Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
the last century. This is partly because of the game’s low cost, but also because there are many perceived benefits to chess, including academic outcomes (some say math scores increase, though the scholarship in this area is difficult to accurately assess) and developing life lessons (such as learning to make a plan before making a move). Many major cities now have a chess program serving underprivileged youth, sponsored by a not-for-profit organization.
In addition to urban programs, the rise of Internet play has enabled children from rural areas to find regular chess competition and instruction. The development of better chess software has also made a difference. Grandmaster Maurice Ashley (the first, and only, African American Grandmaster) claims that there is “an accelerated growth of prodigies,”68 clearly a phenomenon with which chess remains preoccupied. Scholastic chess has become so prominent and vital to the success of the USCF that in April 2006 they started a bimonthly chess magazine just for their scholastic members, entitled Chess Life for Kids.
Soccer
While scholastic chess has grown in the past two decades, it cannot match the explosion of youth soccer in America. Today, according to soccer experts, more kids play soccer than any other organized youth sport.69 Of course, this has not always been true.
Soccer came to the United States from Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, during the nineteenth century as immigrants brought the game with them.70 As there were already sports considered “American,” particularly baseball and basketball, soccer did not garner much of a following in the United States for most of the first half of the twentieth century. The same immigrants who brought soccer here, and their children, are the ones who kept soccer “alive in the United States until the 1970s [through] ethnic leagues, private schools, and colleges.”71 Colleges began offering soccer scholarships in the 1960s, helping to establish the legitimacy of the sport.72
As more and more competitive athletic activities established their own youth leagues and national organizations after World War II, soccer followed suit with the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) in 1964. AYSO’s guiding philosophy of “everyone plays”—which is essentially noncompetitive—along with Pele’s popularity during that time helped soccer become the fastest growing youth sport in the United States by 1967.73
But by the mid-1970s many families were frustrated by AYSO’s egalitarian philosophy; they wanted to challenge their children to be above average. Resistance from AYSO and other recreational organizations to the increased competitive impulse spurred parents to develop their own private clubs. As these private clubs developed, with their higher participation fees, many children from the European immigrant and working-class families who had previously kept soccer alive in the United States, along with an increasing number of Latino immigrants, were excluded.
By the end of the 1970s there were about three thousand of these private clubs.74 Most were connected to U.S. Youth Soccer (USYS), which was founded in 1975 as the competitive parallel to AYSO. USYS explicitly focused on organizing leagues and tournaments for what are known as elite or travel soccer club teams. Such teams are easily distinguishable from recreational, or “rec,” teams that AYSO sponsors, as they have year-round seasons, they sometimes play multiple league games each week that require travel, and they almost always have paid trainers and/or coaches.75 These traits are characteristic of the professionalization seen in various children’s athletic activities.
Another way youth soccer has tried to professionalize, which is noteworthy among kids’ activities, is that they require all coaches—even volunteer parent coaches in recreational leagues—to get a license to coach. This rule is mandated by the national organizations. Such licenses go from A to F, with A being the most advanced, certifying someone to coach at an international level. Most youth coaches have only an E or F license, the lowest, and while these licenses simply require a few hours of training, the fact that they are required highlights the professional attitude many within the world of soccer have toward youth programs in the United States.
Soccer America, the monthly publication for soccer fans in the United States, also devotes at least one article each month to issues affecting youth soccer, illustrating its salience in the wider soccer community. Jim Haner writes in his 2006 memoir on being a soccer dad and coach that soccer is now simply a part of American childhood, at least for those from a particular class: “Soccer is now one of the defining experiences of childhood in suburbia—like Boy Scouts or Little League two generations ago, only much bigger—but it barely existed in most places as recently as twenty years ago.”76
While youth travel teams did exist in the 1980s, many soccer writers are quick to point out that they barely resemble the teams of today, with their names, uniforms, and “highly evolved infrastructure.”77 Given that organized competitive soccer developed so recently, it is all the more remarkable how professionalized and organized the competitive landscape already is for kids in the twenty-first century.
Dance
Dance has long been considered a classic childhood experience, the way soccer is for many kids today. And as with soccer, the contemporary dance landscape is quite different than it was thirty years ago. It is now filled with hundreds of dance competitions run by private companies. “Competitive dance” refers to for-profit dance competitions that organize regional and national competitions for all forms of dance, as opposed to dance that is competitive only for admission to companies and programs or for roles in specific productions.
The history of dance education in the United States spans the twentieth century, though formal instruction outside of the home began in the nineteenth century. Dancing academies, such as the Dodworth Academy, started in the 1840s in New York City.78 These academies helped mold upper-class American children in the image of upper-class Europe an children, teaching them social dances.79 The Dodworth Academy reached the height of its popularity in the 1890s as the nouveau riche wanted their children to acquire the proper cultural capital; on Saturdays they offered classes to children as young age three. But by the 1920s the Dodworth Academy had closed due to economic difficulties and family politics.
By that time ballet schools had stepped in to fill the void in dance education. One of the first formal ballet schools opened in 1909; it was affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Before schools like this developed, teachers would hold lessons in their homes.80 Dance schools and studios developed and expanded over the next few decades. Dance teachers’ organizations, including Dance Masters of America (DMA), organized in 1948, helped to legitimate the field and promote dance education. In the 1960s these teachers’ organizations began to hold national conventions where teachers could take workshops and bring their students to show off their skills and compete.
Dance competitions did not arise for the first time in the 1960s, however. They were preceded in the nineteenth century by a tradition of mostly informal dance competitions among children and adults. For example, “challenge dancing” was common in African American communities, and Irish step dancing competitions (at fairs, pubs, and even in homes) were common both in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora.81 What distinguished the new competitions of the 1960s is that they were organized, and the organizers earned money for their efforts.
DMA held its first competition for individual dancers in 1963, and another dance teachers’ organization, Dance Educators of America, also started competitions in the early 1960s. These competitions awarded scholarships to winning dancers, supporting them in their continuing dance education. Dance competition expert Pam Chancey explains that the goal of the competitions of the 1960s “was to challenge professionals and add prestige to the art of dance. At that time, many people criticized dance competitions for attempting to turn dance, an art form, into a ‘sport.’”82
But comparisons to sport likely helped establish dance competitions, at least in terms of the way parents viewed the value of participating. Private competitions, eager to jump into this competitive space and thinking of dance competitions as a different form of athletic contest, started to pop up in the late 1970s.
Showstopper National Championships was one of the first to enter the field, and today it remains one of the largest competitions. Showstopper