Mark St. Amant thinks that one youth soccer league’s twist on the mercy role (score too many goals, and you automatically lose) is a sure sign that we’re careening toward Crazyville.
An apocalypse of yet-to-be-determined magnitude is on its way.
The specifics, at present, are unclear. But it’ll very likely include fires, tornadoes, floods, pestilence, locusts—your basic Biblical shit, minus the nuclear holocaust which, I believe, was not part of the Old Testament.
And the root of said apocalypse? Kim Jong-il’s nuclear arsenal-slash-batshit craziness? The fun-lovin’ Osama bin Laden? Deadly rioting after Brett Favre announces that (oops!) he’s not returning to the Vikings after all?
Nope—it’ll be caused by the complete and utter wussification of youth sports. Let me explain…
In sports, the “mercy rule”—also known by the more violent, bloodthirsty, Braveheart battlefield-ish nickname of the “slaughter rule”—has traditionally worked like so: if a team jumps out to a seemingly insurmountable lead, the game/match/contest is ended, giving the dominant team a well-earned win and presumably sparing the losing team any further public humiliation or self-esteem erosion.
But a youth soccer league in Ottawa, Canada, has recently established a mercy-rule-in-reverse-twisted-sideways, and it works like so: if a team jumps out to a lead of five goals or more, that team forfeits. No, you’re not drunk; you read that correctly. Play too well and you automatically lose!
In other words, if a team threatens its sensitive opponents’ nascent, porcelain mouse-fragile self-esteem—even though five goals, while a nice lead, is by no means insurmountable—that team, in the spirit of would-be sportsmanship and “can’t we just all get along” squishy-huggy-joy-joy run amok, is penalized with a loss, thus, like the original mercy rule, also sparing the real losing team any further public humiliation.
Oh, and then there’s this: in 2008, parents in the Youth Baseball League of New Haven, Connecticut, began boycotting games and refusing to allow their kids to play whenever a young pitcher named Jericho Scott took the mound. Why? Because Jericho had the sheer audacity to be—wait for it—too…good…at…pitching!
He threw too hard, they complained. Was too dominant. Too accurate. (Too accurate? Wouldn’t you prefer—and encourage—pitchers in your kid’s baseball league to possess enough control not to drill your son or daughter in the dome?) The league even threatened to disband Jericho’s team and redistribute his teammates to other teams, sort of a prepubescent version of Major League contraction.
And while I can see maybe doing this to, say, the Pittsburgh Pirates, doing so to a Little League team because one kid happens to be succeeding too much is just naked-Gary-Busey-riding-a-unicycle-with-a-meth-smoking-ferret-on-his-shoulders-level crazy.
Especially when you consider this: Poor Jericho was 9.
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Not to play the In-My-Day-We-Walked-To-School-In-the-Snow-Uphill-Wearing-Cardboard-Shoes card, but back in the ‘70’s, there was a kid in my little league named Scott Lodgek. The dude was like 6-foot-9 in sixth grade. He threw absolute gas. And this might just be my mythologizing him over time, but I think he even had a moustache.
Not a bushy Tom Selleck kinda deal, but the other, far worse kind: that unruly, scattershot, Bob Dylan barbed wire-looking mess that says, “I don’t know why God has cursed me with pubic hairs under my nose, but I’m going to take it out on you little shits by drilling your skulls with 96 mile-per-hour cut fastball.
I’d go up to bat, close my eyes, swing through three Rawlings blurs, and go sit back down. Done and done. No tears. No self-worth destruction. Just… the way it was. Lodgek owned me and everyone else. And he deserved to because he worked at his skill, honed it, practiced it, and earned it. No one gave him anything.
But did this occasional emasculation mean that I, or any other kid, who failed miserably started taking their frustration out on neighborhood animals, or grew up to be Ted Bundy? No. (At least not that I know of.)
Did my coaches or parents feel the need to pull Scott aside and whisper “Uh, say there, big fella, maybe you could tone it down a bit, throw underhand, just to make these poor little guys feel better about themselves.” No. We went up there, took three cuts, and sat back down, relieved that he didn’t give us a concussion.
