in some form of organized sports, and more than 3.5 million injuries each year, which cause some loss of time of participation, are experienced by the participants. Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries. By far, the most common injuries are sprains and strains.

Obviously, some sports are more dangerous than others. For example, contact sports such as football can be expected to result in a higher number of injuries than a noncontact sport such as swimming. However, all types of sports have a potential for injury, whether from the trauma of contact with other players or from overuse or misuse of a body part.

The following statistics are from the National SAFE KIDS Campaign and the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Injury rates:

More than 3.5 million children ages 14 and younger get hurt annually playing sports or participating in recreational activities.

Although death from a sports injury is rare, the leading cause of death from a sports-related injury is a brain injury.

Sports and recreational activities contribute to approximately 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries among American children.

Almost 50 percent of head injuries sustained in sports or recreational activities occur during bicycling, skateboarding, or skating incidents.

More than 775,000 children, ages 14 and younger, are treated in hospital emergency rooms for sports-related injuries each year. Most of the injuries occurred as a result of falls, being struck by an object, collisions, and overexertion during unorganized or informal sports activities.

Where and when:

Playground, sports, and bicycle-related injuries occur most often among children between ages 5 and 14 years old.

The highest rates of injury occur in sports that involve contact and collisions.

More severe injuries occur during individual sports and recreational activities.

Most organized sports-related injuries (62 percent) occur during practice.

Types of sports and recreational activities

Consider these estimated injury statistics for 2009 from the Consumer Product Safety Commission:

Basketball. More than 170,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for basketball-related injuries.

Baseball and softball. Nearly 110,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for baseball-related injuries. Baseball also has the highest fatality rate among sports for children ages 5 to 14, with three to four children dying from baseball injuries each year.

Bicycling. More than 200,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for bicycle-related injuries.

Football. Almost 215,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for football-related injuries.

Ice hockey. More than 20,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for ice hockey-related injuries.

In-line and roller skating. More than 47,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for in-line skating-related injuries.

Skateboarding. More than 66,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for skateboarding-related injuries.

Sledding or toboggan. More than 16,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for sledding-related injuries.

Snow skiing or snowboarding. More than 25,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for snow boarding and snow skiing-related injuries.

Soccer. About 88,000 children ages 5 to 14 were treated in hospital emergency rooms for soccer-related injuries.

Trampolines. About 65,000 children ages 14 and under were treated in hospital emergency rooms for trampoline-related injuries.

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default - Stanford Medicine Children's Health

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Stanford Medicine Children's Health Detailed information on sports injuries in children

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After Krista Rickards' daughter Sarah suffered a severe concussion on a high school volleyball court in September 2010, the teenager returned to school in a matter of days. Sarah looked just fine. But she quickly became a regular at the school nurse's office, complaining of dizziness and severe headaches triggered by the noise and chaos of the halls and lunchroom, by overhead projections used in classrooms, and by long days and nights of books and homework.

The nurse in her New Jersey high school would let her lie down for a while but eventually dispatched Sarah back to classes. There, the then-sophomore battled problems with memory and concentration before coming home, exhausted and depressed, and trying to get through homework.

By the end of the school year, Rickards had enlisted the help of a neuropsychologist for her daughter. This was new territory for the administrators at Sarah's high school in Cape May Court House, N.J., but Rickards stood firm. Eventually, they negotiated a raft of accommodations that would exempt Sarah from gym class and give her extra time she needed to take tests and complete her assignments.

But by then, Sarah had suffered several more concussions -- in gym class, on the sidelines of volleyball games, in the school stairwell. Sarah was suffering from what neurologists call post-concussion syndrome and eventually had to be home-schooled before graduating last June.
Study: No helmet brand can save football players from concussion risk
After a child has a concussion -- whether under the Friday-night lights or in a jungle-gym accident -- the return-to-play deliberation has gotten plenty of attention. But there's mounting evidence that returning to the rigors of academic activity too soon also can slow healing and exacerbate symptoms. Yet parents, patients and physicians have gotten scant advice on how to manage a child's return to learning after a concussion.

For the first time, a new report in the journal Pediatrics systematically addresses that deliberation. The report underscores that, for a child with mild traumatic brain injury, the noise and chaos of school hallways, the eye strain of classroom instruction and the mental calisthenics of homework and tests can tax the brain at a time when its energies are needed for healing.

It also acknowledges that giving a student's brain healing time is a challenge for many school administrators. They have had little guidance on the matter and are under intense pressure to show improvements in students' test performance, meet the needs of children with long-term disabilities and fulfill an ever-growing list of demands on schools.

"Schools are very structured places, and are really geared toward the average: Everyone gets the same kinds of curriculum," says Rosemarie Scolaro Moser, a neuropsychologist and director of the Sports Concussion Center of New Jersey in Lawrenceville, N.J. "But every concussion is unique, and each student athlete heals at a different rate. So there's no predictability, and that unknown causes a lot of discomfort when you're a school administrator trying to meet goals, deadlines and objectives in a student's progress."

Among most school administrators, the lingering cognitive symptoms of concussion and the requirements of a healing brain remain unfamiliar ground, the authors of the Pediatrics article write. And among the pediatricians who manage children's recovery from concussion, the specifics of educational law and practice can be foreign. Yet both must work together with children and their families to set limits that will allow the brain to heal.

In most cases, that process of recovery will take a week to three weeks, during which a patient's school time might be limited, homework might be curtailed, and frequent breaks might be tolerated. Administrators might allow a concussed student to move between classes ahead of the noise and confusion after the bell, to waive or reschedule tests, and to let a student eat lunch in a quiet place.

The Pediatrics report offers checklists that parents, physicians and schools can use to identify symptoms that are triggered by school-related activities, and to track them as they resolve.

Brooke de Lench, a youth sports expert who founded the group Mom's Team, said new findings about concussion and its aftermath have begun to find their way to physicians and coaches but are still trickling down to parents and school administrators.

"It usually takes a few years," said de Lench, whose film, " The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer, " is airing this fall on PBS. Patients' families and their doctors are now coming together to help student athletes heal after concussions.

"Now," she said, "the schools really need to get behind this."

That, says Krista Rickards, whose daughter is now a freshman in college, won't be easy, not only because of the competing demands on school administrators, but also because of the nature of concussions.

"As a parent you have to push. I wasn't aggressive, but I was persistent," Rickards said. Once she had clear recomendations from neuropsychologist Moser (authored of "Ahead of the Game: The Parents' Guide to Youth Sports Concussions"), Sarah's school agreed to accommodations, she said.

"It's hard, though, because a concussion is not a seen injury. You can see crutches, you can see a cast, or a wheelchair. You can't see a concussion," she said.
ALSO: Concussions: Even one can change the brain, study finds Football concussions: The smaller hits matter too Study finds concussions common in teens Concussion settlement highlights difficulty of proving brain damage

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Post-concussion return to learning also a tough decision

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After Krista Rickards' daughter Sarah suffered a severe concussion on a high school volleyball court in September 2010, the teenager returned to school in a matter of days. Sarah looked just fine.

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(Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)

Health experts have some bad news for high school football players: There is no particular type or brand of helmet or mouth guard that will keep you relatively safe from a concussion.

The companies that make helmets and mouth guards often claim that their own products can reduce players' risk of a sports-related concussion or lessen the impact of a concussion that does occur. These manufacturers cite "laboratory research" that purports to show one brand is safer than others, and a group of researchers wanted to see if they could verify such claims, according to a summary of a presentation they made Monday at a national meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The research team, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin, tracked 1,332 high school football players from 36 schools during the 2012 season. Participating players completed a preseason questionnaire about their injury history and demographic information. Then, as the season progressed, athletic trainers from the schools kept tabs on the incidence and severity of any concussions that occurred.

At the start of the study, 171 of the players - or 13% - told the researchers that they had experienced a sports-related concussion in the previous 12 months. During the 2012 football season, an additional 116 concussions were sustained by 115 players - 8.6% of the student athletes in the study.
Post-concussion return to learning also a tough decision
When the researchers compared the rates of concussions for each type of helmet, they found essentially no difference by brand or by year made. The rate of concussions for players wearing Riddell helmets (the most popular brand in the study) was 9.5%; while the rate for players wearing Schutt helmets was 8.1% and the rate for players wearing Xenith helmets was 6.7%. There was no statistically significant difference in those figures, the team reported.

Nor was there any difference in the severity of concussions, as measured by the number of days players had to sit out (13.5, on average, for those wearing Riddell and Xenith helmets and 13 for players wearing Schutt helmets).

In addition, the concussion rate for helmets made in 2011 or 2012 was 9.3%, which was statistically indistinguishable from the 7.9% rate for helmets made in 2009 and 2010 or the 8.8% rate for helmets that were even older than that.

There was a surprising safety difference when it came to mouth guards. The data showed that the 39% of players who wore "specialized mouth guards" that were "custom fitted by dental professionals or specifically marketed to reduce" the risk of sports-related concussions were actually 90% more likely to experience a concussion than the 61% of players who used generic mouth guards during the 2012 football season.

The researchers noted that their findings were "contrary to manufacturer claims" that specific equipment could protect football players from concussions, which occur approximately 40,000 times per year among high school players in the U.S.

"Caution is advised when recommending specific preventive equipment based on manufacturer claims of reduced risk," they wrote in the abstract that summarized their findings.

