How much is too much?

For youth sports, the answer is apparently nothing. An average professional hockey, basketball, or soccer player might have 80 games a year. Eight- or nine-year old kids often play the same, along with practices and weekend tournaments.

So whats going on?

Whats going on is that adults are ruining sports from kids. Weve professionalized youth sports, organized the games kids used to play in the schoolyard or in parks. Instead of that endless and unstructured fun, parents drive their kids to games and practices, where coaches tell kids what to do and how to do it. This goes on five, six, even seven times a week. Sure, a precious few go on to superstardom as professional athletes, but theyre the one percent of the one percent. The rest burn out.

Is it really necessary to travel every weekend to yet another tournament? Is that third practice a week really adding to a young persons enjoyment? Has society forgotten about the Law of Diminishing Returns? Is there not something wrong about $30,000 budgets for a hockey team of 12-year olds?

More is not necessarily better. The magic number is three - one game and two practices a week. Until a kid is 13 or 14, that is enough of any one activity. Let them develop a number of interests - sports, reading, music, and maybe hanging out with friends once in a while. After that age, if the interest is still there, then it might be appropriate to let them focus on one sport or activity. Two- and three-sport athletes are going the way of the Dodo bird. We do no lack for great athletes, but we force our kids to specialize at an early age. Cross training is widely accepted by experts as an essentially part of an athletes development. Yet, I do not see many kids cross training at all.

Naturally, if any of my kids were a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods I would encourage them to focus. Unless yours belongs to that elite class, however, perhaps your kid would be better off playing a number of sports; and make sure they have time to play after school, without coaches and referees blowing whistles all the time.

There is also a worrying commercial side to this issue. Leagues and tournaments have become a big business, along with equipment sales and sports facilities. Ironically, all this money depends upon a constant stream of kids who play a whole lot of sports. The more they play, the more money is made. I find it hard to ignore this connection; and, also not to believe that business has been an active partner in fueling the belief so prevalent among parents and coaches that kids have to play their sport every day of the week.

We need to remember that youth sports are for kids - not for those watching from the sidelines, or tournament organizers, or equipment manufacturers. Professional athletes are paid millions to play 80 games a year; how much are our kids getting for becoming professional athletes at 8-years old?