What Are We Doing Here?
“I thought this was about the kids.”
I said it standing in a circle of folding chairs at a club meeting, surrounded by parents who’d shown up ready to argue about playing time. The room went quiet for a second. Then someone changed the subject, because nobody had a real answer.
That question has stuck with me for years. What are we doing here?
Most of the time, the honest answer is: something other than what we tell ourselves.
I have three kids. Two daughters who played club volleyball through what was, without question, the hardest stretch of our lives, a divorce that took apart everything I thought was permanent. While their world was falling apart at home, that gym was the one place it wasn’t. They had teammates. They had a season. They had something to win that had nothing to do with what was happening in a courthouse. I watched sports do for my daughters what I couldn’t do for them in that moment: give them a place to just be kids.
That’s what youth sports is supposed to be. A refuge. A proving ground for effort and joy, not a stage for adults working out their own stuff through a nine-year-old’s box score.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us forgot that. Three out of every four kids who start organized sports quit before they finish high school. That number should stop every coach and every parent cold. Kids aren’t leaving because the games got too hard. They’re leaving because we made it not fun.
I know this because I’ve been the parent who got too loud on the sideline. I’ve been in that circle of folding chairs. Ego is patient. It waits for a rec league gym to find you.
Here’s the thing about ego, though. It only has what’s already inside it. Squeeze an orange and you get orange juice, not lemonade, because that’s what’s in there. Squeeze a stressed, competitive, unresolved adult and you get a stressed, competitive, unresolved sideline. The kids didn’t put that pressure there. We did.
The fix isn’t a new rule. It’s a new posture, and it starts by handing some of the control back to the kids.
I learned to play tennis alone, hitting a ball against a backboard for hours because nobody was available to hit with me. I got good because I had to figure it out myself, and there’s a version of confidence you only build that way. Nobody was standing over me correcting my grip every third shot. I was allowed to be bad, then a little less bad, then decent, on my own timeline.
Kids today rarely get that. Every rep is supervised. Every mistake gets a comment. We’ve engineered self-reliance out of childhood, and then we wonder why kids show up to a big moment with no instinct for figuring things out on their own.
Set up your own cones. Pick your own teams. Argue about the rules and work it out. That’s not neglect. That’s the exact muscle a kid needs for every hard thing that comes after sports, a business deal that falls apart, a marriage that ends, a job that disappears. The adults who handle hardship best are usually the ones who spent some part of their childhood solving smaller problems without a parent hovering.
And the game itself can be part of the redesign. Imagine soccer with four goals instead of two, two to attack, two to defend, so a kid always has somewhere to score and never spends the whole match standing around waiting for a chance that never comes. Add something as simple as a celebration dance after a goal, and you shift a kid’s brain from “don’t mess up” to “that felt great, let’s do it again.” Fun isn’t the opposite of competitive. It’s the thing that keeps a kid competitive long enough to get good.
I coach men who are rebuilding after they lost something big, a marriage, a business, their sense of who they are. Almost every one of them is, in some way, still trying to prove something to a parent who was too loud on a sideline thirty years ago. The work I do with them and the work being done to fix youth sports are the same work. Build people who compete because they love it, not because they’re terrified of what happens if they lose.
So ask yourself the question I asked that room. What are we doing here?
If the honest answer is “for the kids,” act like it.
Let them set up the cones.
Let them lose sometimes without a lecture in the car.
Let the game be FUN again.
The scoreboard will still be there. So will the kid, hopefully, for a lot longer than three seasons.
