The All-Sports Ministry of PA NJ & DE - Executive Summary Start-Up Budget & Prospectus

CIRCLE Working Paper 44: February 2006
Sports, Youth and Character: A Critical Survey
obscuring the very real economic barriers that preclude many from involvement . . . The
uncomfortable notion of socioeconomic classes is erased, and the suburban middle class allowed
to bolster its sense of self-righteous achievement and privilege.”
The problem with this approach to sports is that it doesn’t, in the end, tell us anything about sports.
From this perspective, everything the suburbanite does – from buying a house in a nice neighborhood,
taking a vacation, enrolling his children in good public schools, watching the network news, and working
at a well-paying job – bolsters his sense of achievement and obscures America’s class divisions. All major
social institutions are conservative in the sense that their primary norms do not subvert the status quo
– at least so long as they are part of a reasonably well-functioning society. Thus, ringing these themes
about sports institutions doesn’t really illuminate them. The growing “Critical” literature on sports is not
reviewed here (although it is referred to in the second motto at the head of this paper).
65 Bill Pennington lists this number without citation (“As Team Sports Conflict, Some Parents Rebel,”
New York Times, November 12, p. A1. Steven J. Danish offers the following figures: 20-35 million youth
between ages 5-18 play in organized non-school sports (“Teaching Life Skills through Sport,” in Gatz et
al. eds., Paradoxes of Youth and Sport, p. 49). Alex Poinsett, reporting studies by Margaret Ewing and
Vern D. Seefeldt, contends that 22 million kids play a sport under the aegis of a national sponsor (such
as Little League Baseball and Pop Warner Football); 2.4 million play in club-based sports; 14.5 million
take part in “recreational” sports under the auspices of city and county recreation programs or nonprofit
institutions; 7.4 million play interscholastic sports. Because children often play more than one sport,
there is considerable double-counting in these figures. The estimate used in the text – 40 million overall
– seems a conservative figure.
66 Poinsett, “The Role of Sports in Youth Development.” Michael Clark, “Who’s Coaching the Coaches?”
in Gerdy, ed., Sports in School, p. 55, gives a figure of 3.1 million coaches. The need for finding,
training, and keeping coaches is ubiquitous. De Knop and De Martelaer (“Quantitative and Qualitative
Evaluations of Sport in Flanders and the Netherlands,” pp. 43, 45) report on the problems confronting
sport in the Netherlands. Poinsett’s estimate of untrained coaches may be out of date. See note 139 and
accompanying text.
67 Daniel Gould and Linda Petlichkoff, “Participation Motivation and Attrition in Young Athletes,” in Smoll
et al., eds., Children in Sport (pp. 161-62), report that 42% of those who drop off a team do so because
they have “other things to do,” 28% because they are “not having fun,” 24% because they “want to play
another sport,” 24% because they are “not as good as they wanted to be,” 20% because they disliked
coach, 16% because they felt “too much pressure,” 16% because they were bored, 16% because they
found their sport “too difficult”). These figures obviously involve children giving multiple reasons for their
team-leaving. Michael W. Passer, “Determinants and Consequences of Children’s Competitive Stress,” in
Smoll et al., eds., Children in Sport, offers a “very rough guess” that “competitive pressure, overemphasis
on winning, [and] dislike of coach” cause about 25-35% of dropouts (p. 217).
68 Robert J. Rotella, Tom Hanson, and Richard H. Coop, “Burnout in Youth Sports,” Elementary School
Journal, 91 (1991), p. 423. The drop-out picture drawn in this paragraph isn’t universally endorsed.
Douglas E. Abrams, “The Challenge Facing Parents and Coaches in Youth Sports: Assuring Children Fun
and Equal Opportunity,” Villanova Sports and Entertainment Law Journal, 8 (2002), asserts that most kids
quit sports because parents and coaches have “made them miserable” (p. 255), basing his assertion on
an article by Eryn M. Doherty, “Winning Isn’t Everything . . . It’s the Only Thing: A Critique of Teenaged
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