Study leader Dr. Margaret Alison Brooks, an assistant professor in the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said the report should make players think twice about the assertions made by equipment companies.

"Despite what manufacturers might claim, newer and more expensive equipment may not reduce concussion risk," she said in a statement. "So is it worth the significant extra cost to families and schools?"

She also expressed doubt that any type of equipment could make football perfectly safe for players. Properly fitted helmets can reduce the risk of skull fractures and scalp lacerations, she said, but "because the brain is floating freely inside the skull, I think most experts doubt whether it is possible to ever develop a helmet design that can prevent concussion."

If you're interested in the latest medical research, you like the things I write about. Follow me on Twitter and "like" Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.
ALSO: Heads-up for dangerous football hits, athletic trainers warn NFL players' brains at work show early signs of concussions' toll Could NFL concussion questions be solved by fly swatters?

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Study: No helmet brand can save football players from concussion risk

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Health experts have some bad news for high school football players: There is no particular type or brand of helmet or mouth guard that will keep you relatively safe from a concussion.

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Seeds of Innovation: Bringing a Game Changing Helmet to Market

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Any parent knows that young children are filled with energy, eager to run, jump and play. Transferring that natural energy to competitive sports can help keep kids active and healthy as the grow, and other distractions increase that may lead to a more sedentary lifestyle. Competitive sports such as soccer, track, basketball and swimming can also help kids learn important life lessons about teamwork and fair play.

Learning How to Compete

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Participating in sports teaches children and teenagers how to compete in the real world. As they grow older they'll face competition in school, in the workforce and other areas of life. But these competitions don't have to be negative or unhealthy. Playing sports can help kids understand how competition works in a friendly environment, and that if you try your hardest, you have a better chance to succeed.

Understanding the Value of Exercise

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Millions of American children and teenagers are overweight. This obesity epidemic has make the early onset of health problems such as diabetes more common. Participating in competitive youth sports burns calories and helps to prevent obesity. Additionally, many children who are active in sports are motivated to eat healthier foods, such as fruits and vegetables.

Improving Self-Esteem

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Improved self-esteem is another benefit of competitive youth sports. When a child wins a game with his team, he feels accomplished and recognized. Even when he doesn't win, he can learn a valuable lesson: that you can't win every time. Losing with his team can also increase self-esteem, as he learns to hold his head high and feel proud for trying his best.

Decreasing Risky Behavior

According to the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, youth sports can help deter negative behavior, such as joining a gang, because competitive sports provide an outlet for expression, friendship and controlled aggression. Teens who have positive influences and friends feel less of a need to participate in risky behaviors.

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What Are the Benefits of Competitive Sports for Youth?

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Any parent knows that young children are filled with energy, eager to run, jump and play. Transferring that natural energy to competitive sports can help keep kids active and healthy as the grow, and other distractions increase that may lead to a more sedentary lifestyle.

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Dealing With Stress In Sports (for Teens) - Nemours KidsHealth

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The key to keeping calm when playing sports is to develop a healthy attitude and learn to deal with the stress that comes with competing. Here’s how.

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WORKING MOTHER

September 1987

By Alfie Kohn

When it comes to competition, we Americans typically recognize only two legitimate positions: enthusiastic support and qualified support.

The first view holds that the more we immerse our children (and ourselves) in rivalry, the better. Competition builds character and produces excellence. The second stance admits that our society has gotten carried away with the need to be Number One, that we push our kids too hard and too fast to become winners - but insists that competition can be healthy and fun if we keep it in perspective.

I used to be in the second camp. But after investigating the topic for several years, looking at research from psychology, sociology, biology, education, and other fields, I'm now convinced that neither position is correct. Competition is bad news all right, but it's not just that we overdo it or misapply it. The trouble lies with competition itself. The best amount of competition for our children is none at all, and the very phrase "healthy competition" is actually a contradiction in terms.

That may sound extreme if not downright un-American. But some things aren't just bad because they're done to excess; some things are inherently destructive. Competition, which simply means that one person can succeed only if others fail, is one of those things. It's always unnecessary and inappropriate at school, at play, and at home.

Think for a moment about the goals you have for your children. Chances are you want them to develop healthy self-esteem, to accept themselves as basically good people. You want them to become successful, to achieve the excellence of which they're capable. You want them to have loving and supportive relationships. And you want them to enjoy themselves.

These are fine goals. But competition not only isn't necessary for reaching them - it actually undermines them.

Competition is to self-esteem as sugar is to teeth. Most people lose in most competitive encounters, and it's obvious why that causes self-doubt. But even winning doesn't build character; it just lets a child gloat temporarily. Studies have shown that feelings of self-worth become dependent on external sources of evaluation as a result of competition: Your value is defined by what you've done. Worse - you're a good person in proportion to the number of people you've beaten.

In a competitive culture, a child is told that it isn't enough to be good - he must triumph over others. Success comes to be defined as victory, even though these are really two very different things. Even when the child manages to win, the whole affair, psychologically speaking, becomes a vicious circle: The more he competes, the more he needs to compete to feel good about himself.

When I made this point on a talk show on national television, my objections were waved aside by the parents of a seven-year-old tennis champion named Kyle, who appeared on the program with me. Kyle had been used to winning ever since a tennis racket was put in his hands at the age of two. But at the very end of the show, someone in the audience asked him how he felt when he lost. Kyle lowered his head and in a small voice replied, "Ashamed."

This is not to say that children shouldn't learn discipline and tenacity, that they shouldn't be encouraged to succeed or even have a nodding acquaintance with failure. But none of these requires winning and losing - that is, having to beat other children and worry about being beaten. When classrooms and playing fields are based on cooperation rather than competition, children feel better about themselves. They work with others instead of against them, and their self-esteem doesn't depend on winning a spelling bee or a Little League game.

Children succeed in spite of competition, not because of it. Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best work when we're in a race - that without competition we would all become fat, lazy, and mediocre. It's a belief that our society takes on faith. It's also false.

There is good evidence that productivity in the workplace suffers as a result of competition. The research is even more compelling in classroom settings. David Johnson, a professor of social psychology at the University of Minnesota, and his colleagues reviewed all the studies they could find on the subject from 1924 to 1980. Sixty-five of the studies found that children learn better when they work cooperatively as opposed to competitively, eight found the reverse, and 36 found no significant difference. The more complex the learning task, the worse children in a competitive environment fared.

Brandeis University psychologist Teresa Amabile was more interested in creativity. In a study, she asked children to make "silly collages." Some competed for prizes and some didn't. Seven artists then independently rated the kids' work. It turned out that those who were trying to win produced collages that were much less creative - less spontaneous, complex and varied - than the others.

One after another, researchers across the country have concluded that children do not learn better when education is transformed into a competitive struggle. Why? First, competition often makes kids anxious and that interferes with concentration. Second, competition doesn't permit them to share their talents and resources as cooperation does, so they can't learn from one another. Finally, trying to be Number One distracts them from what they're supposed to be learning. It may seem paradoxical, but when a student concentrates on the reward (an A or a gold star or a trophy), she becomes less interested in what she's doing. The result: Performance declines.

Just because forcing children to try to outdo one another is counterproductive doesn't mean they can't keep track of how they're doing. There's no problem with comparing their achievements to an objective standard (how fast they ran, how many questions they got right) or to how they did yesterday or last year. But if we value our children's intellectual development, we need to realize that turning learning into a race simply doesn't work.

Competition is a recipe for hostility. By definition, not everyone can win a contest. If one child wins, another cannot. This means that each child comes to regard others as obstacles to his or her own success. Forget fractions or home runs; this is the real lesson our children learn in a competitive environment.

Competition leads children to envy winners, to dismiss losers (there's no nastier epithet in our language than "Loser!"), and to be suspicious of just about everyone. Competition makes it difficult to regard others as potential friends or collaborators; even if you're not my rival today, you could be tomorrow.

This is not to say that competitors will always detest each other. But trying to outdo someone is not conducive to trust - indeed, it would be irrational to trust someone who gains from your failure. At best, competition leads one to look at others through narrowed eyes; at worst, it invites outright aggression. Existing relationships are strained to the breaking point, while new friendships are often nipped in the bud.

Again, the research - which I review in my book No Contest: The Case Against Competition - helps to explain the destructive effect of win/lose arrangements. When children compete, they are less able to take the perspective of others - that is, to see the world from someone else's point of view. One study demonstrated conclusively that competitive children were less empathetic than others; another study showed that competitive children were less generous.

Cooperation, on the other hand, is marvelously successful at helping children to communicate effectively, to trust in others and to accept those who are different from themselves. Competition interferes with these goals and often results in outright antisocial behavior. The choice is ours: We can blame the individual children who cheat, turn violent, or withdraw, or we can face the fact that competition itself is responsible for such ugliness.

Studies also show, incidentally, that competition among groups isn't any better than competition among individuals. Kids don't have to work against a common enemy in order to know the joys of camaraderie or to experience success. Real cooperation doesn't require triumphing over another group.

Having fun doesn't mean turning playing fields into battlefields. It's remarkable, when you stop to think about it, that the way we teach our kids to have a good time is to play highly structured games in which one individual or team must defeat another.

Consider one of the first games our children learn to play: musical chairs. Take away one chair and one child in each round until one smug winner is seated and everyone else has been excluded from play. You know that sour birthday party scene; the needle is lifted from the record and someone else is transformed into a loser, forced to sit out the rest of the game with the other unhappy kids on the side. That's how children learn to have fun in America.

