Keep adult ambition out of children's sports

Last Saturday at Wack Wack Golf and Country Club, I was seated with several new members of WWGCC who attended the monthly fellowship tournament and acquaintance party as part of the requirement for admission as member of the golf course identified with the 99-year old Philippine Open. In the course of the conversations, one of the new members said he and his eight-year old son were preparing for a soccer game the next day, Sunday. When I asked what he does for a living, he told the group he had just come back from the United States a fairly lengthy stint in America as a banker.

We exchanged notes about children’s sports since it had been the subject of countless columns I have written over the 23 years I’ve been preoccupied with sports column writing. Over those years, I had always advocated the promotion of the proper perspective on children’s sports for both children (the participants) and the adults (the administrators) who run children’s sports and deliberately introduce their own value systems into what should essentially be sports or games for fun and wellness.

This new member told me that while in the States, he enrolled his son in a sports program that precisely inculcated sportsmanship, fair play and fun rather than competition and beating one’s opponent. He said that, to his surprise, some parents mocked that mindset. In fact, he said, “Nagagalit sila” (They were upset) with that approach and it is possible some of them withdrew their kids from the program. We figured out the reasons for such a behavior and we thought that such an attitude probably goes back to how success is defined in our materialistic and highly individualistic society. Success is manifested by beating the other side.

The other but more “noble” reason is the fact that outstanding performance in primary and secondary athletic competitions could lead to the scholarship trail and education in a fairly prestigious school which, in the United States, could run up to about $60,000 per year or $240,000 for four years (or about P10 million), a princely sum in any language. The assumption is that the athletic scholar or student-athlete is a real student in truth and in fact and is not just being guided through courses for mere compliance with school and government requirements.

When speaking of children’s or youth sports especially in America where many scholarly but practical studies on youth sports and value formation have been conducted with enviable rigor and regularity, one has to bring up the name of former football athlete Joe Tomlin who James Michener wrote about with obvious admiration in his book, “Sports in America”. Michener remembers Tomlin as “a big amiable guy who had played a formidable game of football and who had loved the game so much that upon graduation he had cast about for some way to remain associated with it. He hit upon the bright idea of organizing the Pop Warner Junior League Football (akin to baseball’s Little League), named after the much-loved coach of the Carlisle Indians. He became its champion and its czar, and achieved a remarkable success in establishing leagues across the country.”

Michener states that Tomlin, a good scholar himself, had postulated an unusual scoring system for determining his champions: The evaluation formula takes into consideration a team’s scholastic as well as its football record. Scholastically each player’s average is converted into a numerical point value. The player point values are then added and divided by the total number of players on the roster to determine the point average of the team. This scholastic average is then added to the point value of the team’s won-tied-lost record. The result is then divided by two to determine the final point standing of the teams.

According to Michener, Tomlin conceded that under this system, which many tough-minded coaches ridiculed, it would be possible for a team with an 8-1 record and high grades in school to win the championship from a team with a perfect won-lost record but poor grades.

Michener adds that when he started to attend Junior League football games, he found them to be pretty much as Tomlin described them in his literature: “The general objective of Pop Warner Junior League Football is to inspire youth, regardless of race, creed or national origin, to practice the ideals of sportsmanship, scholarship and physical fitness as reflected in the life of the late Pop Warner. The specific objectives of the program are to familiarize all boys with the fundamentals of football, to provide an opportunity to play the game in a supervised, organized and safety-oriented manner, and to keep the welfare of participants free of any adult ambition and personal glory”.

Note the last clause. Next week, more on Joe Tomlin, youth sports and a template from Foundation University.