406. Let Kids Play: Fixing Youth Sports with Linda Flanagan Why have youth sports become a pressure cooker of competition, money, and burnout instead of fun, growth, and play? Journalist and author Linda Flanagan joins us to break down: -The three biggest reasons kids' sports have changed for the worse—and what we can do about it.-How parents can rethink their role on the sidelines, engage with coaches, and set healthy boundaries.-Why specializing in one sport too early can actually hurt long-term athletic success.-The hidden consequences of linking kids' self-worth to their performance. About Linda: LINDA FLANAGAN is a freelance journalist, a former cross-country and track coach, and the author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters. A graduate of Lehigh University, Flanagan holds master’s degrees from Oxford University and the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and was an analyst for the National Security Program at Harvard University. She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance, a contributor to Project Play at the Aspen Institute, and a regular writer for NPR’s education site MindShift. Her columns on sports have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Runner’s World, and she is currently co-producing a documentary series on mental health in collegiate women athletes. A mother of three and a lifelong athlete, Flanagan lives in Summit with her fabulous husband, Bob, and a small menagerie of pets. She is still floating over Malcolm Gladwell’s recent claim that Take Back the Game was one of his favorite books last year. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why have youth sports become a pressure cooker?
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Hey everybody, this is Amanda. Before we dive in, we want to say this. We believe in the power of sports. As the daughter of a football coach, the wife of a basketball and baseball coach, as myself the coach of my daughter's lacrosse, basketball, and volleyball teams,
And as the mother of two kids whose selfless, grounded coaches and dogged teammates have strengthened their grit, confidence, and leadership through sport, I know how remarkably invaluable sport can be to grow us and connect us. But as we are talking about today, sports are neither good nor bad. Sports are an empty vessel.
And depending on what you fill that vessel up with, sport can either be deeply nourishing or or deeply toxic. Today, we are talking about the flood of money and dramatic increases in stress and pressure in the sports industrial complex that are poisoning the vessel of youth sports for kids and families.
Journalist Linda Flanagan helps us unpack what's gone wrong and how we can bring back the best of what sports have to offer to our kids.
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. And today to help us figure out what has gone wrong with kids sports and how we can make it just a little healthier for our own families and communities is Linda Flanagan. Linda is a freelance journalist, former cross-country and track coach, and the author of Take Back the Game, How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids' Sports and Why it Matters.
She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance, a contributor to Project Play at the Aspen Institute, and a regular writer for NPR's education site, MindShift. She is also currently co-producing a documentary series, on mental health in collegiate women athletes.
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Chapter 2: What are the three biggest reasons youth sports have changed?
And so what might look like resilience, what might look like short-term performance is actually fear-based and If we're not testing those assumptions, we might be building the absolute wrong kind of character that we think they are. Correct? Absolutely.
Yep. I think, again, sports are an empty vessel. I believe done in the right environment, they can be great for kids. I think exercise in the right environment, in the right amounts, it is an empty vessel. So we do have to challenge assumptions about what's good for us and our kids.
And I think one of the things that really sticks out when I'm listening to both of you talk right now is my personal experience. And what I believed brought me great character traits, in fact, were just great coaches. People in my life that taught me the lessons that I was kind of couching in the whole term sport, right? And I think that that is really important.
My mom told me this when I was very young. She said, it is important that you guys play sports. And she told me this when I was older too. She was very careful on what coaches she put me in front of. And now I'm seeing that with our 16-year-old daughter with her club coaches. There's some questions that I have that I'm wondering, right?
you know, is this a good place for her to be developing as a full upright adult one day? And I'm not a hundred percent certain. Can you just give us a little bit of just background as to why this has happened in youth sports? Your book really does a great job at it.
Yes. So I identify three main reasons for the change in youth sports from, you know, the way it used to be when it was more low key and relaxed and child driven. The first is that it's a big business. We think we all know that the youth sports industrial complex and the numbers are all over the map in terms of how much it's worth. But it's roughly a 30 billion dollar industry.
And the Aspen Institute reported that parents spend between 30 and 40 billion dollars a year. Now, the industry developed this way for a variety of reasons, starting in the 70s when public funding declined for parks and recreational type programs that were open to all. And private enterprise stepped in and started filling that void. Then we had Title IX, which brought more girls in. Great.
So there's more demand and demand. business starting to fill in the gaps. And then a pivotal moment was Disney's opening of the Wide World of Sports Complex, which is so interesting to me. I talked to one of the guys who was there at the beginning and he said, look, it was, we needed to put heads in beds.