Terry Orlick, a Canadian expert on games, suggests changing the goal of musical chairs so children are asked to fit on a diminishing number of seats. At the end, seven or eight giggling, happy kids are trying to squish on a single chair. Everyone has fun and there are no winners or losers.

What's true of musical chairs is true of all recreation; with a little ingenuity, we can devise games in which the obstacle is something intrinsic to the task itself rather than another person or team.

In fact, not one of the benefits attributed to sports or other competitive games actually requires competition. Children can get plenty of exercise without struggling against each other. Teamwork? Cooperative games allow everyone to work together, without creating enemies. Improving skills and setting challenges? Again, an objective standard or one's own earlier performance will do.

When Orlick taught a group of children noncompetitive games, two thirds of the boys and all of the girls preferred them to games that require opponents. If our culture's idea of a good time is competition, it may just be because we haven't tried the alternative.

How can parents raise a noncompetitive child in a competitive world? Competition is destructive to children's self-esteem, it interferes with learning, sabotages relationships, and isn't necessary to have a good time. But how do you raise a child in a culture that hasn't yet caught on to all this?

There are no easy answers here. But there is one clearly unsatisfactory answer: Make your son or daughter competitive in order to fit into the "real world." That isn't desirable for the child - for all the reasons given here - and it perpetuates the poison of competition in another generation.

Children can be taught about competition, prepared for the destructive forces they'll encounter, without being groomed to take part in it uncritically. They can be exposed to the case against competition just as they are taught the harms of drug abuse or reckless driving.

You will have to decide how much compromise is appropriate so your child isn't left out or ridiculed in a competitive society. But at least you can make your decision based on knowledge about competition's destructiveness. You can work with other parents and with your child's teachers and coaches to help change the structures that set children against one another. Or you may want to look into cooperative schools and summer camps, which are beginning to catch on around the country.

As for reducing rivalry and competitive attitudes in the home:

Avoid comparing a child's performance to that of a sibling, a classmate, or yourself as a child.

Don't use contests ("Who can dry the dishes fastest?") around the house. Watch your use of language ("Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?") that reinforces competitive attitudes.

Never make your love or acceptance conditional on a child's performance. It's not enough to say, "As long as you did your best, honey" if the child learns that Mommy's attitude about her is quite different when she has triumphed over her peers.

Be aware of your power as a model. If you need to beat others, your child will learn that from you regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger if you use your child to provide you with vicarious victories.

Raising healthy, happy, productive children goes hand in hand with creating a better society. The first step to achieving both is recognizing that our belief in the value of competition is built on myths. There are better ways for our children - and for us - to work and play and live.

Copyright © 1987 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.

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WORKING MOTHER September 1987 By Alfie Kohn When it comes to competition, we Americans typically recognize only two legitimate positions: enthusiastic support and qualified support. The first view holds that the more we immerse our children (and ourselves) in rivalry, the better. Competition builds character and produces excellence.

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Learn how coaches can communicate player cuts most effectively, how athletes can best respond when not making the team, and how coaches can most effectively evaluate athletes.

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IN THIS ISSUE:
"TO CUT OR NOT TO CUT, that is the question." The Fall is upon us and as we look forward to the start of a brand new school year, young athletes' thoughts turn to middle and high school dreams of fame and glory: Impressing the coach in preseason, making the varsity, possibly breaking into the starting lineup and maybe even hearing the roar of the crowd as you make that game winning play. Or perhaps that big dream is more focused on being selected for your club team, qualifying for that prestigious tournament, moving up to the next level or possibly being chosen for the regional squad. You can just see it all now. All that hard work, dedication and determination finally pays off....except for one, very small, slightly "minor" obstacle: TRYOUTS - That nerve-wracking, gut-wrenching, anxiety-provoking gauntlet that almost every athlete, across every sport, at eve ry playing level must successfully navigate through before they can see that dream of theirs turn into a reality. The dreaded TRYOUT: When coaches get to measure you against everyone else on the field and where your precious dreams and self-worth rest precariously in their sometimes insensitive hands; And with just about every tryout comes that historically barbaric and sometimes humiliating ritual called CUTTING! Why just the sound of it conjures up fear and violence. CUTTING! You know the drill. Those who are deemed "good enough" by the coach's judgment make the team and get their name posted up on that magical list on the locker room door. Those who prove "worthy" are "chosen!" They are "in." However, those unfortunate individuals who didn't live up to the coach's expectations, who weren't considered talented enough, fast enough, tough enough, big enough or in any other way worthy of a spot on the team had their names put on that public list with invisible ink! When they excitedly went to check for their name with all the other players, it was nowhere to be seen. After all there's nothing like a little bit of public failure and embarrassment to build character and self-confidence.

Cutting squads down to a manageable size is considered to be a necessary evil for most athletic teams. There's an obvious argument that you have to limit the size of most teams because there just aren't enough resources, equipment, playing time and coaches available to keep everyone on the squad who tries out. Besides, this is America and isn't winning supposed to be where it's at? Naturally we have to keep the team that's going to give us that best possible chance to get that W. Aren't the weaker players going to hold us back? Aren't they going to cut down on the playing time of the better athletes? So what if we have to dash a few dreams and hurt a few feelings along the way. Shoot, aren 't sports just like life in that way? You have to learn how to be competitive in order to survive and be successful in today's fast-paced world.

In this issue of the Mental Toughness Newsletter we will examine this pleasant ritual of cutting and the effects that it has on athletes, their parents as well as on the men and women who end up having to make the cuts.

ATHLETE'S LOCKER - "Tryouts and what to do if you're cut"

PARENTS' CORNER - "When your child gets cut...."

COACH'S OFFICE - "Cutting with class & courage"

DR. G'S TEACHING TALES - "Rocky Marciano turned his weakness into his power"
ATHLETE'S LOCKER
"Tryouts and what to do if you're cut"

OK. So you've had this dream for as long as you can remember. You want to make the team and crack into the starting line-up. You certainly think you're good enough. You've been giving it all you've got for as long as you can remember. You think that you have some potential and maybe can go somewhere exciting in this sport. You work with a private trainer. You do extra work every week. You run on your own. You know you're outworking a lot of the other guys who were on the team last year. No question that some of those guys are really lazy. You should make the team this year. You keep telling yourself that. SHOULD...yet so much of it depends on those stupid tryouts. You always seem to get so darn nervous when you go to those things. It just seems like there's so much pressure on you. You can't stop thinking about how the coach is watching and if you make any mistakes, then he'll see them and think you're not that good and that will hurt your chances of making the team. Why is it that whenever you do things well he always manages to miss it? It's only when you screw up that he's there watching....And then there's all your competition. Some of these guys just aren't that good. You know that. You should be outplaying them. But why does it seem like they always do great in tryouts and that the coach spends a lot more time with them than you?

There are two interrelated mental mistakes that athletes commonly make in tryouts that cost them dearly. Two mental errors that interfere with them performing to their potential and showing the coaching staff what they really have. Two mental "no no's" that you need to get a handle on if you'd really like to impress the coach and increase the chances that you'll earn a spot on the squad. Both are connected to concentration and directly affect how nervous or relaxed you are right before and during tryouts.

Understand this to start with: If you are too nervous or stressed out during tryouts then your talent and ability will do a quick disappearing act, GUARANTEED! You can't play to your potential if you're overly nervous or uptight. In fact, NO ONE can! When you're too nervous your brain stops working, your muscles tighten up and your reflexes and conditioning vanish. As an athlete, tight muscles are your biggest enemy. Keep in mind then that your stress level and therefore how tight your muscles get are directly determined by these two CONCENTRATION mistakes.

If you're like most athletes who are on the bubble about making the cut or not, then the most pressing question bopping around inside your cranium on the days leading up to tryouts is exactly that: "Will I make the team?" One of the most common concentration mistakes made by athletes going into tryouts is to keep this outcome focus in the forefront of their minds during the entire tryout period. When you make a mistake you wonder how it will affect your chances of being selected. When you do something really well, when you make a great play, when you miss an assignment, when someone stops you, when the coach has to yell at you, when you do well or poorly in a conditioning run, when you show up early or late for practice the natural tendency is to view all of your actions, both good and bad through the lens of "how will this affect my chances of making the team?"

Unfortunately, maintaining this outcome focus during tryouts will set you up to fail big time! First off, it will distract your focus from the task at hand. If you're constantly worrying about how what you're currently doing will affect your status on the team, then you'll be distracting yourself from the immediate drill, scrimmage or exercise that you are presently doing. In addition, continually evaluating all that you do while you're doing it tends to put your concentration almost completely "in your head" and you end up thinking too much. Remember, as an athlete, thinking is "hazardous" to your performance health. You can't think and perform well. Doing your best is an automatic, non-thinking thing. Second, and as I've mentioned above, having an outcome focus under pressure will almost always make you too nervous and too physical ly tight to do your best. In fact, it's an outcome focus that is most often responsible for choking.

