Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Born out of the Cold War and the desire to defeat the USSR in sports, the U.S. Olympic Committee brought together the national governing bodies for each Olympic sport.34 The AAU had to find a new function; over the next two decades they transformed themselves into a powerful force in the organization of children’s competitive sports, serving as a national organization overseeing a variety of children’s competitive sports, such as swimming and volleyball.
Nonathletic competitions for children also began to take off in this time period. One example is child beauty pageants. The oldest continuously running child beauty pageant in the United States, Our Little Miss, started in 1961. This pageant was modeled on an adult system, the Miss America Pageant, with local and regional competitions followed by a national contest. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s child beauty pageants began “mushrooming at an unbelievably fast rate.”35 By the late 1970s there was even a media-recognized “pageant circuit.” A 1977 Chicago Tribune story reported, “Youngsters who travel the circuit learn how to fill the bill wherever they are, acting naïve and spontaneous here and knocking them dead with vampiness there.”36
Whether the yardstick was academics, athletics, or appearance, by the 1970s parents (mostly those who were educated and upwardly mobile) wanted their children to “be better than average in all things, so they tried to provide them with professionally run activities that would enrich their minds, tone their bodies, inculcate physical skills, and enhance their self-esteem.”37 National organizations went along with this impulse to be better than average by instituting national guidelines and contests. Even programs that had a philosophy of “everyone plays,” such as the American Youth Soccer Organization (discussed more below), joined the competitive fray by hosting elimination tournaments where there was only one victor. These competitions began to be geared to children of younger and younger ages.38
Some observers have argued that the rise of these adult-organized competitive activities for children can partly be explained by the decrease in safe areas for children to play on their own.39 While there is some validity to this argument, as safe play space for children in both urban and suburban areas was declining, this argument does not explain the trend toward increased competition because there was an alternative to the competitive path. As upwardly mobile parents clamored to have their children involved in competitive activities that would brand them as “above average,” adults involved with less advantaged children focused on inclusiveness. Those involved with “preventing such youngsters from being lured into gangs, drug use, and other antisocial behavior, steered children into organized activities sponsored by churches, schools, YMCAs and YWCAs, and Boys’ and Girls’ clubs.”40 In these inclusive clubs, participation and not competition was the norm.
So the same YMCAs and Boys’ clubs that had been the first movers in organized competition several decades before now moved in the opposite direction. The activities provided were still organized by adults, but little of the tournament impulse remained. Instead, these children’s better-off peers were now the competitive ones, working to ensure their privileged positions in numerous activities organized at a national level. As the price of such competitive success continued to increase—even for young children—many less advantaged children were pushed out of the competitive space.
EXPLOSION OF HYPERCOMPETITIVENESS: 1980S TO THE PRESENT
Since the 1980s it is not only the costs of participation in competitive children’s activities that have grown, but also the level of professionalization. As more children compete in more activities for more money at higher levels, the result over the past three decades has been the growth of hypercompetition. In addition, the distance between middle-class children and others continues to grow within the same activities as middle-class families become ever more competitive.41
Many explanations for the continued growth of organized activities during this time focus on increases in maternal employment: with both parents outside of the home in the after-school hours, children need to be supervised. But competitive activities—particularly the most common ones for elementary school–age kids, which take place outside of the school system—actually create additional work for parents and take time away from other house hold tasks.42 Parents have to make sure uniforms and other equipment are clean and ready and shuttle kids to various lessons, practices, and tournaments. (This is especially true in the suburbs, where children’s play space is largely physically limited to areas reachable by car, but it is also true in many urban settings as parents worry about children’s safety if they play alone, even though kidnapping rates are down.)43
Competitive activities not only produce more work for parents; they also create many work-like elements for children.44 Parents and children often use work language to describe kids’ participation. For example, it is common when a successful child quits an activity to say that he or she has “retired.”
It is not a stretch to say that many young athletes and performers are now young professionals. There are three specific ways in which children’s competitive youth sports have become professionalized since the 1980s:45 (1) the development of highly hierarchical divisions within youth activities, (2) the rise of the full-time paid coach, and (3) the ascendancy of the year-round season.
The development of elite programs (which includes travel, select, premier, all-star, and Olympic development programs) across activities intensified during the 1990s.46 There are now many stratified categories of organized play, ranging from recreational up to elite.47 Children usually have to work their way up through these divisions, with the goal being the top level team or organization in their geographic area. This system often tries to model itself on professional sports leagues, with club owners seeing recreational leagues as farm systems for the development of elite or pro players. Needless to say, these programs exist outside of the school system. This is true even for activities like spelling bees, which would seem to have to exist within the school system, but between homeschooled children and kids looking for their version of mental athletics, private bees are beginning to develop as well.48
The AAU illustrates the recent development of more and more hierarchical, competitive activities. Currently there are over a million participants in AAU sports. In 1995 the AAU had about 100 national championships, most for kids over twelve. By 2008 it held more than 250 national championships in which “a total of 1900 group champions are crowned, starting around age 6. More often, these tournaments begin at age 8.”49 Less than twenty years ago eight was the age when kids started participating in recreational youth sports. Now kids routinely vie for national titles at that age.
Of course these kids need coaches with high levels of expertise to help them reach those national championships. Enter the paid youth sport coach and other specialized trainers, who reinforce the professionalization of youth sports and activities.50 Parent and volunteer coaches now often exist only in recreational leagues, and some elite clubs and organizations explicitly forbid parents from having any coaching responsibilities. When a team must pay for full-time coaches or trainers, who often charge over $20,000 for a season, the costs outstrip the budgets of all but the wealthiest families. And of course, now that adults can make a living from youth sports, they must continue to justify their employment, so they strive to increase the number of professional markers for these children’s activities.
One such marker is the third way youth sports have become professionalized: the rise of the year-round season.51 In the past, for example, soccer dominated the fall, basketball the winter, and baseball the spring. Now, at the competitive level, teams practice all year—much like the pros—often requiring a permanent annual commitment from families.52 With indoor training facilities and specialized camps held during school vacations, children are asked as early as age eight to commit to a single sport. This has the consequence of forcing children to specialize early.
At the same time the number of competitors at the highest levels has increased, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, as the rewards for winning have also increased. Gymnastics and figure skating are good examples, as detailed by Joan Ryan in her 2000 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which describes the efforts of young girls and their