The Death of High School Sports

My friends and family — really, anyone who’s known me for more than ten minutes — are amused by the parenting role that fits me most awkwardly: softball mom. Being a softball parent suits me like a concrete boot, starting with my dearth of sports knowledge, an achievement I unlocked by being neither athletic myself nor a fan of any team sport (watching obsessive amounts of tennis and Olympic figure skating apparently doesn’t count at all). Let’s just say the year my high school offered yoga for P.E. was a highlight of my adolescence.

Moreover, softball is not one of the more genteel sports — and I have been accused repeatedly throughout my life of being, well, “genteel” is a kind word. Snobby, elitist, stuck-up: these are all descriptors I’ve endured.Some of those words clung to me in part because my parents are British, and Americans reflexively associate the English with snobbery (see “Grey Poupon” mustard commercials and every mid-’80s movie villain). It may also have been because I neither owned a pair of jeans nor laid eyes on a keg until college, but could navigate the Paris Métro or lead you right to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. In high school, I was more likely to be re-reading Anna Karenina or watching “Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie” than reading a box score.

Which is all to say that the sidelines of any team sport was the last place anyone would have expected to find me. My conversations with other softball parents, from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, sometimes felt like practicing a foreign language. Nevertheless, in the true spirit of teamsmanship, these other parents have always been immensely welcoming and warm to me as I tried to blend in and learn their ways. I’ve sold “walking tacos” at tournament concessions, discussed the relative merits of tattoo placement (my favorite: the rosary anklet), and learned that every softball team has at least one player named Gianna but probably two or three. Coaches can be jerks, but softball families are fantastic. And they will feed you, too.

This cheery sideline camaraderie makes what’s lacking in youth sports even more poignant. As a softball outsider, I may sometimes be sketchy on the rules and customs of the game, but I can also see what others may not. My older child began playing on a whim at seven, became a pitcher through a combination of skill and temperament, and ended up on a Division III college team. This last is a fortuitous turn of events, since she played only one full high-school season — thanks, COVID — and never played on an elite club team, thanks to our refusal to spend every summer and weekend transporting her to tournaments and “clinics.” Unlike those who went on to Division I teams, our daughter’s life never revolved around softball. Nevertheless, she always loved it and while she enjoyed playing, she valued even more the idea of being part of a team. Sadly, too often this was just an idea rather than reality, as “team play” turned out to be elusive.

Among the very few things I knew about sports growing up was that being on a team was one of the highest and best things to which you could aspire. You would learn to be collaborative and team-spirited, you would have each other’s backs in victory and defeat, and you would work to achieve true sportsmanship — a higher-level cognitive skill that separates humankind from other animals. My own version of this, I’ve only recently realized, was in theater and singing, also collaborative endeavors where success depends on communication, mutual understanding and group effort. Pulling together successfully as a cast or a singing group provides the same kind of profoundly meaningful, whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thrill that I imagine a sports team feels. And the diva-like or selfish behavior that would sink a show and demoralize a cast was also discouraged on the field. Or so I thought.

Sadly, elitism, selfishness and individualism have permeated youth sports, degrading their higher purpose almost beyond recognition. For starters, if you ask a parent today why they want their child to participate in sports, what do you think the answer will be? I would be less surprised if they answered “to stay fit” or “for a college scholarship” than if they said something about sportsmanship or resilience. American parents, immersed in diet culture, are obsessed with keeping children’s bodies “active” — which usually translates to “thin” — and are also intensely anxious about college admissions. Youth sports has morphed into a profit-making complex that exploits parental anxieties rather than actually helping young athletes.

If you have a reasonably athletic teenager these days, chances are high they don’t just play on their school’s team. In fact, if you have a very athletic child, they may not play on their school’s team at all. When I was in high school in the1980s, high school sports were the pinnacle of teenage athletics — a varsity letter was a rite of passage, a badge of pride, a ticket to popularity and cool. At my small, all-girls school in New York City, getting into Nell’s was a far more potent path to coolness, but we saw all those teen movies too, so even we knew that varsity sports were cool for normal American teenagers. Thirty years later, high-school teams have become an afterthought or sideshow to the real action of club and travel teams.