Now it may be obvious that you want to make the team. It may be obvious that it's been one of your most important goals for years. However, you must remember the cardinal rule in peak performance: NEVER, EVER TAKE YOUR GOALS WITH YOU INTO A PRESSURED SITUATION. The sole purpose of your goals is to motivate you to work harder in practice. Goals are a motivational tool for practice only. Your goals do NOT belong on the field or court with you when the chips are on the line. Yes, of course you want to make the team. However, you must discipline yourself so that your focus is on what you're doing at the moment and not the outcome of the tryouts. If you continually hear from that outcome, goal-oriented part of yourself during tryouts, then your mental job is to quickly return your focus of concentration back to the task at hand each and every time that it happens. So every moment that you're out on the field in tryouts, try to keep your focus in the NOW, on WHAT you're doing, NOT on HOW you're doing it. Continually evaluating yourself during tryouts is a performance disrupting waste of time.

The second concentration mistake most often made by athletes during tryouts, and one directly related to what we've just discussed, is to have your focus too caught up with the coach or coaching staff. It's natural as an athlete to want to know how the coaches are viewing you. It's natural to care about what they think of you. It's common to have the burning question, "do they think I'm good enough to make the team?" continually on your mind throughout tryouts. However, having this focus will only intensify your nervousness and further distract you from paying attention to what is actually going on in the tryout. The fact of the matter is that who the coaches ultimately end up choosing for the team is one of those UNCONTROLLABLES while you are actively involved in the tryouts. You do not have DIRECT control over the coaches' choices because you do not have direct control over them. The coaches have their own biases, opinions, preferences and idiosyncrasies, fair or not. Indirectly you can have an impact on their opinion of you by how well you perform. However, if you focus on the coaches and what they think of you, then you will only succeed in getting yourself uptight, and undermining your self-confidence, therefore making it less likely that you'll make a good impression on them.

You see that's the funny thing about all of this. If you really and truly want to impress the coaches and increase your chances of making the team, then your focus of concentration must be away from them, and what they think, and on YOU and what you are doing in the moment. You can learn to control your focus in this way. You can learn to control how quickly you bounce back from a mistake or bone-headed play in tryouts. You can learn to control how you react to the coaches yelling at you or praising one of your competitors. (Incidentally, your focus should also NEVER be on your competition and what they are doing during tryouts.) However, ultimately you do not have direct control over the coaches' decisions. If you go into tryouts with this in mind, then chances are good that you'll play both looser and with much more confidence.

Now having said all that, you can do everything humanly possible, you can be "on" throughout all of tryouts, you can perform mistake-free, and you can outrun and out-hustle the competition and still not find your name on that fateful list at the end of tryouts. Tryouts should be fair and impartial and yet sometimes they aren't. Why the coach chooses and cuts who he does is oftentimes one of those annoying and depressing mysteries of life. Sometimes the coach's choices can have much more to do with favoritism than picking the team fairly based on ability, dedication and effort. Regardless of whether you think the selection process was fair, what should you do if your name is not on the list? What should you do if you're cut?

Getting cut is one of those major emotional setbacks for most serious athletes. It's frustrating, depressing and a tremendous blow to your ego. In a sense, what the coach is saying to you when he/she cuts you is that, in his opinion "you're simply not good enough to be on the team" and that he believes "all those others chosen are better than you." (Keep in mind this is NOT fact. It's merely this coach's opinion!) The normal reaction to having a coach cut you? To feel devastated, discouraged and depressed. Remember, this is NORMAL!!!! When you have your heart set on a goal like this and, whether fairly or unfairly it's taken away from you, then it's pretty common to respond by being bummed out big time. The much more important issue here is not that you may feel like a f ailure or that suddenly your self-confidence is about gutter high. The absolutely critical issue here is how are you going to handle being cut? In other words, where will you go from here? What are you going to do about getting cut?

When I ask these questions I am NOT talking about going to the coach and bitterly complaining, although it's pretty normal to want to do that. What I am talking about is how can you use this setback to continue to build your dream? How can you use this very disappointing failure to motivate you to work even harder towards your dream? Know that for almost every great athlete, frequent and sometimes repeated failures have helped them ultimately get to where they are now. It's virtually impossible to reach any worthwhile goal in or out of sports without failing enough times. Why?

When they're used correctly, your failures hold very valuable lessons for you, lessons that contain the ultimate keys to your success. Failures provide you with valuable information about your weaknesses, about what you did wrong, about what you need to work on for next time. This kind of feedback is absolutely critical to you getting better in your sport and reaching your dreams.

However, it's very important that you understand the one lesson that failure SHOULD NEVER teach you. Your failures do NOT reflect your potential. YOU ARE NOT YOUR FAILURE! Getting cut does NOT mean that you will always be cut, even if you've been cut before. You know the story about Michael Jordan. He was cut from his high school basketball team! Getting cut does NOT mean that you'll never be good enough. It just means that for this tryout you didn't make the coach's list. In other words, getting cut should always be viewed as a temporary, just this time kind of thing, not a permanent, every time one! What I'm saying here is that you do not want to use your failures as a yardstick to measure how worthless or inadequate you may think you are as an athlete or individual. Getting cut may leave you feeling worthless and inadequate. However, your feelings should be viewed for what they are, they're not facts, they're just emotions and they are directly related to this situation and this situation only.

What I'm saying here is that in order for you to be in a position to really grow from your failures, you must learn to see them as both specific and time-limited. Do not allow getting cut to generalize to other parts of your life so that you mistakenly believe that you are a failure at everything. Then you'll end up having a pity party and the only thing that will come out of that is even more bad feelings.

So if getting cut is supposed to be such a valuable learning experience, then what exactly are you supposed to learn from this heartwarming event? Well that's entirely up to you and your coach! If the coach who cut you did so by impersonally posting a list on the locker room door, then your first job is to track him/her down and ask him/her directly some specific questions. Any coach who cuts you owes you a few minutes of their time to help you understand why you didn't make the team. However, the very best way to approach such a meeting with the coach is to ask them to help you figure out all the things that you need to work on so that next year when you try out you will have a better shot. Questions like, "What specifically do you think I need to work on to make me a better candidate for the team?" "What weaknesses do you think I have that I need to work on? 221; "What suggestions would you have on how I can directly work on strengthening those weaknesses?" "What skills and strengths did the players chosen have that you think I lack and need work on?"

What's very important in this meeting with the coach is that you have the stance that you want the coach's help, you want his/her feedback. Do not go into the meeting with hurt feelings and an angry, accusatory "it's not fair" attitude even if it isn't fair! Do not suggest to the coach that perhaps he/she is blind as a bat, totally incompetent and should have chosen you instead of specific other players who you know for a fact totally suck. While this may very well be true, challenging the coach's decisions in this way may put him/her on the defensive and then you probably won't get the helpful feedback that you need.

So what do you do if the coach has nothing helpful to offer in your meeting? If you come out of your conversation with the coach just as baffled and confused as you were when you began, no problem! Then go find someone else who knows the game and who you respect to help you accurately assess your strengths and weaknesses and to provide a qualified opinion as to what you can do to take your game to the next level. Do NOT let getting cut from this team be the final word on your athletic career. Just because this one coach doesn't think that you're good enough to be on the team doesn't mean that you'll never be good enough in this sport. Use your disappointment and discouragement to fuel your motivation. Redouble your work efforts and keep plugging away at your dream. Do not let one failure completely take the wind out of your sails. Even the best have gotten cut at one t ime or another. Remember, BE LIKE MIKE and get off your butt and get back to work!

Are slumps, fears or blocks preventing you from performing to your potential? Call Dr. G today at (413) 549 - 1085 for one on one phone coaching to help get you unstuck and back on track.
PARENT'S CORNER
"When your child gets cut...."

There is nothing quite as emotionally excruciating and heartbreaking as watching your own child suffer through the wonderfully sensitive process of getting cut from a team that they had their heart set on making. You've watched them practice over the years to get good in their sport. You saw how hard they worked to prepare for these tryouts. You know how desperate they were to make this team. You even shared their dream. You encouraged them to try hard and keep going despite minor setbacks, injuries and frustrations all along the way. You probably even helped them practice out in the backyard for more hours then you can remember now. You know just how important this sport has become to them. Heck, because of that it's probably gotten just as important to you! You could feel their growing anxiety as these tryouts approached. Forget that! You were just as anxious if not more so than them! And then your heart soared when they came home after that very first day of tryouts with a big smile plastered all over their face and an enthusiastically positive report of how things went. You were hoping and praying that their coach shared this same optimistic assessment.

And things seemed to go just as well the remaining two days of tryouts as well which is why you were totally stunned to see the tear-streaked face of that kid you love coming up the walkway towards the front door on the day that everyone was supposed to find out who made the cuts. His head was down and his shoulders slumped under the weight of what was obviously a crushing disappointment. It was in that moment, even before you knew exactly what had happened that you had that protective and primal urge to throttle the coach for causing your child this pain. Through crocodile tears and half sobs he relates to you the heart breaking experience of rushing to the team bulletin board after school with a group of the guys to check to see whether their names had made the coach's "list." He was the only one of his friends who hadn't made the team! The ONLY one! He was totally d evastated and had all he could do to keep it together around his buddies. And now he's standing in front of you broken and crying and all you can think about is how you can possibly take away all this pain and make the coach suffer.

