BERKELEY, CA – “You want to see what Americans care about?” Michael Lewis asks.
You probably know Lewis. He takes sports and societal narratives – the sabermetric undercurrent, a homeless kid seemingly born to be a left tackle, the careful yet tough influence of a high school coach – and turns them into influential books.
The really good subjects, he has found, are right under your nose and no one is saying anything about them. That eventually becomes impossible.
Take travel sports.
“Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,” Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. “They care about that more than anything.”
Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: “Travel sports is the work of the devil.”
Reeves’ three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex.
“You’ve got these kids being hauled around the country and thinking they gotta do this, parents shouting at the kids and they had scouts there and individual coaches,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “I was horrified by the culture around it.”
Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers.
“The most pathetic character inside it is the one who’s paying for it all,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win,” his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex.
“The sports parent funds the entire operation but is regarded by everyone else as expendable. The central truth of this elaborate mechanism we’ve built so that our children might compete against each other might be this: How little a parent can do to help the child. As a result, the overwhelming emotion of the sport parent is anxiety.”
But would he do it again? It’s a question he thought about as he wrote, and as he spoke to the crowd at Project Play five years later about what has become a $40 billion industry.
The two authors (and dads) offer perspective on their zany escapades within travel ball and advice on how we can negotiate it – or perhaps avoid it entirely.
Travel and youth sports can give parents a ‘moral education’
Lewis has raised two daughters and a son with his wife, Tabitha Soren. Soren thought softball would be a nice way for dad and his young daughters, Quinn and Dixie, to bond.
What could go wrong? Ther local softball league was founded by Cal religion professor Harlan Stelmach under the premise it existed for the “moral education of parents.”
It was against the rules to talk about the score, or even to use verbs from the stands to instruct or criticize your daughter while she was playing.
“Left to their own devices, children playing sports make it fun,” Stelmach said. “It’s when adults get involved that the problems arise.”
The goal was a .500 record, and an evaluation was held to select teams balanced equally by skill.
But dad coaches whose daughters were good players told their children to “tank” their formal evaluations so they would be undervalued. The rules were about adult behavior.
“You’re not just teaching the kids, you’re teaching the parents,” Lewis says. “Most of the competitive landscape was Daddy ball. It was dads who cared too much, who were frustrated by their own lack of success as baseball players, whose wives had seen this is the one way to interest their husband in their daughter was to get them into competitive sports and have them run their sporting lives.”
Haley Woods, an All-American catcher and power hitter at Cal who coached Dixie Lewis when she became a competitive travel player, had a poignant message for parents. It’s what we need to understand when our kids are young: Don’t see them as who you wish them to be, but for who they are.
Growing up in England, Reeves played sports all the time, with no infatuation with what he might become. Rugby didn’t help you get into Oxford, anyway.
“I wasn’t very good at anything, but my dad coached rugby,” Reeves says. “He’d played. We’d cut a hole in the fence so we could get into the school tennis courts, and they looked the other way, and summers were spent on the tennis courts. I never had an hour of tennis coaching in my life, but I’m an OK tennis player as a result. …
“I was fortunate enough to grow up with a very clear sense from my parents of the joy and the value of sport, but always on the play side. … I lived in fear of one of my kids getting good enough to play travel sports.”
Reeves wrote the 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About it.” His session at Project Play addressed youth coaches and administrators looking for ways to engage more boys in sports as their participation numbers are plummeting.
Problems with boys and girls sports can arise when we get out of our comfortable communities and into the industrial complex.
“It’s like, you have these small furry creatures who have been raised on an island without predators,” Lewis says.
We toss them into the jungle, and our education continues.
Observing travel sports can be a pill for improving a child’s character
At some point, with players’ and parents’ inner ambition brimming beneath the surface, the Berkeley softball league formed a travel team. Lewis’ older daughter, Quinn, was 9.
Now they were driving an hour away to play. At first they got pummeled, which tested the adults’ limits’ of frustration.
“At a kid’s ballgame, you’re never quite sure who’s going to go mad – only that someone will,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win.”
No trait – education level, income, race or gender – was predictive of it, he observed. The explosion happened to the Berkeley parents the first time the team was close to winning.
Near the end of the game, one of their runners slid into home. The umpire called her safe. Lewis recalled four opposing coaches running out of the dugout and screaming at her, profanities flying.
The umpire started to cry.
“The Berkeley parents were always very good at not being the first one to throw a punch,” Lewis said, “but (they) are always on a hair trigger for other parents’ bad behavior. So their coaches get their fans riled up, they’re all screaming at the ump. The Berkeley parents are then outraged.
“On the field, they’re like 20 little girls looking back and forth, with 70 parents screaming at the top of their lungs, veins popping, faces red. Through the noise – and the din was incredible – you heard this Berkeley mom shriek, What horrible modeling for our children.”
The umpire tossed the opposing head coach. He then told her he was director of facilities and said she was fired. Lewis followed her as she moped toward the parking lot. He had to give her a pep talk to stay.
“I remember having this feeling like, yeah, on the surface, it is horrible,” he said. “On the other hand, softball became one way to show my children – and then basketball with my son – how not to behave as a grown-up.
