‘The goal of the game?’ Sportswriter dives into youth sports mania

“The Goal of the Game.”

It’s a statement but also a question we can ask ourselves as sports parents.

It’s driven into our kids very early, often by us.

Is it to win?

Is it to be the “best?’

Or is it to just enjoy the experience?

“Dad, according to Mom, asked the parents in our group not to worry about how good we were, or weren’t,” writes author Harvey Araton, through the eyes of a kid named “Z,” in a new middle-grade novel.

Z’s dad was the coach of the boy’s first soccer team. It’s a neighborhood collection of grade school buddies. Dad didn’t just roll out the ball, though. He orchestrated drills that mimicked game situations that gave everyone a shot at the action.

“You scrimmage too much, and the same kids, the stronger players, will dominate the ball, and then how do the other kids get better?” Z overhears his dad telling his mom early in the book.

Everyone notices, in fiction and reality, when others don’t have this growth mentality.

Z and his teammates hear opposing parents scream for blood, or at least a foul, when his team, once a doormat, incrementally starts to get better and begins to dominate.

The kids of manic youth sports parents, one of whom Araton admits to once being himself, is whom he wants to reach. The veteran sportswriter, most recently with The New York Times for 25 years, covered the Danny Almonte age scandal at the 2001 Little League World Series, and the ensuing escalation of Little League World Series coverage into American living rooms.

He has pondered or written about (or both) kids choosing between club and high school soccer and early sports specialization.

He also played the role of sports dad to two now-grown sons (36 and 32). 

“Kids learn playing sports,” Araton tells USA TODAY Sports. “I think there’s a joy in that. I just feel, especially at these early years, it’s becoming infected with this ambition that there could be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and I think too many parents become obsessed with turning their children into potential cash machines.”

Araton launched the book last week with a signing at his local bookstore in Montclair, New Jersey. He made sure to also include a panel discussion about youth sports. He spoke with us about how his novel imitates the raucous life America lives within it, and the lessons he has gleaned from it.

YOUTH SPORTS SURVIVAL GUIDE: Pre-order Coach Steve’s upcoming book for young athletes and their parents

Is it your child’s ambition or your ambition? Ask them

Araton is from Staten Island, which he describes as New York City’s last developed borough. It still has large swaths of parks and fields, where his story is set.

He had grown up on the basketball courts near his public housing development. The free play felt natural as it took him to the local Jewish community center and high school. He eventually played at a health club in Brooklyn as an adult and even worked in Madison Square Garden, where he covered the Knicks, the team he had idolized as a kid.

His competitive juices carried him into fatherhood when his older son, Alex, was in first grade and had the option of going out for a travel team. It’s a decision many of us have faced.

“I remember asking him if he wanted to try out,” Araton says. “And he was kind of a naturally cautious kid and said, ‘Not really,’ and I remember being disappointed, a little deflated. Maybe I already was thinking, ‘If he doesn’t go into this next level, he’ll fall behind and never catch up, (and) there will go any chance of playing in high school.’ I mean, I could look at my kids, look at their size even at that age and know that they weren’t likely to be D1 college athletes.

“But I remember being disappointed and over the next couple of weeks, I came up with five or six different ways to pose the same question. Well, Nick’s trying out, you sure you don’t want (to)? And he kept saying no. And then the last time that I asked, he said, ‘No, dad.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘But if I don’t play travel, can I still play in the town league?’

“And I remember feeling this sensation of shame because I realized in that moment that I was projecting my own ambitions and my own sports values onto this 6-year-old kid. And all he wanted to do at that point in his life was just run around and play with a bunch of kids he knew and maybe take one or two things out of any game and feel good about himself and look forward to the snacks.”

It’s all Z wanted to do, too.

Consider if your youth sports world is ‘completely out of control’

The book’s central character, who tells the story in the first person, is a combination of Araton’s two sons. Charly, Alex’s younger brother, was 4-foot-11 when he entered high school but played on the basketball team for four years.

Z is left-footed with really good field vision like Alex and he’s small and feisty like Charly was. It doesn’t seem to bother Z when his young team is losing because he knows he will celebrate the things they all did well, or at least enjoyed, at Big Mitch’s restaurant afterward.

Big Mitch is the father of his friend and teammate, Lloyd.

“You only let in, like, seven or eight goals on an undefeated travel team,” he tells Lloyd, the team’s goalie, in the book. “Do you think a kid who was out of shape could do that?”

Z becomes less comfortable when sports becomes more and more competitive. His father has a horrific accident and the team eventually gets a coach from England, who adopts a similar skills-first mindset with the kids. Kevin, the coach, who has also had a traumatic experience with his father, takes Z under his wing.

