‘Club Sports’
The Palisadian-Post presents an homage to Will Rogers’ column, “Will Rogers Says,” with a column by Palisadian Jimmy Dunne—on life in the “greatest town in America.”
There’s something our generation made up—something that’s gotten out of control.
Club sports.
I want to find the guy who said, “I’ve got a good idea. Let’s have a ton of kids and parents get up at 5 on a Saturday morning, drive an hour and a half to some giant sweatbox in Anaheim so sixth-graders can play seven games of volleyball against kids and teams they’ll never see again.”
Yesterday a pal was all pumped up telling me how his 4-year-old granddaughter was invited to join an elite gymnastics club. And bragging how the walls are lined with posters of Olympian alumni.
Yikes.
At 4, I was still wrestling with toilet training.
Seems to me, what started out as a way for gifted, elite athletes to play other gifted athletes has, over the years, cast a much, much wider net.
And the carrot many clubs are dangling in front of parents and kids? College scholarships. Many club websites are loaded up with college logos and case studies of how your kids’ dreams can come true.
As one of seven kids, sports wasn’t a way for my parents to get our college paid for. Sports was a way to get us out of the house.
I’ll bet the ranch many of your journeys looked a lot like this.
I rode my bike in my uniform to a baseball league game at the park about 10 blocks from my house. We played one game.
The game lasted an hour, not eight hours. We played against pals we knew from school and town, and they were on teams with snappy names like “La Grange State Bank” and “Sauerberg Pharmacy.”
There was a trendy brand of shoes everyone wore in our suburb—called “gym shoes.” The only Nike I knew about was some guy with muscles living on a mountaintop in Greece.
Gym shoes were fabulous for baseball, basketball, tennis, touch football, golf between the goalposts at the football field—and they were great in summer, winter, spring and fall. They were quite a bit bigger than my foot, but I’m sure I grew into them the next year.
After we played, the dad coaches would treat us to a dip cone at Frosty Freeze. With a face full of happy and ice cream, we rode our bikes home.
During the summer, we played you-name-it at the park without coaches, parents, fielding or batting specialists—for hours. Just hanging with my buddies goofing around. That’s where I learned to play every sport. And a lot more in life.
And after baseball season ended, we all played football. And then we all played basketball. We also played tennis, swam, ice skated, played golf, or anything else that involved balls, pucks, racquets, or scoring.
Whether you were great or stunk, you played in the same leagues and on the same teams. It didn’t matter all that much. And if you stunk badly enough, you did something else.
My parents’ total investment in my nine-year baseball career was two mitts (one used), a pair of baseball cleats, and a bunch of balls, bats, and cups. That’s it.
And nobody, nobody, can convince me we didn’t have just as much, or more, fun as our kids committing thousands and thousands of hours to one sport (and a ton of parents’ money) to keep up with every other club kid, coast to coast.
In general, are kids better baseball players/hockey players/golfers/soccer players/you name it today? Yeah, they’re better.
But so what?
Hip-hip hurray. The next generation of baseball players may decrease fielding errors by 3.67%.
Who wins? Nobody. Not the kids. Not the parents. Nobody.
We all know it’s in vogue to have/do “more.” That “more is better.” Super-sized fries. Five sets instead of three in tennis. More homework. More books in a kid’s backpack. More pages to sign on “home loan” documents. Six matches a day in volleyball tournaments instead of one.
All bad ideas.
The Kentucky Derby lasts two minutes. That’s why it’s exciting. If it were an endurance contest where the horses went around the track 20 times—I don’t think there would be a mint julep.
Kids’ sports are like brooms and ropes.
When they’re little squirts, we’re the broom. We sweep ’em gently into sports and programs we think will be good for ’em.
But then it gets tricky.
They get in something. So do their friends. We blink, and they and we start chasing the carrot.
Little by little, geography of games shifts from our own town backyard—to long car rides, then to plane rides on holiday weekends. Costs and time commitments blossom exponentially.
Sound familiar?
That’s where the rope kicks in.
You can’t push a rope. Somebody always pulls the rope, and somebody’s always getting pulled along.
You have to ask yourself, deep down … who’s pulling? Is it your kid? Is it you?
I’d make sure it’s your kid who’s doing the pulling.
And if they stop pulling, maybe it’s time to give ’em the slack to put the rope away.
We all find it’s in those moments—those hard, real moments—where love and where respect lives.
I do know this.
Our kids only get one shot at growing up, and we only have one shot of watching them do it.
As Oscar Hammerstein said: “Life is a carousel, my friend; life is a carousel.”
So true. The ride is so much fun if it’s at the right speed—and lasts the right amount of time.
But it’s no fun for anybody if it’s spinning too fast—and you can’t get off.
Jimmy Dunne is a modern-day Renaissance Man; a hit songwriter (28 million hit records), screenwriter/producer of hit television series, award-winning author, an entrepreneur—and a Palisadian “Citizen of the Year.” You can reach him at j@jimmydunne.com or jimmydunne.substack.com.
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