When our younger daughter was in 8th grade she told us about upcoming tryouts for a new volleyball program. Because this was a club team, we needed to pay for the tryout (although it was at school). Because she was 13 and scary, we agreed, and soon enough she learned she — and her friends, hallelujah! — had “made the team.” Then we discovered that being on this team would cost thousands of dollars a year, not including travel expenses. As our daughter had never previously been interested in volleyball and was unlikely to exceed 5’ 4” in height, we screwed our courage to the sticking place and told her no. It was an unpleasant conversation, but we felt justified — after all, we were already sacrificing to send her to a school that was known for its strong athletics program. Naively, I thought other parents would also be outraged, but many families signed on immediately.

This experience is hardly an anomaly: the incursion of club sports into high schools is rampant across the country. People regularly pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for their children to participate in college “clinics” and “camps” that purport to be coaching or recruiting events but are definitely cash cows for the institutions and programs running them, who pay coaches to show up and collect fees from athletes’ families to be seen by them. Of course, this all runs counter to the ideal of sports as a vehicle to help less privileged students achieve their college dream. For many sports, parents pay enormous sums to private coaches and sports consultants to mold students into alluring college recruits. Many also pay consultants to create promotional packages for their potential recruits with camerawork and soundtracks to rival an ESPN highlights reel.

While the elitism fostered by this for-profit system is shameful, I believe the effect it has on the attitude of student athletes is just as bad. Because youth sports are centered more than ever on the dream of college recruitment, many student athletes come into the sport focused on what the sport, or the team, can do for them — the opposite of a team mentality. Also, because most high-school teams aren’t scouted by college coaches, the answer to “What can this team do for me?” is usually “not much.” As a result, the best high school athletes may also often be the least team-spirited and the poorest sports; they behave like they are doing everyone else a favor by showing up. This sets a terrible example and damages team morale. Perhaps in an individual sport like tennis it matters less, but on the softball field it’s disastrous. My daughter, after winning an award for being a strong student-athlete, was trolled online by some of her own teammates, as if they couldn’t handle praise for someone who played alongside them for years because they weren’t being lauded. It was sad. It’s possible these girls were just selfish or mean, but it seemed telling that it was some of the best players on the team — elite club players, more innately talented at softball than my child — who couldn’t accept, let alone applaud, their teammate’s success.

Many call the desire to play college sports a “dream” but for most families it’s a fantasy. The numbers are stark. Overall, 6% of high school athletes go on to play in the NCAA. Two percent play in Division I programs. And not all those students receive an athletic scholarship — in Division I, slightly over 50% receive athletic aid, and Division III does not give out athletic scholarships at all, though they do provide non-athletic aid such as merit scholarships (the average award is $17,000, which doesn’t take a huge bite out of a $65,000 annual cost). Furthermore, I would bet heavily that while certain sports have a high level of financial aid, the sports played mostly by white students (squash, crew and sailing, for example) have a much lower rate. In fact, were I running the numbers at an expensive, private, liberal arts college, I might see the pumped-up demand for spots on college teams as a golden opportunity — not only to recruit top athletes, but to attract the holy grail of college admissions: families willing and able to pay full tuition. I have no doubt that many families pass on more affordable colleges and universities if it means their child can play their sport at a collegiate level. Once you’ve invested years of time and money into that sport, isn’t it worth another four years of tuition to watch it all pay off in a college sports experience, which we’ve come to accept as the ne plus ultra of youth sports?

My child has just completed her first year as a college athlete, and she had a wonderful time. I joked that she knew more upperclassmen after the first two weeks than I did in my first two years; she gained confidence and community from her team; she loved her teammates, who took such good care of the first-year players. The team came out of the year with a losing record and didn’t make the championship tournament, but when she cried on the phone to us, it was because the season was ending, not because of how it ended. In some ways, I wonder whether being on a less competitive team in a less competitive conference is sort of perfect: you get the bonding effect of teamsmanship, the excitement of games and structure of practices, the pleasure of cheering for and being cheered on by your friends; but because this truly is the final event — none of these young women are going to play competitively beyond college — you are no longer burdened by the negative aspects of the high-school years. No more too-pushy parents, no more for-profit club teams, no more purely selfish striving. I wish it were possible to regain some of that purity of purpose in the high-school years when our student athletes are at their most impressionable. Still, I am thrilled that our daughter is once again — for the first time since her little league days — experiencing the real joys of being part of a team.