Youth Sports: Innocence Lost

"I stopped going to gymnastics and soccer because after a while it became like work, no fun...I used to like it. " (11 year-old boy, San Fernando Valley, California) Adults volunteer their time, talent, and energy in youth sports in order to preserve civility, to ensure equal opportunity, to maintain a safe environment, and to provide adequate instruction. Years of observation and systematic study support the notion that most parents, coaches, and administrators get involved with youth sport programs for the right reasons and approach their new responsibility with their best intensions (Frankl, 2006a). What at first seems as an innocent activity (Herbst, 2000), however, turns in many instances into endless hours of travel, practice, and competition. Once overly invested and stretched, parents feel a moral justification to pressure their child to step-up her/his commitment and thus practice more often and for longer hours (Frankl, 2006a). Considerable financial, time, and emotional commitments are used as a leverage to extract more from the child, who is made to feel guilty if he/she does not deliver on the investment. There comes the time when parent and child, quite unexpectedly, find themselves caught up in "the middle of the highly pressurized, complex, and confusing world of competitive [youth sports] (Groppel, Loehr, Melville, & Quinn