Want your children to learn sportsmanship as much as you want them to win?

Has the fun in youth sports all but disappeared?

If you think that good behavior, good ethics, and good fun should be the mainstays of sports, then use this information to spread the word and effect some change.
 
With less than 1% of youth athletes going on to play at the college level, the question has to be raised, what is the function of these sports? Is the child “playing” for her/himself or for us? When we think back on our own sports, we remember pick-up games and friends. Not that many of us remember hours of drills at the age of ten, but that’s what’s happening now. And by the time these driven kids get onto the fields and rinks, they’re playing for stakes foreign to the minds of most kids. “Fun,” as a motivator, drops away, and as this key ingredient disappears, so does both good behavior and good ethics. And what happens to an athlete’s game when it stops being fun?
 
All of us have horror stories about ugly game scenes. Do we have to put up with this? Hopefully, the answer is no. But it’s going to take many of us standing up and saying no. What do want our kids seeing in us? How fast do we want to yank them into our adult world of winners and losers?
 
This page is a work in progress—a place where parents, coaches, and administrators can work together to change what’s happening. Sure, your kid can be competitive, and everyone expects her/him to play as hard as is absolutely possible, but this same youth can be learning and exemplifying the morals for which we all stand. We don’t have to compromise ourselves, or our child’s present and future integrity, just to win a game! How insane is that?
 
As a work in progress, this page is all of ours. It needs your input, your offerings. It is your place to say “Enough!” You are free to use, copy, reproduce, and rework anything you find in these pages, so long as you agree to further the “fun quotient” in our kids’ sports. We have all come home from too many games where we felt badly for our kids and for our own sense of decency, having either participated in or witnessed an outrageous act by a parent or a coach. In the future, we should have the courage to either tell the offender that enough is enough, or, we should just leave and then explain our stand to our kids. But just to stand there and take it degrades us all.
 
Duplicate and copy anything you’d like off this page.