Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
Boys (PSAL) was established, and formal contests between children, organized by adults, emerged as a way to keep the boys coming back to activities, clubs, and school. Formal competition ensured the boys’ continued participation since they wanted to defend their team’s record and honor. Luther Gulick, founder of the PSAL, thought, “Group loyalty becomes team loyalty, and team loyalty enhances school loyalty, for the spirit of loyalty and morality demonstrated publicly spreads to all the students, not just those who compete.”18
A girls’ league within the PSAL was founded in 1905, though many of the combative and competitive elements present in the boys’ league were eliminated.19 In 1914 the New York version became part of the city’s Board of Education. By 1910 seventeen other cities across the United States had formed their own competitive athletic leagues modeled after New York City’s PSAL. Settlement houses and ethnic clubs soon followed suit. The number of these boys’ clubs grew rapidly through the 1920s, working in parallel with school leagues.
The national spelling bee, a nonathletic competitive activity for children, also grew in popularity at this time. Spelling bees, known historically as spelling fights or spelling parties, are an American folk tradition. Throughout the eighteenth century they were part of the typical Colonial education, and by the nineteenth century they had developed into community social events.20 By the turn of the twentieth century spelling bees had evolved into a competitive educational tool. In her history of American childhood from 1850 to 1950 Priscilla Ferguson Clement explains, “Individual competition was also a constant in [late] nineteenth-century schools. In rural areas, teachers held weekly spelling bees in which youngsters stood in a line before the teacher (toed the line) and vied to be at the head of the line rather than at the foot.”21
Around the turn of the twentieth century a social movement formed to promote a national student-only bee. The first nationwide student bee was held on June 29, 1908. But due to racial tensions (after a young black girl won), the next national student spelling bee was not held again until the 1920s. By 1925 the national student spelling bee as we know it, complete with corporate sponsorship, had taken shape.22
Other community-based competitions, such as Music Memory Contests and mouth organ contests, were also popular at this time.23 Additionally, in 1934 the organization that would become the National Guild of Piano Teachers’ National Piano Playing Tournament was formed.24
During this time children from wealthier families generally received a variety of lessons thought to enhance their social skills and prospects. In a history of children from different class backgrounds in the United States, Harvey Graff wrote of one new upper-middle-class, turn-of-the-century family, the Spencers: “The Spencer children went to dancing school, dressing the part and meeting their peers of the opposite sex. The girls were given music lessons, with varying degrees of success.”25 These activities were organized and overseen by adults but were not yet competitive. (This was especially true for dance, as I discuss below.)
By the 1930s this pattern began to shift as a consequence of the Great Depression and as educational philosophies changed. During the Depression, many clubs with competitive leagues suffered financially and had to close, so poorer children from urban areas began to lose sites for competitive athletic contests organized by adults. Fee-based groups, such as the YMCA, began to fill the void, but usually only middle-class kids could afford to participate.26
At roughly the same historical moment athletic organizations were founded that would soon formally institute national competitive tournaments for young kids, for a price. National pay-to-play organizations, such as Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball, came into being in 1929 and 1939, respectively.
At the same time, many physical education professionals stopped supporting athletic competition for children because of worries that leagues supported competition only for the best athletes, leaving the others behind. Concerns about focusing on only the most talented athletes developed into questions about the harmfulness of competition. Historian Susan Miller explains: “Basketball, like all team sports, came under fire for a flaw that no amount of rule changes could rectify; critics charged that they inherently encouraged unnecessary and potentially harmful competition. . . . Critics argued that team sports put too much focus on winning at the expense of good sportsmanship and thus encouraged the rise of star athletes instead of fostering full participation by all team members.”27
In the end this meant that much of the organized youth competition left the school system. But it did not leave American childhood. “By allowing highly organized children’s sport to leave the educational context,” Jack Berryman, a medical historian, explains, “professional educators presented a golden opportunity to the many voluntary youth-related groups in America.”28 The concatenation of concerns about competition and the financial realities of the Depression created an environment wherein organized, competitive, pay-to-play activities for kids would flourish outside of the school system in places like Pop Warner and Little League.
Overall during this “seeds of competition” period a transformation occurred both in the time spent in organized competition and in the types of children who participated in these activities. Earlier in the century, affluent children participated in personal growth activities where they did not encounter much organized competition, as the activities were more than anything a form of social grooming. But with the development of national compulsory schooling there had to be a way to distinguish the achievements of children from different classes. (Not surprisingly the 1930s also saw the development of gifted programs, and in 1941 the Hunter College Campus for the Gifted was founded in New York City.)29 As school became more competitive, so too did the time children spent outside of school—particularly for those from upwardly mobile families.
Growth of Competition: Postwar to the 1970s
During this period competitive children’s activities experienced “explosive growth” in terms of the number of activities available and the number of participants.30 In the de cades following World War II a variety of competitive activities began to be dominated by children of the middle class. As the activities became more organized, competition intensified within the middle class.
One of the first children’s activities to become nationally organized in a competitive way, and certainly one of the most well-known and successful youth sports programs, is Little League Baseball. After its creation in 1939 the League held its first World Series only a decade later, in 1949. In the ensuing years Little League experienced a big expansion in the number of participants, including participants from around the world. As this model of children’s membership in a national league organization developed, fees to play increased.31
With the success of these fee-based national programs it became more difficult to sustain free programs. Most elementary schools no longer sponsored their own leagues due to concerns over the effects of competition on children, similar to concerns voiced in the 1930s. The desire to dampen overt competition in school classrooms was part of the self-esteem movement that started in the 1960s.32
The self-esteem movement focused on building up children’s confidence and talents without being negative or comparing them to others. As the movement did not reach outside activities, such as sports, private organizations rushed to fill the void. Parents increasingly wanted more competitive opportunities for their children and were willing to pay for it.
By the 1960s more adults had become involved in these organizations, especially parents. Parents and kids spent time together at practices for sports that were part of a national structure: Biddy basketball, Pee Wee hockey, and Pop Warner football. Even nonteam sports were growing and developing their own formal, national-level organizations run by adults. For example, Double Dutch jump-roping started on playgrounds in the 1930s; in 1975 the American Double Dutch League was formed to set formal rules and sponsor competitions.33
An often overlooked event in the history of children’s sports, and especially competitive sports, is the passage of the Amateur Sports Act in 1978. This congressional bill