On the glory of sport.

If you read nothing else this week, do read this piece by Greg Garber about sportsmanship and Little League. Up to now I've never had a beef directly with Little League, as I've directed my ire towards the general landscape of the parents, coaches and multi-million dollar industry pushing young athletes into year-round, one-sport mindsets. Traveling teams for big sports start in elementary school; I heard that one magazine has even started ranking the top national football prospects in fourth grade. Clearly the system has gone out of whack, in which children and teens are not allowed to play for the sake of play, to enjoy sport, or to even play a couple of sports; apparently cross-training is now confined to yogilates and swiss ball crunches. The vast majority of kids in my high school, if they played one sport, played another; hell I would've gone out for football in addition to track had my mom not come up with a 'rule' that I couldn't play if my dad wasn't at home that season.

The point is, the very same people who decry all of the bad things about sports today–the steriods, the cheating, the assholes–are the same ones perpetuating those things by twisting our youth in an absurd and slavish devotion to the bottom line: if I send him to five sports camps in a summer, why not six? If her team has a weeknight game, then surely her sixth-grade teacher will understand, right? In the era of Halo and Maddenoliday (don't ask), I think the proliferation of sport academies, along with the AAU and other leagues filled with poachers and conmen, has contributed to the upward trend of youth obesity in at least two ways. First, with specialization at younger and younger ages, starting spots and varsity teams are slotted automatically for a select few who attend the aforementioned six camps a summer; other school-age athletes sense this, and believe that if they have little or no chance of advancement, then why even go out for sports? Second, when you are, shall we say, encouraged to play a single sport year-round, then chances are you will not be going out and playing a pickup game of soccer or flag football afterschool or on the weekend; when the best athletes are thus taken out of the neighborhood talent pool, those pickup games no longer exist, leading to all of the other kids' downtime being spent on Xbox or PSP.

How to rectify this? I don't know. Because in the end, we want the best athletes on the field when we root for our division 1-A schools or our professional teams, and we don't care how they got there (we're actually getting more interested in how they get taken off the field, if only to revel in our mock disgust). However much I feel and want to root for the young boy in Utah with the cranial tumor and a chance to tie the game, I can't fault the opposing manager. Why do we play? We play to win the game. I just wish somebody knew what the hell winning is supposed to mean anymore.