It was a strategy to get more teenagers at Disney World because they generate revenue when they go to the hotels and And parks and most teenagers tire of the Magic Kingdom. So they developed this complex kind of, you know, as an experiment. And then they found when 9-11 happened that parents pulled back, travels, you know, slowed way down, but it didn't slow down to Disney's wide world of sports.
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Chapter 3: How can parents rethink their role in youth sports?
Thank you. I'm watching them. I'm stuck here four hours a day. I understand they're not super talented. Like something else is going on here. And also I am. trying to avoid this like suck into one thing. And also then it takes over the whole family's life. And then they're all revolved around this one thing. And then by the way, what does that do to the kid?
Then the kid knows our whole family's life is revolved around my performance in this one thing. And that's not what we're doing here. That ups the pressure so much. I'm confused in general about pursuit of excellence. I feel like
Assuming that we should all be pursuing excellence, I've experienced and know too many people who are the carrots of the system and watched their mental health, their physical health. I've felt it in myself. I think the cost of it might be too high. I think that everyone's a victim of systems of exceptionalism, everyone who doesn't make it, and especially those who do. make it.
I was listening to you talk about a podcast. Can you tell us what the long-term results on mental health and emotional health of those D1 athletes is?
Yeah, it was very surprising and counterintuitive to me to find that D1 athletes have been studies done by a woman named Janet Smith, who found that D1 athletes had lower quality of life measures had worse sleep, worse, lower wellbeing measures and less physical activity than their non-athletic college peers or their non, you know, varsity athletic peers.
And you're talking about long-term when they're like 40 or whatever. Yes. In their fifties, you know, they, yes.
Surveyed later, they were less active, more unhappy or unsettled than their peers were. who hadn't played. Another point though, which is related because I think college sports are a little, these are so extreme is that the single best predictor of whether you'll be active later in adulthood is whether you played a varsity sport in high school.
To me, that's the sweet spot is varsity sports in high school. If you can do it great. And then it kind of develops that habit. Maybe that's an old fashioned view. If you leave out the club stuff for a minute, But college sports, they're a whole other ballgame. I mean, the commitment that's required, the physical, the exhaustion. They have two full-time jobs, and it takes a massive toll. Yeah.
Can we talk about parent sideline culture and what is going on? I want to start by telling you that when Abby came and said we couldn't be mediocre anymore, which, by the way, I think our kids are as confident and beautiful. What Abby brought was absolutely necessary. I wouldn't change it in any way. But we were on this, like, fancier team or something. I don't know.
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Chapter 4: Is specializing in one sport too early harmful?
Well, if you can X out all the influences that are saying specialize early, you know, sign your kid up five years old, all of that, you know, in a perfect world, I think the, They play a lot, unstructured play outside with like-minded age-related peers, a little older, a little younger. I spoke to the professor, Peter Gray, who's really an expert on play.
And, you know, this is where kids learn emotional resilience. They develop confidence. They develop a feeling of competence and independence. So this is something we've taken away from kids. Let your kids play unstructured and get out of the way. As they get older, I think it's great to introduce them to sports that doesn't have to be organized.
In elementary school, I think some rec teams are great. I think they're wonderful for kids to meet other kids. If they're like local and they're low key and the focus is on development, fun, keep dabbling and exploring what interests them. There's this document called the Children's Bill of Rights in Sports that is a big thing in Norway.
And we've started to adopt it in some communities here in the U.S. The first principle is let children decide what they want to do. Yep. Ask them what they want. And as they get older, and if they're interested in a particular sport, and those who are, indulge it to the extent that you're comfortable with as a family.
I think you hold off on specializing as long as possible, as long as you think it's doable that they'll be able to still be competitive, but not at first grade, not at second grade. It's not in their interest to do it that young. As they get older and then they decide they want to, I think it really has to come from the kid. And there's this quote I love from Steve Magnus, that Olympic coach.
There's no such thing as an 11 year old sports star. So get over your eight year old, bring it home a trophy. Like don't make a big deal of it and let them dabble and then kind of choose their own path. And with any luck, they'll play in high school on a varsity team if they're good enough. I frankly am really split about whether, particularly for women, if college sports are so great.
I'm not sure I'd want my daughter to play for a college team. Why? Well, if you look at the data, and I'm involved in a documentary project on mental health of collegiate women athlete. It's called Beyond Stigma. And if you look at the data, and I can share it with you, in 2023, the NCAA did a survey of women. mental health of men and women in college sports. It's like over 20,000.
