Against Kids’ Sports – by Anne Helen Petersen – Culture Study
This is a piece about the professionalization of children s sports and how that professionalization has transformed and degraded the desire to play, the desire to be part of something, even just the desire to move into class-siloed, life-swallowing regimentation. Somewhat ironically, this regimentation is fueled by its hazy promise (or at least a hope) to bypass the American class system and secure a route through college scholarship, or, less commonly, through actual professional play to stability.
In this way, professionalized kids sports manage to distill the decades long hollowing of the middle class and the quietly frantic parenting reactions to that destabilization. Participation is cloaked in the casual language of fun and teamwork and we re just doing it because our kid loves it so much, justifications that only bolster the broken economic systems that have rendered the route to professionalization so attractive.
This dynamic is playing out in my family in a particularly heartbreaking way. Maybe I’ll tell you all about it sometime. For now I’ll just say, it would be a good thing if a kid who was pretty good at basketball could get a place on the school team instead of kids from God knows where who are recruited in, sometimes from out of the US, just to play basketball or football, against other teams who are doing the same thing. It’s good for those kids, sure, and good for the coaches who are recruited in as well, and good I presume for money raising efforts at this private high school (though some public schools do the same thing). But it’s bad for my kid, and a lot of other kids who are also pretty good but not UCLA/Stanford/USC/Arizona State etc., etc. good at sports. It is all f*&^ked up and we’re not even done with it.