The Biden administration thinks children need much more running around than they are getting.
“The White House has announced a new partnership with major sports leagues,” reported the Washington Examiner’s Haisten Willis, “to promote physical activity and better nutrition among the nation’s youth.”
The Super Bowl will feature the rollout, and you can expect to read plenty in the media in the coming weeks about the health effects of children’s reduced physical activity.
There are many reasons children are more sedentary nowadays. The COVID lockdowns that closed schools, canceled youth sports, and criminalized pickup basketball games all habituated children into sitting at home on their couches in front of a screen.
Children walk places (to school, to the corner store, to the basketball courts, to their friends’ houses) far less often than they once did, thanks to sidewalk-poor suburbs built for cars, safetyism and helicopter parent mandates, and overscheduled childhoods.
Also, and this is one that most commentators miss, the elitification of youth sports has consigned millions of mediocre youth athletes to idleness. The Travel Team Trap ruins sports for nonelite athletes and ballplayers whose parents can’t keep up with the hustle.
Here’s how it works: The best players in town join the travel team. By age 10, it takes up all their time, and they couldn’t possibly make the rec league games. So the children left behind in the local rec league suffer because there aren’t good pitchers or quarterbacks or shooters, and many of the would-be coaches are in Delaware every weekend at their children’s 12U regional tournament.
John W. Miller wrote a long and insightful essay about this a couple of years ago, in which he made this crucial point:
“Baseball falls apart when the best players are siphoned off. A good example is pitching—youth baseball relies heavily on the skill of its pitchers. Without strike-throwers or fielders to back them up, baseball is absurdist slow-motion theater starring one pitcher hurling pebbles to the backstop. The rise of privatized sports has drawn the best pitchers away from volunteer-based leagues, raising the likelihood that a local recreational team lacks the skills needed for a decent game, driving average players to find other sports or to quit. Or, if they can afford it, to seek out private clubs.”
So it’s no wonder the number of children in youth sports has fallen. (The baseball numbers are down by about 25% in just 15 years.)
The mediocre athletes of my age played Little League and rec basketball alongside the future Division I stars. Today, the stars play in Delaware, and the mediocre children play on the PlayStation 5.
The drop-off in sports participation is even more serious among high school-aged kids, where the attitude is that you shouldn’t even try if you’re not top tier.
So if anyone from the White House travels the country trying to get children off the couch, they should start by telling parents to skip the travel team and to revitalize the local Little League.
This involves taking on a profitable goliath and reorienting the mindset of American parents, who now see it as their duty to give their children the elite of everything.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Here was a great tweet about the problem that went viral today.
It’s OK to let some children be below average. The alternative is the couch.