What should you do when your child gets cut? What should you do when they come home with a broken heart? If only there was an easy solution to help them immediately feel better like there is with any other bump, scrape or cut. You put on antiseptic ointment and a band aid, wipe the tears away, give them a hug and everyone feels better. Unfortunately this kind of cut isn't so easily or quickly healed. How you as a parent handle this painful experience with your child can help him/her begin to put it into perspective and grow from it. Here's some Do's & Don't's as guidelines:

LISTEN - Listen carefully to what your child has to say about his/her experience. Try to understand exactly what happened to them from their perspective. In order to do this you must remain silent inside while they share with you the events that led up to their getting cut. Gather as much accurate information from them as possible.

DON'T ASSUME ANYTHING - Remember, your child is reporting from a very emotional place. When they say that the coach did or said "such & such" to them do not automatically assume that this is what exactly happened. They may not be such an accurate reporter at this time. At some point you may need to directly consult with the coach to understand his/her perspective.

LET YOUR CHILD HAVE HIS/HER FEELINGS - One of the hardest things for a parent to do is to watch your child suffer. The natural, knee jerk reaction in this situation is to race in and try to make your child feel better immediately. Try to contain yourself. They are disappointed for a very good reason. They had their heart set on a goal and they failed to make it. Disappointment, discouragement, sadness, anger and other feelings all come with this package. Don't rush in to save your child from these emotions. In fact, your child needs to experience these sometimes uncomfortable feelings in order to constructively work through the experience and put it behind them.

BE EMPATHIC - So instead of trying to make your child feel better, just reflect back your understanding of the difficult feelings that they are going through. Let them know that you can see their upset, disappointment, sadness, anger, frustration, etc. Really try to step inside their shoes and feel what they're feeling, from their perspective. Empathy is the main thing that a child needs from a parent when that boy or girl is really hurting. Empathy is what they need when they're dealing with strong emotions. Immediately after getting cut, when they are still very raw emotionally they might not be able to use your advice, suggestions or words of wisdom. What they will be able to make very good use of is your empathy. Being empathic oftentimes means that you don't even need to say very much. You can let a child know non-verbally that you understand how they feel by how you interact with, look at and hold him/her.

DON'T LET YOUR OWN FEELINGS STEAL THE STAGE FROM YOUR SON/DAUGHTER - Keep in mind that everything about your child's sport is for them, and NOT for you. If they have a disappointment it belongs to them. It's not yours. They were cut and let down, not you. Do not distract your child from their disappointment with your own feelings and issues. I know this goes without saying but don't get upset with them because they were cut. Do not blame them. It's not their fault.

SAVE YOUR CRITIQUE OF THEIR EFFORTS UNTIL AFTER THEY'VE BECOME ADULTS - The very last thing a disappointed athlete needs to hear when they're in the midst of strong emotions generated by being cut is a parent's criticism about their lack of training, efforts, practice time, etc. This kind of information, even if accurate will not be at all helpful to the child-athlete. It's really a timing thing here. What they need from you is your love, support and emotional sensitivity, not your "helpful suggestions" about all the things that they didn't do right. It goes without saying that at all times you want to try to stay in your role as the parent and not confuse what you say and do with the coaching role.

DON'T ENGAGE IN COACH-BASHING WITH YOUR CHILD - The natural reaction when a child is cut from a team is to respond with hurt, anger and blame for the coach. He was blind as a bat, terribly biased, had a vendetta against my kid, or was just plain dumb as rocks. While some or all of these accusations may actually be true in your child's case, going there with your child is not helpful and will teach them the wrong lessons about their failure. Remember, most coaches are human, they have their strengths and weaknesses, they all have their "blind spots," they either volunteer their time or work for peanuts and unfortunately, the vast majority of them are not well trained. If you have a serious concern with how you think your child was dealt with during tryouts, don't complain to your child about all that was wrong with the coach. Go instead to the coach and when you do, leave your strong emotions at home.

ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO TURN HIS/HER FAILURE INTO A POSITIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE - No question that failing not only feels badly, but it flat out stinks. You want to help your child understand that these kinds of emotional setbacks can form the foundation for their later successes in life, both in and out of sports. Along these lines, teach them to view getting cut as providing them feedback on what their weaknesses are and on specifically what they need to work on to increase their chances of making the team the next year. What this entails is that you have to encourage your child, if they are old enough, (12 and up) to go ask the coach specifically what he/she thinks the athlete needs to work on to get better. (If you have a younger child then you can either accompany your child-athlete and ask the questions for them or meet with the coach alone .) Asking the coach for this kind of information is the athlete's right. The very least that a coach can do for the cut athlete is to provide a clear and specific explanation of what weaknesses need to be strengthened in order to make that particular child a better candidate for next time. What is absolutely critical to keep in mind when you or your child approach the coach after having gotten cut is to do so in a non-emotional, non-confrontational manner. The attitude that you or your child must convey is one of needing the coach's "help." Now having said that, there will be a number of coaches who will be unable or unwilling to provide this kind of feedback. Furthermore some coaches will get defensive when asked for this information believing that the athlete or their parents are challenging their authority. Most reasonable, mature coaches will be happy to take the time to provide this kind of valuable feedback.

HELP YOUR CHILD UNDERSTAND THAT GETTING CUT DOES NOT MAKE HIM/HER A FAILURE - When kids (and even adults for that matter) fail, it's always easy to fall into the trap of feeling like a failure. You want to help your child understand that failing is an integral part of the learning process. It is NOT a static thing. It does NOT define who you are as a person. And it's not like there's only one tryout ever and that this particular tryout determines a child's success or failure in their sport or life. Certainly your child my actually feel this way right after they get cut but it's your job to help them see otherwise. Failing is something that happens to us on the road to success. Failing does not define whether we are adequate or not. Failure is feedback and you can't learn, grow or get better at anything without enough of this kind of feedback in your life.

ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO CONTINUE TO PURSUE HIS/HER DREAMS - Along these same lines, you want to teach your children that failing and disappointments are nothing more than bumps in the road. When they hit one, stumble and fall, their job is to get back up and keep plugging along. Encourage your child to fight through their disappointment, to not give up on their dream, and instead, to work even harder towards that goal. Your timing with this information is important. Your child will not be able to hear this message right away after getting cut. Give them ample enough time to feel sad and discouraged. Listen to them, be empathic and don't take their feelings away. Perhaps later that night, the next day or even the next week or two you can begin to introduce the idea of and encouragement for continuing to go after that dream.

MODEL APPROPRIATE RESPONSES TO FAILURE - You can directly teach your child the healthy ways to respond to failure by how you interact with them around their experience of getting cut. Kids learn their most powerful lessons not so much from what we say as much as from how we say it and how we then act. Conduct yourself like an adult and provide your child with a powerful model for handling setbacks. When it's appropriate, time-wise, share with your child some of your heartbreaking setbacks and what you did with them to turn them around. Let your child know that he/she is not alone in their disappointment and that it's a common experience in life.

WWW.COMPETITIVEDGE.COM for the latest in mental toughness training aids, articles, books and cds.
COACH'S OFFICE
"Cutting with class & courage"

In the best of all possible worlds you wouldn't ever have to cut anybody. You wouldn't ever have to be in the position of breaking hearts, stomping on an athlete's self-esteem or crushing a youngster's dream. You wouldn't ever have to go through that uncomfortable ritual of telling kids that they just aren't good enough to play for you. In the best of all worlds, everyone who tried out and put in the effort would make the varsity. You'd never have to say "no." There would be enough resources, equipment, practice field hours and assistant coaches to accommodate everyone and anyone who wanted to play. In the best of all worlds no one would ever complain about everyone getting to play and sports would just be about what they're really supposed to be about: FUN. Unfortunately the best of all possible worlds is a recreational sports fantasy and not suited to the reality of today's competitive sports environment.

Whether it's the right thing or not, coaches and athletic organizations are always trying to field the most talented teams, the ones that will provide the best chance to pick up a "W." College sports, which are usually serious business, have almost always been in the market of just playing the best and cutting the rest. Whether this is good or bad, middle school and high school sports are competitive to the point where winning is really what they're all about and only the better athletes make these squads. But now we see far too many club teams across a wide variety of sports comprised of athletes as young as 9 and 10 years old, and sometimes younger where the predominant driving force is to win. Oh sure, the club's charter may clearly state that the sport is supposed to be just for fun, that learning the game and its' skills takes precedent over everything else and that all kids will be given a fair and ample opportunity to play. However, in reality, when push comes to shove, the club is really just about fielding the best athletes so as to increase the chances that the kids can win and the adults involved can feel successful.

So what does this mean for you if you're coaching young kids in today's competitive sports arena? It means that 98% of the time you will have to hold tryouts and then, at their conclusion, you will need to "cut" the excess players, the ones who, in your expert opinion don't measure up. Rarely will you be as lucky as the Amherst ( Massachusetts) High School Hurricanes, multiple State Champion's women's Cross Country team. Art Keene, the long time coach of the Hurricanes has never cut anyone. Coaching cross county you can have the luxury of keeping everyone who tries out. This is how Coach Keene feels. If an athlete wants to put her time and effort into training, then in his opinion, she has earned the right to remain on the squad and compete in most of the r aces, regardless of how fast she may be.