All of which made it that much sweeter the first time I swung and—ping!—took a patented Lodgek heater over the Hunnewell Field fence for a three-run bomb. That’s because after so much failure, success felt… earned.
Does Harvard accept kids with C-minus averages just to make them feel, well, accepted? Do the New England Patriots give massive signing bonuses to guys who catch passes with their faces, not their hands? Does Goldman Sachs accept barely literate, unscrupulous charlatans into its residential mortgage-backed securities department? Okay, bad example on that last one.
But you get the point—real life doesn’t work like Jericho Scott’s baseball league. You shouldn’t be handed something just because you feel you deserve it, or just for showing up.
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I think the reason I’m starting to obsess about this alarming Everybody Gets a Trophy syndrome is that my daughter, Harper, just turned 4. Meaning we’re about to start that phase of her life where nights and weekends are filled with various soccer-swimming-tee ball-esque activities. I just signed her up for Boulder’s “Little Dribblers” soccer program seconds before writing this, in fact, and we’ll soon perform that suburban dad-and-daughter ritual known as shin guard shopping.
And I honestly worry that, when I start coaching, I won’t be able to hide my disdain for this touchy-feely, “certificate of participation”-filled parenting/coaching philosophy that’s spread like so much Ebola these past few years.
That’s not to say that I advocate being another Marv Marinovich, the longtime poster boy for the sports version of the Obsessed Stage Parent. He was a training freak and football svengali who infamously and relentlessly drove his son, Todd, almost from birth to become an NFL quarterback. Marv’s craziness included stringent workouts (in-crib pushups when Todd was one month old), a nutrition program (Todd was forced to bring his own sugar-free/refined flour cake to birthday parties, and balance and agility workouts before he could even walk. For Marv, Todd wasn’t so much a little boy as a gridiron lab rat who missed his entire childhood. But it worked.
Kinda. After a hot start to Todd’s career at USC—he led the Trojans to the Rose Bowl as a freshman—he soon clashed with then head coach Larry Smith and, the following season, …continued on page two Pages: 1 2
About Mark St. Amant
Vocalyze
I said it when they banned aluminum bats in little league and I’ll say it now; It’s a competition. A game. There will be winners and there will be losers. As long as the rules are applied equally, it’s as fair as it’s going to get. Some kids are bigger, stronger and faster. Get over it.
I signed my son up for football in a Pop Warner league as soon as he was old enough. He ended up playing as the quarterback on a team that was, on average, shorter and younger than every other team in the league. During the first season, his team lost ten out of the eleven games they played because the kids on the other teams were older, bigger and faster.
It was a good lesson for both of us. Life is not fair. I always encouraged him to do better next time and only criticised when it was constructive.
They played the next season with almost the same roster and they won seven out of the eleven games because they were bigger, stronger and faster than half of the other teams. My son celebrated every win and graciously accepted every loss. I don’t want to get all Neitzsche on ya, but sometimes, in order to truely appreciate a win you must first know what it’s like to lose.
Participation awards encourage mediocrity.
I played Little League baseball for one season, the summer of 1963. We lost our first game … a fielding error of mine led to us getting clobbered. We hung our heads and slunk off the field as best we could.
Every single day of the next week we held practice … 2-3 hours at a whop until our tongues stuck to our lips and we were near to passing out. We went home when we had to go home. Not before.
There were no adults anywhere near.
We never lost another game in regular season and swept the playoffs as well.
Look it up … “Wagars Market”, Flat Rock, MI 1963
The point? When kids need their parents permission or a ride or anything else beyond the minimum equipment for the sport to excel, they are being held back. All a kid really needs is the ‘want to’ and a place to let it happen.
My solution is to just get your sons involved with boy scouts instead of sports. They’re never going to be professional athletes anyway!
