NB: links used in this blog post are exclusively of Swedish origin and language, and are used only as references; they do not contain any important information needed to understand this blog post.
This information, which was brought to my attention by the Swedish news program Aktuellt, fills me with a great sense of poignant despair, mostly since I myself am a coach for a youth American football team. In my team we wouldn’t even dream of doing something like that, even if we could (we don’t have enough players to be able to be selective). We base our philosophy on two very important principles:
- The kids must have fun; if they don’t have fun every single practice, we’re doing something wrong.
- We should also strive to educate our players; not only in the sport itself but also in a wider context, as human beings, including a lot of responsibility and leadership, empathy, and morals.
Besides from this, we of course try to win games; there’s no sense in competing if you’re not doing your best to win; however, pursuit of winning must never precede the two principles established earlier. All the players will have a starting position (if not too many players, of course, then we’ll just cycle in-game), and no player must ever feel left out of the game. If we get a kid that wants to play, that kid is going to play, end of story, regardless of his athletic ability; though we of course can’t put a player in a situation where he doesn’t know what he’s going to do and most likely will end up hurt.
That problem can be easily solved by making sure, at practice, that every single kid knows a position and is capable of playing that position without putting him or anyone else at a great risk of injury. It is not even remotely impossible; not even hard to do, as long as you are willing to accept that the chances of putting the most points on the scoreboard (which in my book is not identical to winning; there are a lot of ways to win) are decreased. And this you must do, and you must remember that the kids are there to have fun; who will ever think back at winning a peewee game when they were 11 and going “Yeah, that was so awesome that we won that game”? No one. Instead it is more likely, and I know this from personal experience from my own peewee days, that they’ll go “Yeah, that was so much fun we had there, do you remember when ‘this and that happened’? Can’t remember what the score was though.”
However, there is, sadly, a widespread use of selecting the ‘best’ 9, 10, 11, or 12-year old boys to an elite team inside Swedish soccer organisations, all in the pursuit of excellence and winning a championship; for kids. And small kids are told “You are not good enough”, and not let into the team. Other small kids are told “You need to practice harder – it’s not supposed to be fun.” Imagine the stress this puts on the child – he must always perform at his absolute best to even be kept in the team. Is it even legal to put small children under such extreme pressure?
In fact, all this goes against the recommendations stated by the organisation responsible for all sports-related events in Sweden, Riksidrottsförbundet; the problem is that its just recommendations, not anything that can be forced upon the sports club, so basically the clubs can keep doing it without anyone to stop them. The policy my own team applies completely correlates with RF’s policy, found here.
Lets revisit why the elitist thinking is bad. One reason is that there has been a study showing that no individual can be determined if he/she is going to be any good in any sport, until that individual is at least 17 years of age (I am now rather annoyed that I can’t find this research, but it’s there – you’ll have to trust me). In fact, if you ask many of today’s top athletes when they started practicing their sport, many of them would probably give you the answer that they did it when they were somewhere around 16, 17, or 18 years old. There is actually one Swedish runner who now competes at elite level, who had never practiced running until she was 18. So the argument that it would produce better athletes for the future is pretty much an illusion.
And again – the pressure this puts on the kids. I can’t stress this point enough; it is simply not OK to force a young boy into an elitist thinking where he must perform at his very best at every single practice or else he’ll get kicked out. And remember all those kids who are not allowed into the elite section, while, perhaps, their friends are. To act like a psychologist: “How does that make them feel?” I’m guessing bad. Very bad, resulting in low self-esteem and with that the doors to a variety of different problems open up. What happens when you take out your frustration on not making the team by bullying some kid in school? Then we suddenly have a major societal issue, all caused by elitist thinking in a sports club. And that, I think we can all agree, is not very good.
I think the very existence of this elitist thinking for youth sports clubs is appalling, and it must be stopped immediately, lest we have a bunch of kids breaking down into nervous wrecks, or kids who see life as a competition where one must win, always, and that failure is not an option. Are these the sort of people we want in our society? Ruthless, competitive machines who must always maximise efficiency and ‘win’? Or do we want caring, empathetic people who can actually benefit the society; people who we would love to have as our neighbours? It’s up to us.