For most sports and teams, however, this situation is totally unrealistic. As sometimes hurtful and barbaric a ritual as cutting can be, it's a necessity when it comes to the majority of competitive sports. To me, however, the real issue isn't cutting. "Getting cut" is just an integral part of life. It's one other kind of failure or setback and life is filled with plenty of them. In fact, to be successful in this game of life your job is to learn how to effectively how to handle failing or being cut. The more critical and important issue here is how the cutting is actually done. In other words, how does the coach conduct the cutting process? Does he/she post a list at the end of tryouts with only the names of all those who've made the squad? Does he hold a final team meeting and directly tell those players who failed to make the cut? Does he hold individual sessions with each and every athlete who was cut explaining the situation to them in private? In my humble opinion, most coaches do cutting very badly.

As the coach, adult and the designated "cutter," the process of cutting may be no big deal to you. It's just something, maybe a wee bit uncomfortable that you have to do once every season. However, to the young athlete, the designated "cuttee," the process of being cut by the coach can be absolutely and totally devastating to the point where they leave emotional scars that can last a lifetime. Far too many youth sport and high school coaches are fairly oblivious to the tremendous power that they wield, day to day in a preadolescent and adolescent's young life. They are unaware that a little comment, well-meaning joke, what they consider to be reasonable criticism or a raised voice or nasty look can completely shake a kid up. Perhaps they just don't understand how fragile kids these ages typically are. Developmentally the kid is attempting to gradually move away from his family and find his/her own sense of identity. They are looking desperately to discover those areas in their lives where they might excel in. As the child moves into adolescence, his/her identity search takes on an added sense of urgency. Adolescents as a rule are uncertain of themselves. They typically have very low or shaky self-esteem. They are looking for mentors to connect with or other adults that they can begin to model themselves after. They are looking to fit in with their peer group and the fear of not being accepted is frequently intense and foremost in their mind. While an adolescent may come to your tryouts with an outer sense of bravado and cockiness, not too deep inside of them they are fairly insecure and burdened by feelings of inadequacy.

The process of tryouts with the prospective of getting cut puts most kids this age under a significant amount of stress and further feeds their sense of insecurity and aloneness. This is even truer for those athletes who do not have the caliber of athletic skills that their older, more experienced teammates may possess. Most kids who get cut do not know how to handle this potentially significant failure. They do not know how to put this kind of experience into a healthy perspective. They do not know how to separate their sense of self worth as an individual from this massive blow to their ego. As the designated adult and educator in this situation they need your help. You may not have to deal with them until the next year, but because they showed up for this season's tryouts you have a responsibility to them. To put it bluntly, you owe them!

You owe them courtesy, respect and, most of all, sensitivity. You owe them a minimal amount of help in handling their failure of not making your team. You owe them honest feedback about what they need to do to increase their chances of having a more successful tryout the next year. In other words, you owe them more courage, directness and decency than is usually provided by impersonally posting a list of names with theirs omitted. When I say that you owe them I am making some critical assumptions about you. I am assuming that you are committed to the coaching profession, that you truly have your athletes' best interests in mind and far in front of your own, that you sincerely care about these kids that you're working with as individuals well beyond their athletic skills and performances and that you are interested in and committed to encouraging personal potential in the youngster s that you come in contact with.

Despite the fact that I am a terminal optimist, I am not stupid. I know that there are coaches out there who truly don't give a rat's ass about these personal qualities and commitments that I've just mentioned. These individuals are not in the business of shaping today's youth in healthy and positive ways. They are, instead in the sport for themselves. They are too selfish and immature to really care about the kids that they come in contact with. As a consequence they are totally insensitive to the impact that they may have on their young athletes. These are the kinds of coaches who are destructive, end up traumatizing many of the kids they work with and who give the coaching profession a bad name.

I am not appealing to these kinds of individuals here. They are too closed minded and personally wounded themselves to make much use of my words. I am, instead appealing to you. Have the courage and decency to cut young athletes the right way. Do NOT just impersonally post a list of the winners and losers of your tryouts. Take the extra time to sit down individually with each and every one of the athletes that you cut and explain to them exactly why you ended up cutting them. By this I do not mean that you have to justify your decision. You don't! However, you do want to help them understand what they need to work on to get better. Let them know what their specific weaknesses are and encourage them to go out and work on them. Empathize with them about how painful it is to get left off a team, and encourage them to constructively harness their disappointment into motivation and positive action. The fact of the matter is that you never really know just how good an athlete can get when they put their mind into it and their body matures another year or two. Inspire them to keep trying, to never give up. Sometimes the worst athlete at tryouts this year can come back the following year and impress the hell out of you.

Remember, if you have to cut, cut with courage and class. Your kindness, sensitivity and the minimal amount of extra effort and time that you take with the young athletes that you cut today can make all the difference in their athletic career tomorrow.
DR. G'S TEACHING TALES
"Rocky Marciano turned his weakness into his power"

The Edge by Howard Ferguson

The great professional boxer Rocky Marciano didn't just walk into the ring and suddenly become a champion boxer. In his early days as a fighter, he lacked finesse, poise and also had one glaring weakness - he could barely hold his arms up. They were big arms, short an powerful. The tragedy was that after a couple of rounds in the ring his arms would get heavy and would begin to descend slowly to his sides, and then, of course, he would take a terrific beating from his sparring partners.

With that obvious weakness, few in the know gave Marciano a chance to become a champion. But Marciano was aware of his weakness, and he worked at it to turn it into a strength.

Rocky developed an ingenious method of striving to overcome his weakness. He would submerge himself in the local swimming pool and flail his arms as hard as he could against the water. He would swing them against the buoyancy of the water for hours, forcing the arm muscles to develop against abnormal difficulties.

"In order to develop strength in my arms, I practiced throwing punches under water in the YMCA pool. Art Bergman, a fireman I knew who was a terrific puncher, gave me the biggest, heaviest bag I ever saw. It weighed 180lbs. The normal bag weighs 40 or 50 lbs. I had trouble with my hands before. Art told me to punch the bag with my bare fists, and that's the way I hardened my hands up."

When Marciano retired, he was undefeated! He won all 49 of his professional fights, 45 by knockouts. He hadn't walked into the ring a champion, but when he left the ring, he walked out as one of the greatest in boxing history. Why? Because he wasn't afraid to acknowledge and work on his weaknesses until they became strengths. This can happen when a person meets a weakness head-on, when he dos something about it.

"I was willing to make sacrifices. Even while traveling, when there were no facilities, I would spend hours in my hotel room working on my strength. I wanted more than anything else to be a fighter. Then I wanted to be a good one, and after that a great champion."
Are you or your athlete having a performance difficulty or consistently underachieving, call me today. Please click below:

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Cutting In Sports | Competitive Advantage: Mental Toughness

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IN THIS ISSUE: "TO CUT OR NOT TO CUT, that is the question." The Fall is upon us and as we look forward to the start of a brand new school year, young athletes' thoughts turn to middle and high school dreams of fame and glory: Impressing the coach in preseason, making the varsity, possibly [...]

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Teenagers can significantly lower their likelihood of being overweight or obese by walking or biking to school and playing on at least one high school sports team, but preferably two or more, a new study suggests.

Though the spread of childhood obesity in the last decade has spurred health authorities to ramp up their efforts to promote youth activity, the new findings are among the first to demonstrate that walking or riding a bike to school actually has an impact on weight gain among high school students. The study also found that while school-based exercise can reduce or stem weight gain, it is sports participation in particular that makes a difference. Physical education classes, the researchers found, did not reduce or prevent weight gain, likely because they do not offer students the same level of regular, challenging exercise as competitive sports.

"I think being a part of some kind of team or organization gives kids the opportunity to have moderate to vigorous activity consistently," said Keith M. Drake, an author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hood Center for Children and Families at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. "I think a lot of time physical education requirements are not that strict. Kids are not in P.E. that often, and when they are, the physical activity is not that strenuous."

In their study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, Dr. Drake and his colleagues tried to quantify the impact that greater sports participation and less reliance on mass transit might have on childhood obesity. They calculated that if all adolescents played on at least two sports teams per year - in other words, one team per season - obesity rates would plunge 26 percent and the prevalence of overweight adolescents would fall by 11 percent. And if all adolescents walked or biked to school at least four days a week, they found, the number who were obese would drop by 22 percent.

Nationwide, about a third of high school students are overweight or obese, a figure that has prompted federal efforts to boost physical activity of any kind among teenagers. Health officials recommend that children get an average of about one hour a day of moderate to vigorous activity, but most fall far short of that.

One of the government's most recent efforts to boost adolescent exercise was a $100 million-a-year program called Safe Routes to School, which targets the way students commute. In 2001, less than 16 percent of children between 5 and 15 walked, biked or "actively" commuted to school, compared with about 50 percent of youngsters in that age range 40 years ago. Created in 2005, Safe Routes aims to boost those numbers by helping communities build more sidewalks, bike paths and other "pedestrian friendly" routes.

Yet past studies have generally found that while walking and biking to school increases physical activity levels, it has little or no impact on body weight. Dr. Drake and his colleagues noted that the sample sizes in those studies were small - in many cases, just a few hundred students - so recruited over 1,700 high school students and their parents to examine the relationship between commutes to school, levels of sports participation and body weight.

Over all, only 10 percent of students in the study were "active" commuters, walking or biking to school more than three-and-a-half days a week; most, about 70 percent, said they never did either. Active commuting, the study found, lowered the risk of obesity by 33 percent, though it did not seem to protect against being overweight.

"We found that it's only affecting kids who are near the obesity cutoff," Dr. Drake said. "We think that's because walking and biking to school are fairly leisurely exercise and kids don't tend to do it unless they live close to school. So we think it's only affecting kids who are very overweight, whereas for most normal kids it wouldn't affect them."

