Reviewed by Susan Green

Seek and ye shall find. Sportswriter Mark Hyman asserts in his introduction that “commerce is damaging youth sports.” The 160 pages that follow offer a variety of examples supporting Hyman’s thesis. Some of the anecdotes are convincing. Others fall short. But if that’s all you try to find, you’ll probably overlook the benefits. You may even miss the point.

Like many parents living in the D.C. suburbs, I have a good deal of experience with youth sports. My son played travel soccer for 10 years; my stepson played recreational soccer; my stepdaughter swam for our neighborhood team. I managed the travel soccer team and was a stroke and turn judge at the swim meets. I myself swam for neighborhood, AAU, high school and college teams in my time. Because my experience was, on the whole, very positive, I approached this book quite skeptically.

A number of Hyman’s anecdotes describe disturbing instances where the profit motive has infected youth sports. One alarming case involves companies that market sports training for babies as young as 6 months, including videos featuring exercises such as “Batter Up: Teach your baby to swing and hit” and “Kick It: As babies learn to walk and run, they need to control their legs and feet.” As the author wryly observes of another such company, “Baby Goes Pro” is not a headline in The Onion but a business that produces sports DVDs for 9-month-olds.  Although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) opposes video-watching for children under 2, these companies proliferate.

To his credit, the author acknowledges that marketing campaigns tied to child development are neither new nor limited to sports. From educational toys designed by psychologists in the 1940s to “Prenatal University,” a 1970s company founded by an obstetrician that claimed to teach pregnant women “how to channel a fetus’s attention, help her build a useful vocabulary, and learn lullabies,” to the “Baby Einstein” videos of the 1990s, infant “education” is big business. Five years after founding “Baby Einstein,” the company’s creator sold it to Disney for a reported $25 million.

Few readers would be surprised to learn that major athletic apparel and equipment suppliers invest heavily in youth sports. But the profit motive can make for strange bedfellows. Hyman highlights the irony of calorie-laden sports drink manufacturers sponsoring high school basketball tournaments, youth skateboarding events and snowboarding competitions. The AAP reported in 2001 that, far from improving children’s athletic performance, sports drinks can actually contribute to children’s health problems. Beef jerky and fast food are two more products that often subsidize youth sporting events. It’s hard to imagine high-level youth coaches endorsing their teams’ consumption of these items.

Irony aside, Hyman’s principal complaint about money in youth sports involves disparities in access. State and local budget cuts often hit first and hardest at “extras” such as school and recreational sports. When playing baseball requires paid coaches, expensive equipment and frequent travel to games and tournaments, low-income kids may be shut out. A Baltimore public high school coach reported that fewer than half of the students trying out for his team had ever played organized baseball. Hyman doubts that any suburban school in the nation would find so few novices among its tryouts.

The inequities aren’t limited to baseball: annual costs of playing any upper-level youth sport are high, e.g., $8,000 (hockey) and $9,000 (volleyball). My son’s team made sure that no kid was excluded because his family couldn’t afford the fees, but we had the resources to do so. More commonly, if a family can’t pay the price, and no free or low-cost “rec league” is available, a kid is out of the game. And that kid will often be black or Hispanic, as Census Bureau data show that African-American and Latino families are three times more likely than white families to be poor. The implications of these trends are obvious: only rich white kids will play youth sports.

If Hyman had left it at that, his thesis would be much more persuasive. Unfortunately, the author makes additional claims about the power of money that ignore the essential power of determination. He asserts that “commercialization,” the buying and selling of anything related to athletics, “is obscuring the life lessons of youth sports: striving, succeeding, and failing, always on the merits.” It’s hard to believe that a child would stop trying to win if only he could get that new pair of cleats. Better-designed skis allow kids to execute turns more easily but they are no substitute for practice. And Hyman’s own anecdotes undermine his contention: the child’s resolve, plus the coach’s teaching and mentoring and the parents’ support, yield success for the dyslexic baseball player from the suburbs as well as for the hard-working inner-city girl in the nonprofit SquashBusters program. As with most achievements, it’s what’s inside that counts.

And that’s the other issue here. Money can be detrimental to youth sports, but, in my experience, the bigger problem is often the parents. The mother who brags that “we” scored the winning goal isn’t really talking about her daughter. The hockey dad who banged another parent’s head on the ice until he died didn’t do so because his son was disappointed after a loss. This kind of narcissistic investment can be far more costly than expensive equipment. Such parents may insist that a concussed child return to the game or demand extra practice that can lead to overuse injuries and lifelong medical problems.

Hyman’s book forces us to consider youth sports as a financial venture. But asking “how much does it cost?” without asking “whose game is it, anyway?” seems to put the cart before the horse.  For now, I’m just glad to see the joy on my son’s face as he sprints down the field with his teammates. That kind of benefit should make any parent proud.

Now that Susan Green’s son is playing soccer in college, she has time to serve as Senior Review Editor of The Independent.