As the boys and girls on the team continue to rise in competition level, and travel further and further away from Staten Island, Z gets a much more transactional coach.

He feels himself immersed in a world over which he has less and less control, similar to the experiences Araton observed and felt as a soccer dad.

“The reason why I chose soccer is because I probably was most closely involved with that, whether it was as coaching them in the early grades or just being at the games and kind of like, living for it a little bit,” he says. “I understand why parents are so heavily involved. After a week of work you really look forward to the experience of the games. It’s like an adrenaline rush but also I think, it created a whole social network with the parents of their teammates and friends and everything. So I get the temptation, and the seductiveness, of it all, but (it) all got completely out of control, as well.”

‘Children are not investments. They’re developing human beings.’

While Araton was growing up on Staten Island, the borough’s Mid-Island Little League won it all in Williamsport. Years later, as a sportswriter, Araton caught up with Danny Yaccarino, who came within one strike of a perfect game during that 1964 Little League World Series against Monterrey, Mexico. 

He wrote a column, (‘After Perfection at the Age of 12, What’s Next?’) detailing how Yaccarino became a very good high school pitcher and reached the Baltimore Orioles organization and yet, he was always haunted by the feeling of coming so close to near-perfection as a Little Leaguer and not getting it.

“Not only did he get a lot of bench jockeying and all that stuff throughout his career, but he also put incredible pressure on himself,” Araton says. “He turned out to be a minor league pitcher and he never went very far. But he told me that he finished his career feeling like an abject failure.”

Z feels an emptiness, too, at the climax of the book. It’s a feeling that can be induced by us.

‘Parents, being vulnerable, and easily manipulated into spending vast sums of money, (wind) up treating their children like they are speculating on a stock, an investment,’ Araton says. ‘They’re not stocks that will pay off at 8 or 9 or 10 years; they’re developing human beings.’

Avoid the ‘temptation’ that you have a sports genius

“Z, we’re running behind,” his mother yells upstairs, trying to get him moving for his U-13 fall season-opening game. She’s now the team’s driven parent-manager.

“Are you all dressed?”

It’s a red flag for all of us.

“The construction of this story is really about Z coming to an understanding of what role sports should play in his life,” Araton says. “And when I say that, I mean, at that particular time, kids are always subject to change. He’s at a point in his life where he’s experienced family trauma, and, when he looks around, he doesn’t see the friends who he loves, the kids that he grew up playing with. He sees a lot of strange kids. And that’s not what he wants. More than playing at an elite level, he wants to play with kids who know him, who know what he’s gone through.

“He realizes that he still loves the game, but will only play it under his terms.”

Isn’t that what we all want? What about our kids, too?

“You could offer them the higher-level stuff,” Araton says, “but if it’s being forced upon them, and if you’re calling up to their bedroom every time there’s practice, then it’s clear that they don’t really want to do it.

“I wouldn’t deny an exceptional child that kind of pathway any more than you would, say, if you had a child who (was) a mathematical genius or a classical violinist, you would want them to have the best teachers to best capitalize on their special talent. But the temptation is so great because sports is the most visible thing in the community. …

‘It’ll become pretty obvious to a parent if they have someone special. But this whole notion that they can create one by spending significant sums of money, I think it’s really overstated.”

‘Chill’ and let your kid truly experience sports

Araton points to another interview he did, with Yael Averbuch, the general manager of the New Jersey/New York Gotham FC of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). She played for an exclusive club team in high school, won two national championships playing for the University of North Carolina and was drafted professionally.

Her mother said she never had to yell upstairs for practice. Yael was the one yelling to them.

Araton’s sons, like Z, had to figure out where sports fit into their lives. It worked out for them, too.

Alex, who played high school soccer, is a special education teacher and Charly, the high school basketball player (who has grown to about 5-foot-9 today), works in marketing strategies for a fashion brand. He still plays in men’s leagues.

Araton says those middle-grade age groups – 8 to 12, give or take – are the ages where people know the least amount about who their children are as athletes.

“Don’t be disappointed if at the age of 8, they are not willing to do all this stuff and make all that sacrifice,” he says. “They might be ready when they’re 11. Kids do things on their own time schedules. So just accept who they are and let them experience sports in the way they want to. They’ll enjoy it more and get more out of it.

“If they’re not playing for the idea of feeling good about themselves, about learning to be a coachable kid, and be a good teammate, to play with kids from all different backgrounds and develop their skills at the fundamental level at the age of 7, 8, 9, 10,” Araton says, “then they’re playing for the wrong reasons.

“Each shall develop at their own rate. I just think that parents have to chill and let the kids experience it for themselves.”

Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.