As for more organized activities, about 17 percent of the students played on one sports team, 18 percent played on two, and 35 percent were on three or more. The study revealed a dose response relationship: the greater the participation level in organized sports, the lower the risk of being overweight or obese. The trend became most significant when students played on at least two teams, representative of year-round participation in sports.

"Playing on one sports team is definitely better than playing on zero, but I would say at least two or three is probably ideal," Dr. Drake said.

Dr. William Stratbucker, the medical director of the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital Healthy Weight Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., who was not involved in the research, said the findings were intriguing because they showed a sort of threshold for effective physical activity. But he said the idea that every child should join a sports team "is not achievable in real life." Some children may face economic barriers, like the costs associated with team sports, or health issues, like asthma, that limit their participation.

Another way to encourage vigorous exercise among teenagers, Dr. Stratbucker said, is for parents to make it a part of their lives. "If the parents are enjoying an active lifestyle themselves, that's modeling behavior that leads to children participating in activity to the levels that they need to be," he said.

Not every student can make the varsity baseball or basketball team, Dr. Drake said, but there are other ways - like playing intramural or club sports, or joining a dance or gymnastics team - for children to get strenuous exercise.

"I don't think it has to be a sports team," he said. "There are other athletic opportunities, even for the noncompetitive kids, that can achieve the same benefit."

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Sports Promote Healthy Weight in Teenagers

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Teenagers can significantly lower their likelihood of being overweight or obese by walking or biking to school and playing on at least one high school sports team, but preferably two or more, a new study suggests.

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Teenagers today experience a myriad of benefits from competing in sports in public schools, from developing camaraderie and team building to honing physical and personal skills. Athletes discover the challenges of both winning and defeat as well.

With the many benefits, however, teens competing in high school sporting events must simultaneously balance athleticism with the potential dangers, such as an overly intense focus on the goal of winning. This goal can become a catalyst leading to destructive behaviors to an athlete's overall physical health and well-being.

While sports are certainly an integral component of the public high school experience, teens and parents must foster positive athletic experiences by maintaining awareness of all positive and dangerous behaviors and making informed decisions when their children are involved in athletic competition.

Team Building and Public School Athletic Benefits
Personal Development
Whether teens compete in team sports or engage in more individualized activities, all high school sports are fundamentally designed to help teens develop stronger personal and interpersonal skills and talents. Athletics offers teens a physical outlet to exert their troubles, anger, and emotions.. As hormones alter teens' moods and thoughts, competition fosters an opportunity for teens to interact with fellow peers, coaches, and mentors, while helping them understand their own abilities and talents.

When children and teens participate in group competitions and activities, they learn skills that apply to opportunities both on and off the playing field. Through competition, teens establish a solid work ethic that values practice and rewards determination. teenagers enhance skills in self-reliance and team interaction, and develop new structures of self- motivation , discipline, and personal responsibility.

Researchers at the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University report, "Kids who participate in organized sports do better in school, have better interpersonal skills, are more team oriented, and are generally healthier." More specifically, Metzl and Shookhoff (2003) further assert that sports help teens develop an array of personal skills, including resilience, attitude control, time management, and long term thinking abilities.

The Kansas State High School Athletic Association has created the following video highlighting the numerous benefits of participation in athletics:
Physical Fitness
While teens competing in sports are certainly exposed to opportunities to enhance their personal and social development, athletes competing in public school sports also expand their physical abilities and fitness levels. Today's teens are exposed to an array of entertainment avenues that may foster laziness, such as television, video games, and other media devices, but the traditional experience of sports, exercise, and kinesthetic activities help boost teens' minds and bodies. Involvement in sporting activities keeps children moving and engaged physically, vital for their overall health and well-being.

During these formative high school years, teenagers' bodies grow and change constantly, and participation in sports can help teens learn how to maneuver and adjust to their changing body and physical abilities. In addition, a teen's hormones and chemical makeup are constantly in flux. Involvement in sports can actually help the body produce more positive chemicals, such as endorphins and adrenaline, which creates more stable moods, positive feelings of happiness, and decreased feelings of depression or sadness.
Collegiate Preparation
While teens adopt an array of new and enhanced skills through participation in athletics, teens even more notably become more rounded college applicants (Metzl & Shookhoff, 2003). When applying to colleges , regardless of the collegiate location or status, most schools will review an applicant's full four-year transcript, which includes grades, course load intensity, test scores, and extracurricular activities.

By participating in sports and other extracurricular and organizations, an applicant demonstrates the ability to manage academics with additional responsibilities, an important quality in a successful student. This balance illustrates student's self-discipline, social involvement, and general well-roundedness. Furthermore, scholarship opportunities may be available for students who display noteworthy abilities and athletic skills.
By ms4denmark [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Balancing the Pros and Cons of Competition Potential Dangers of Competition and Sports
While any physical activity and sport can provide teens with incredible benefits and opportunities, parents and teenage athletes must also be aware of the potential downfalls of competition and athleticism. As teens engage in competitive events and team sports, their exposure to peer-pressure and anxiety may increase with the need to win.

Furthermore, athletes can experience extreme physical pressures when too much is demanded from them, resulting in injuries from overuse or other physical ailments. As revealed in the article, "High School Wrestler Learned Training Dangers First Hand," common wrestling practices can lead to dangerous physical consequences. Wrestlers are often forced to either gain or lose weight in order to compete in their desired weight class, which leads to restrictive dieting often involving severe caloric deprivation. This practice is paired with excessive cardio exercise that quickly, and dangerously, burns off body fat and weight. While these practices are often considered to be a more drastic example of the dangers of athletics, any teen who feels suppressed by the pressures of competition may choose to engage in harmful practices in order to win and encounter athletic success.
By English: Lance Cpl. Andrew D. Thorburn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Midwest Orthopaedics discusses the physical detriments many athletes face due to injury from overuse and the pressures they place on themselves.

Additionally, the physiology of athletes can also be altered as a result of extreme physical exertion. According to Metzl & Shookhoff (2003), "Physical exertion can raise the level of pheromones and endorphins, brain chemicals that cause exhilaration. Exercise can also elevate the serum testosterone level, which makes the heart beat faster." While exercise and competition can enhance the mood-boosting chemicals that help increase a teen's feelings of happiness and success, both spectators and athletes can also feel the adverse effects of sadness or depression when a team has a losing season.
How to Guide Teens to Safely Compete
While teens may be subjected to some potential dangers from athletics, parents can help promote a safe competitive drive by limiting the focus on winning and encouraging their child. Metzl & Shookhoff (2003) assert that if parents and teens "remain uninfected by the toxins of winning at all costs and instead focus on effort and fair play, youth sports can be beautiful, exciting, and fun. They can provide kids with an extraordinary opportunity to express their talents and their character, to run around screaming and laughing with joy." To achieve this, parents and coaches should strive to keep the long-term perspective of sports and competition at the forefront, while teaching teenagers how to do the same.

In regards to addressing the physical dangers of sports, parents can avoid many of the dietary and exercise issues by enforcing specific rules during the sports season. For example, during wrestling season, parents can set a "dinner rule," requiring teens to eat dinner with the family to ensure their child has a balanced diet. Additionally, it is important for parents to talk with their children about any concerns they may have and counsel their children through open doors of communication.

Teens may find it very difficult to strike a balance with the many obligations of both academia and athleticism during a sports season, so it is important for parents to help teens handle the stress and frustrations that may occur. Teens' grades may drop or their social interaction with friends may decrease, and if this occurs, parents can always take advantage of the insight and experience of a teen's coach if they need assistance. For example, if the teen refuses to share thoughts or issues or continues to decline in school or behavior, parents can ask an experienced coach to monitor or speak with the teen. Oftentimes, if the concern is valid and realized, coaches will force teens to sit out during games or competitions until health, attitude, and safety is improved and ensured.
Final Thoughts
By having an awareness of the benefits and challenges of involvement in high school athletics, parents and teenagers can make informed choices that lead to success in high school and beyond. Physical activity is vital for robust health and overall well-being, but it is important for athletes and parents alike to reach a balance between physical limitations and the need to compete to win. If a mindful approach is taken to participation in athletics, teenagers will be nurtured to become their physical and mental best.

Questions? Contact us on Twitter. @publicschoolreview

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Pros and Cons of Sports Competition at the High School Level - PublicSchoolReview.com

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What are the benefits and dangers of competitive pressure on high school athletes ? Some answers here.

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COMPETITIVE YOUTH SPORTS may be as American as apple pie, but we know a lot less about youth sports than we do about apple pie.

The problem is that while the FDA takes responsibility for knowing everything about our food (as the EPA does with the environment and a group called ARDA does with religious life), no one agency or organization monitors youth sports either as a central part of American childhood or as an industry. (And it is an industry. The Columbus Dispatch reviewed tax returns in 2009 and found that nonprofit sports groups alone, from the AAU to the thousands of cash-strapped parent-run community leagues, have $5 billion a year pass through their coffers.) So we are left with a Wild West of local and regional organizations in dozens of sports and no better odds of getting pinpoint data than of counting all the tumbleweeds blowing across the land.

Yet research has been done; there are smart academics and organizations in search of answers. As part of ESPN's summer 2013 Kids in Sports focus, we mined the often hidden-away data to paint as comprehensible a portrait of the nation's competitive youth sports landscape as we could.