“Mostly what they got from grown-ups was a lot of artificial behavior, like polite grown-up behavior. When they saw the mask come off, then we can have a serious talk about how you behave and shouldn’t behave.”
It’s a tactic Jeff Nelligan, another sports dad and commentator on American parenting I’ve interviewed, used with his three sons. Daily life, he writes, offers advice moms and dads can’t concoct on their own: good, bad, and inspirational.
Our job, Nelligan says, is to judge what we see.
“Every single one of us makes judgments about people and situations throughout our day,” he writes. “It’s the only way to successfully navigate through life.”
We learn about the length people go for our kids, and when we go too far. Perhaps for Lewis, it was when he went to Cal’s women’s softball team and, in his words, “threw a sack of money” at its players to coach the Berkeley team and reverse their losing.
Or when he was interviewing then-President Barack Obama for a story aboard Air Force One. When they arrived in Washington, the president asked Lewis to ride back to the White House to continue their discussion.
Lewis said he had to rush home for a girls softball tournament.
COACH STEVE: Ranking the 6 worst youth sports parents
Don’t look at travel sports as something that will pay for college, but as a learning experience
The next time you’re at your child’s game and want to say something out loud, pretend you are on a national stage. With social media documenting everything, you essentially are.
Before you speak, think about what you are about to say, whether it be an in-game instruction to your kid, who might just glare at you, or a jab at another parent, which will make you a spectacle.
Sports parenting is a lot like driving, Lewis writes. He says you want to go over and scream at the coach who benched your child like you want to give the finger to the person who cheated at the four-way stop sign. But 24 hours later, you have trouble even remembering why you got so upset.
Your exercise can start when your kids are young, when the stakes are much lower, nonexistent really. What you stop yourself from saying might teach you something about the industrial complex you are about to enter.
Reeves, the British author, says he came into it blindly.
“I think this whole college thing, the selection thing, the scholarship thing, it’s putting this downward pressure on youth sports that is very distorting, and I don’t know what to do about it, but I do know that we survived it,” he says. “We were never parents trying to get the kids into these highly selective colleges who would like do oboe on Tuesday and lacrosse on Wednesday and their nonprofit on Thursday and the Mandarin class on Friday.
“God, it was exhausting. I was like my kids are just gonna go to a state college and they’ll be fine.”
One of his sons, Bryce, wound up on a travel soccer team and got injured. At that point, the family decided they didn’t want the scene to infiltrate their life any further.
“Saturdays are for the sofa,” he says. “They’re not for getting up at 6 to drive to New Jersey.”
Lewis spent five years of nearly 30 hours per week running his childrens’ sports and 10 as commissioner of the travel softball league, mostly to the objections of his wife.
“In the beginning (it) was, ‘How sweet, Michael’s getting very involved in the daughter’s lives,” Lewis says, “and then it’s like, ‘Wait, we’re spending 52 nights a year at the Hampton Inn in Manteca?’ …
“Her view is there was a price that was paid, and the price was that our life was less diversified. It was more specialized, even if it wasn’t specialized in a single sport. It was severed but it was all or nothing, and the kids all approached it that way. They were all really into it.”
Dixie had a drive that was different, her dad thought. As a young teenager, she had sought out Haley Woods’ elite Cal Nuggets travel softball team on her own and made the team.
She threw herself into the journey and experience. She played in front of college coaches, and she found a role model.
“Everything she says to me, I take seriously, and there’s so few grown-ups I feel that way about,” she told her father about Woods. “She has a lot to say that’s really useful to me.”
Always play sports for the love of them, no matter how old you are
Lewis admits the tens of thousands spent on travel ball fees, private lessons and travel costs and the pursuit of athletic scholarships is much better invested in a 529 college fund.
Still, he also adds, “My view of all this was that there’s so many things you can learn through this experience that what sacrifice was involved was totally worth it.”
Lewis and his daughter observed that top softball schools barely acknowledged ones that couldn’t offer athletic scholarships. Dixie found top academic schools that also had softball teams were surprisingly accessible.
As they walked around the campus of Division III Pomona College after she had committed there, she told her dad the travel ordeal had been worthwhile.
“Look where it got me,” she said. “I feel so good about myself and where I am. I wouldn’t change anything.”
Dixie died in a 2021 car accident during her freshman year of college. Lewis almost gave up writing. He didn’t because it was something that made him feel better. He draws deep satisfaction in knowing, amid his sorrow, his daughter chose her own path through youth sports, and she wound up at her dream school.
Lewis, though, fully acknowledges that roughly half the children in America have been priced out of the industrial complex. Youth sports participation as a whole, Aspen Institute research has found, falls off sharply by age 11.
Reeves’ son, Bryce, is now a Baltimore city public schools teacher and girls soccer coach. He plays on the Baltimore City FC amateur soccer squad.
‘They scouted him – that’s the thing – and he’s having a blast,’ his father says, ‘and that makes me so happy. …
“I think there’s something beautiful to just watching kids running around and having a great time. I’m here to make the case for mediocrity. And the trouble is, that doesn’t sound very inspiring.”
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.