Consider the possibility that we’re all looking at this the wrong way, or should I say (so nobody will be offended) through a different lens. The issue, rather than the wussification of youth sports, is the organization of youth sports by adults. Games, for children age 4/5/6 are meant to be games of imagination, trial and error, naturally occuring, with intense physical, emotional skill development. The beauty of soccer is…put a gaggle of kids on a field with a ball and it happens naturally. Let em play, run around, keep score, do whatever comes naturally. Lets take the “organized” out of youth sports and return the playground to kids, let them play. Plenty of time to exoerience the organizing principals later.
My son Jake, now 24, grew up skiing and snowboarding. I used to push him to race, join a race team and train. “Nope”, was his standard response, if there was a response at all.
One summer day we were out riding bicycles, he was maybe 8 or 9, we’re riding side by side and I said, “How about thinking about joining the race program this winter?” What’s wrong with me that I’m talking to him about this in July?
Jake slams on the brakes, comes to a tire srubbing halt, looks up at me and says, “Dad, skiing is not about racing. Skiing is about having fun!”
Shut me up good.
BTW, Jake went on to become a competitive snowboarder in high school but more importantly he is an absolutely awesome freerider, one of the great people I know to go out and tear up a mountain.
I was raised by a father who was more of a coach than a breadwinner. He was a real life high school coach and brought his work home. I used to say “we’re not a family we’re a team”. The training began young in hockey, skiing and swimming. My two brothers and I started in each sport at about age 5 but as we grew older became stars in our own rights in one of them. I was the swimmer. There was no swim team for me to join in the town I grew up in so dad just enrolled me in swim meets around the state as an individual. At 8 years old I stood shivering in a wet bathing suit on a block in front of a hundred people I didn’t know eyeing up the competition. When I dove into that pool it was win or lose. The lessons I learned from this have proved invaluable to me in life. I discovered my fierce warrior spirit but also a compassion for the loser. In college I tried for the nationals. It was throw-up scary to be swimming against the best and I had to reach deep to gather all of my strength and mental focus in order to even compete. The point of all this is that if my dad had not entered me in those do or die meets, put me up against the better athlete then I’m wondering where I would have developed important skills like risk taking, embracing challenge, realizing that you have more strength than you thought, winning, losing..real life stuff.. I don’t have children so didn’t know about this “mercy rule” until reading this but am dismayed at a trend that will only give children a false sense of how life works..that one they’re destined to play in as adults. Hail Mark for firing up this conversation on how our children and society are evolving. It us up to us what happens next.
Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. That’s the point of pieces like this, and of this entire magazine: to start and ongoing (and, if possible, coherent) discussion. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to a piece about NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s sudden & hypocritical wussification of pro football via his new anti-”illegal”-hit policy…
I think the outrage over not keeping score and handing out participation trophies for little kids’ sports is one of the more comical blips on our cultural landscape. If anyone can persuasively argue that one of the great empires of history was laid low by little kids’ participation trophies, well, go ahead. My guess is that the Romans were simply relieved anytime a youngster reached his/her fifth birthday. “Wussification” was a later, secondary concern.
I’ll second the argument that we should not assume that organized sports are good. My dad did not once suggest that I participate in something like that, although he led by example with his interest in “lone wolf” sports that didn’t necessarily focus on a score: mountaineering, distance running, and the occasional ocean swim. Mom once suggested that I sign up for Little League so she might meet the eligible dads of my team-mates. Gotta love the ’70s! Dysfunctional as hell, but no helicopter hockey soccer parents.
In my experience with my two boys and organized sports, I’ve seen good and bad. Mini-riots over questionable umpire calls? Check. Parents yellow carded at soccer games? Check. Stacking of teams? Check. But I also remember some beautiful cameraderie and the thrilling climax of my oldest son’s baseball career, a Minors championship. But basically, I’m glad to see they’re into the “lone wolf” or “extreme” sports that have descended from surfing and skateboarding. They both love rock-climbing, hiking aimlessly in the open desert behind our house, and b.s.-ing while shooting baskets in the street.