1. Youth sports is so big that no one knows quite how big it is.

How many American kids play competitively on teams or clubs? No one has ever conducted a census. Still, it's worth looking at the various counts, even if they all are flawed.

For starters, the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), which employs tens of thousands of online interviews, tallies how many kids between 6 and 17 are regular/frequent (or what it calls "core") players of different sports. These "core" numbers make a decent stand-in for kids who play on organized teams, even though that's not the question asked; what's asked is whether a kid played that sport a minimum of 13 times a year in a sport like ice hockey or 26 times a year in a sport like soccer. SFIA gave ESPN The Mag custom data totaling up its 2011 participation.

That adds up to 21.47 million kids between 6 and 17, or more than the population of Texas in 2000. That's big.

Competitive sports look bigger in a survey of students done by Don Sabo, a longtime youth-sports researcher and a professor at D'Youville College in Buffalo. He queried a research sample of 2,185 students in 2007 for the Women's Sports Foundation and found that 75 percent of boys and 69 percent of girls from 8 to 17 took part in organized sports during the previous year -- playing on at least one team or in one club. Do the math on the 39.82 million U.S. students ages 8 to 17 in 2011 and that would be 28.7 million of them playing organized sports, more than the population of Texas today plus most of Oklahoma. This chart shows the participation rate of Sabo's sample.

Whichever estimate you have faith in, it's far below the actual total, because it doesn't count the millions of kids who start before age 6 or 8.

2. Kids start by kindergarten, unless ...

No research tries to count the 2-year-olds everywhere being taught by their dads to shoot like Trick Shot Titus of Jimmy Kimmel fame or the 4-year-olds playing in Itty-Bitty and Munchkins leagues that let parents stand by their kids during the games. But Don Sabo's research for the Women's Sports Foundation does try to catch early starters, and it confirms what you already sense, either because you're a parent or you drive by fields filled with them: Lots of kids start playing on teams before they start attending school.

But which kids? Sabo's analysis distinguishing the early starters from the students who don't begin until third or fourth grade speaks to several unsurprising truths about youth sports. Girls start an average of half a year later than boys, and kids who don't exercise start later than those who do. But we also see starkly what drives the very earliest action: money. The biggest indicator of whether kids start young, Sabo found, is whether their parents have a household income of $100,000 or more.

And you know where most of those families live, right?

3. The suburban soccer mom (and dad) is based in fact.

Indeed, Sabo's WSF data paints a distinct picture of suburbs where swaths of kids in elementary and middle school, especially boys, play on three, four or five teams, and the culture revolves around their practices, tourneys and getting to their games. In contrast, childhood in cities and rural areas isn't as intensely sports-focused.

The suburbs clearly aren't alone in their obsession: Kids all over America play sports, which means a large portion of families focus on youth sports. Ninety percent of parents with children on a team attend at least one of their kid's games a week. And with youth players mostly at the age when they'll still talk to parents, you can guess what the subject of conversation often is: 68 percent say they talk at least every other day about games and practices.

As involved as they are, though, parents aren't necessarily driving the sports ship. Sabo asked kids whether sports are "a big part of who they are," and the results reinforce just how deeply most American kids care about sports.

4. Hoops is the king because it's for girls too.

Baseball and soccer start off fast, but by the time kids reach age 9, basketball becomes the most popular competitive sport, according to the SFIA's regular/frequent count. Meanwhile, two sports played largely by one gender -- football for boys and volleyball for girls -- grow fast from ages 11 through 14 but never come close to catching up.

Even through age 17, basketball remains dominant because both genders continue to play organized ball. In a study done for the United States Tennis Association Don Sabo looked at data from 2006 to 2010 via an annual survey of about 50,000 students a year and found that 40 percent of adolescent boys and 25 percent of girls play competitive hoops. Soccer and track are the next most popular with both boys and girls, followed by swimming.

5. Dropping out is both the norm and often temporary.

Nervous types appalled by the incessant yelling by adults from the sidelines can be excused for believing that all the competition turns off as many kids as it turns on. Sabo found that 45 percent of the students in his survey who started a sport had quit it. Yet as you can see, the reasons for quitting aren't that youth sports are necessarily bad.

Indeed, most of their reasons relate more to temporary concerns: The kids weren't having fun playing, were hurt, didn't get along with the team or wanted to focus on their studies. That sheds light on the report's next finding: 33 percent of kids had restarted a sport they'd quit. Kids remain drawn to sports.

It helps that the trend has been toward offering more sports; using 2005-06 data, the WSF found that high schools had more teams for both girls and boys than they did in 2000. To wit, Sabo and his colleague Philip Veliz counted 2.3 million girls and 2.9 million boys playing on high school teams (public and private) in 2011-12 -- 30 percent of high school girls and 37 percent of high school boys.

But there's another trend as well: Millions of high school kids phase out organized sports, with the biggest drop-off coming early -- during and after freshman year. High school sports can be competitive and involve roster cuts and commitments some teenagers can't make. Kids quit for all the reasons above. Whatever the explanation, the numbers are sizable: SFIA reports that between ages 14 and 15 there's a 26 percent drop in the number of kids who play at least one sport even casually.

6. In fact, the closer you look, the more you see the kids left behind.

Girls continue to simply have less access. Whereas high schools in 31 states had enough roster slots for at least 50 percent of the boys enrolled, high schools in only 18 states had that many roster slots for girls.

And then there are the kids who live in the wrong places. In New York, a state with well-funded schools, high school teams could accommodate 75 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls. But high schools in budget-deprived California and Florida, two other major states, had spots on teams for only 29 percent and 23 percent of girls, and 39 percent and 30 percent of boys, respectively.

Meanwhile, opportunities for city kids are far fewer. In Washington D.C., the WSF found, high schools had positions on teams for only 22 percent of girls and 33 percent of boys. That's about one-third the opportunity of girls in New York state and boys in North Dakota.

Living in poor corners of cities culls even more kids from sports. Nationwide, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, only a quarter of eighth- to 12th-graders enrolled in the poorest schools played school sports. (Those are schools with the highest rate of free-lunch eligibility, which are also among the schools with the highest dropout rates, meaning that even lower percentages of the kids in those communities are playing.) This situation won't be helped as schools continue to cut back funds for teams. The percentage of high schools with no sports has already jumped from 8.2 percent during the 1999-2000 school year to 15.1 percent in 2009-10.

7. Finally, about our kids' health ...

The No. 1 fear of sports parents is seeing their child injured on the field. And due to the United States' growing population and sports participation, that's now more common. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 2.7 million kids under 20 were treated for "sports and recreation" injuries from 2001 to 2009.

Reports of head injuries are especially on the rise. From 2001 to 2009, emergency room visits for traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) among children under 19 rose 62 percent. And football concussions reported among 10- to 14-year-olds more than doubled from 4,138 in 2000 to 10,759 in 2010, according to the CDC.

Yet looking closely at the CDC's traumatic brain injury data, which includes concussions, puts football in context. More kids go to emergency rooms with TBIs from biking accidents than from football hits, and the percentage of ER visits for TBIs in football (7.2 percent) was lower than in a bunch of sports, including soccer, baseball, hockey of all types, ice skating, ATV and dirt-bike riding and, most dangerous, horseback riding, where an ER visit is twice as likely to involve a brain injury than in football.

Long-term, the nation's biggest health concern remains obesity. And despite all the youth leagues, the waistlines of America's children are growing. According to the latest CDC numbers, 16.9 percent of kids were obese in 2009-10, almost triple the rate of 1980. According to the CDC, overweight children have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight adults. By 2030, the CDC predicts that 42 percent of all American adults will be obese.

Clearly, all the time that kids spend competing -- and that their parents spend urging them on -- hasn't forestalled the epidemic. It can't help that for every extra hour kids who love to compete spend in uniform, they spend many more hours staring at a screen. In 2009, children spent more than 7 1/2 hours in front of some sort of media, from handheld devices to iPods to computers or TVs, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

For that and many other reasons, the transition from adolescence to early adulthood -- from the time when the bulk of kids compete in sports to the time when most don't -- takes a measurable toll. Every year closer to age 18 our kids get, fewer of them are as physically active as they should be.

The ubiquity of competitive sports is clearly not a panacea, nor does it last. By 18, the youth-sports pipeline has reached a destination or sorts -- by then Serena Williams had won her first major, Bryce Harper and Kobe Bryant had been drafted and Tiger Woods had teed it up for his first PGA tourney. The players largely have been sorted into their categories: future pros; college athletes; club and rec competitors; and those who give up.

Yet after all is said and done, one fact sticks out: Of all the kids in America, very few have not played sports. In the survey done by Sabo for the WSF, only 13 percent of boys and 18 percent of girls between 8 and 17 had never joined a team or club, had never shared the experience of getting a uniform, practicing with teammates and running onto the field or court to compete.

That's American childhood for you.
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Mag: Hidden demographics of youth sports

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COMPETITIVE YOUTH SPORTS may be as American as apple pie, but we know a lot less about youth sports than we do about apple pie.

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VisualNews.com, ContributorA place where you can find daily visual inspiration from around the world.

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For the 45 million children ages 6 through 16 currently participating in youth sports, many parents are having to reach deep into their pockets to cover the rising costs of equipment and sports-related activities.