I’ve spent my whole career making a living, at least in part, in sport. Which means I’ve spent my entire time as a parent terrified of my kids playing sports.
Not because I don’t value sports. I do. Sports can be fun and help develop transferable skills. But I’ve also seen the other end. I’ve watched college kids show up with their entire identity built around a sport, and I’ve watched what happens to them when they’re done playing, whether because of injury, not making the roster, or graduation. It can be brutal.
It causes real heartbreak and real damage, and it happens to good kids who did nothing wrong except invest everything in one place and spend their entire lives in a system that told them that was what they had to do.
So, with our own four children, we went the other direction. We didn’t push. We let them find their own way into sports, or not. Two of them ended up loving sports. One doesn’t care much either way, and one is young enough that he’s still feeling it out. That’s fine by me.
Our oldest daughter is obsessed with volleyball. She had to fight us a little to play club in the first place, which tells you how hard I was trying not to be the sports dad. She’s going into her third club season now, and overall, it’s gone well. She’s had kind coaches who treated her and her teammates well.
But the system she’s playing inside of is broken.
Here’s how it works in Wichita, and I’d guess most places aren’t much different. There are quite a few clubs and almost no independent teams. Every club runs tryouts on the same day every year. Most tell you every spot is open, that they’re evaluating fresh, and that there are no assumptions.
You try out, and if they want you, you get an offer and three days to decide. If you don’t get an offer, you go home and wait. Some kids sit by the phone for three days not knowing if they made a team.
My daughter is 12. This isn’t a college walk-on story.
One club waited until everyone else had cleared out of the gym, then handed out roses to the girls who made the team. It was a well-intentioned touch, and in isolation it’s a nice gesture. But it also meant every girl who hung around for a bit and lingered who didn’t get one had to watch it happen in front of whoever was left, then go home and explain to her parents what the roses meant. My daughter got a rose, and it made me (and her) really uncomfortable. And again, I think the intentions were good by the club.
For the most part, our daughter got the outcome she wanted, so this isn’t written out of bitterness. That part was fine. What wasn’t fine was watching my wife and daughter work through the two weeks around it and hearing story after story about 12-year-old girls getting put through the wringer.
Here’s the part that really got me. My daughter has played for the same club, with the same coaches, for two years. It’s been a good experience. So, I asked, reasonably I thought, whether we could just talk to them directly and ask if she’d have a spot again this year. Skip the crazy.
I was told by my wife and daughter, in no uncertain terms, that you do not do that. Not under any circumstances. You go through the tryout like everyone else, no matter your history with the program.
Which is strange when everyone involved already knows so much about everyone involved. The coaches know the players. The players know where they stand. The families have spent months at practices, tournaments, camps, and open gyms. Then, for one Saturday, everyone is supposed to pretend none of that exists. Of course it does.
When something goes wrong, the club can point to “the evaluators,” as if the tryout is an independent tribunal and not run by many of the same people who have already coached these kids and know exactly what they can do.
I heard about a girl on my daughter’s team who was asked back for a second tryout. She’d played for these same coaches for over a year, and her Family had paid for open gyms all summer specifically to prepare. After all of that, someone decided they needed to see her again to be sure. Doesn’t make sense. That is more evaluation opportunity than any college program gets when recruiting.
And then there was the tryout last year where a coach stood in front of a room full of parents of 12-year-olds and told them that if their daughter wanted to play college volleyball, this club was the only option. That’s not information. That’s a sales pitch dressed up as expertise, delivered to parents who are scared enough to believe it.
I don’t fully understand the internal politics that produce a system like this, and I don’t think the people inside it are acting in bad faith. I’ve met these coaches. Most of them care about these kids. But I know what the structure looks like from the outside.
It looks like something built for people to lie to each other.
Coaches who already know who they want to have to pretend otherwise. Parents who already have a pretty good idea of where their kid stands must pretend they don’t. Kids who trained together all summer get pitted against each other for a Saturday afternoon, and then some go home in tears while others get flowers. Nobody involved designed it to hurt anyone. It just does.
Maybe I sound like the guy yelling about how it was better back in his day. But back in my day, mostly you played with kids from your school or your neighborhood. The teams were pretty independent. You knew who you’d be playing with from one year to the next. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t manufacture a week of dread every summer for a bunch of preteens.
I don’t have the whole fix, but most of it comes down to honesty. If a coach has worked with a kid for two years and knows she has a spot, say so. If a roster is mostly set before tryouts, be honest about that. If a player is genuinely on the bubble, tell the family. The current system creates unnecessary uncertainty because everyone is afraid to say out loud what everyone already knows.
My daughter is fine. She got what she wanted this year, though she picked up some scars from the process. But I keep thinking about all the other 12-year-olds who didn’t get roses, and about how normal it’s become to run kids through something built more for the convenience of adults than for the kids inside it.
We’re talking about 12-year-olds. They should be learning to compete, deal with disappointment, make friends, work for something they want, and figure out whether they Love the game. Some disappointment is unavoidable. That’s part of sports and part of growing up.
I just don’t think we should confuse unnecessary Anxiety with development, because that’s how the system has always worked.