And in every single measure, the women did worse and sometimes significantly worse than the men. So overall, 44% of collegiate women athletes felt constantly overwhelmed by all they had to do. The men, it was just 19%. 29% of the women felt overwhelming anxiety, just 9% of the men did. Women athletes report much higher rates of clinically significant depression. They get injured a lot more.
I'm sure Abby, you are aware of this in your career in sports that they tear their ACLs four times the rate that men do in sex comparable sports. And the ACL is the big ligament in the knee that when you tear it, it's a long rehab process and usually require surgery. And half of those people are going to get arthritis within 10 years.
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Chapter 5: What are the hidden consequences of linking self-worth to performance?
I don't have to be careful about what I say. I think about it a little differently than you do because you've not been in it. for all of the years. I've been conditioned to believe that some of this stuff is normal. It's been normalized to me. I can understand how it can look and feel for somebody who hasn't been in it.
I guess what I've seen from the outside and then you say from the inside, it feels to me like when an Abby or say some of her at the same level friends approach or try to involve themselves in coaching staffs that I would think they would be falling over backwards.
You would think? Yeah, former national team players, former professional athletes.
At the club level, because their kids are in it, or at the college level, because they went there. It is perceived as more of a threat to shut down than a gift to accept. And they are pushed to the side and there's resistance. There is no room for you here. in a level that stuns me.
Yeah. It's a really interesting thing. It's kind of baffling because these men who have built these college programs or these systems for, you know, many, many years, some of which I'm friends with and trust and actually were some of my favorite coaches. It's interesting to me that the first thought OK, I've built this system of women.
I've built this 30 years of plus of alumni that many are actually in the game coaching at other colleges, lower level colleges, because they haven't established themselves yet. I have all of these other women who could potentially take over for me. To me, that feels like such a full circle, like here we are. But it's interesting to think about how it's not the path that they take.
They hire more men in their coaching staffs and then they groom these men to take over for them when they want to step away from the game and they do it in such a way That it makes it kind of impossible for the college to pick their own coach.
They tell us we arrange it so that we have I quit at a certain time. That's too late for anyone to vote. And then my protege, this guy, he will step in and then there will be no time for any sort of inquiry. And this is how we will continue.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How can we improve youth sports culture?
And it's autopilot. There's no more intentionality over anything. It's just pull the bar down on the seat and we're off. And then you're out. I think the other thing, Glennon, something that I've had to reckon with is just really thinking about what I say I care about and what I actually care about and then getting clear with myself about where there's a rub between the two.
Because if I actually care when my kid doesn't perform well, then I need to be real intellectually honest with myself about, is that what I'm doing here? Is that what I actually care about? Or do I actually care that they're in here working it out for themselves and getting back up again, lifting up their teammates, like really distilling what you care about.
And then when you inevitably feel sad or disappointed or discouraged, or you can be like, oh, breathe through it. But good thing that's not what I actually care about. Because what I actually care about is this thing. And you can ground yourself there, but it gets really confusing in the moment if you don't actually know what you care about. That's really good.
And I think it's really important to have other things in life than sports. For all kids, even those like you, Abby, who are as good as you or on that path, that they have other outlets in life so that all their eggs aren't in one basket, so that if they get hurt, they're not... bereft. And so many of the experts say this, that kids need multiple sources of meaning in their life.
It's not just from a sport. It's from something that's not quantifiable. Maybe it's knitting or cooking or art or working in an animal shelter, but other sources of meaning in their life so that all is not lost when their athletic career is over at whatever age that is. But if it becomes everything, it's going to be a very hard readjustment.
So you want to encourage kids to do other things besides sports, have downtime.
And also not the only source of connection to you in your relationship with your kid, because then they might be thinking, I give up my sport. I give up my bond with my dad. I give up my sport. I give up my time with my mom. Like you need the multiple connection points with your kid too, because that's really confusing to them.
You guys, thank you. I really appreciate that you're having these conversations. I think just exposing all of this and talking about it is going to help just in that. Just to make all the parents feel less crazy and
be a little more intentional about the decisions we're making I think also parents need to try to reclaim their agency somewhat especially when the kids are young to not feel like they have to do two seasons of soccer when their kids are nine years old they don't have to do this it's a choice and That club coaches aren't the boss of them, that they can assert their agency as parents.
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