The Celebration of Mediocrity
This is an Evite to a party, a celebration to honor our new friend, mediocrity. It starts at 6pm, but you can arrive an hour late because I know you have two other commitments you didn’t want to say no to. We’d prefer the kids stay in the playroom, but don’t yell at them if they run into our bedroom. At 6:30 we’ll play a game but only half the kids will be able to play. There are a lot of rules I can explain when you arrive, but we don’t really need to enforce them. There are only winners in this game. Everyone gets cake. RVSP by next week, but if you forget that’s fine – just come.
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So this 8 year old with a pony tail and pink flashing sneakers moves around the basketball court holding the Spaulding ball over her head, skipping back and forth like a ballerina on skittles. It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon outside and the referees–two guys who also happen to coach the two teams—hold whistles (in their hands), shouting along with the fans in the bleachers, “Dribble Sandra! Dribble!”
No Sandra, no. Don’t dribble. Dear God Sandra, if you do anything, don’t let it be a dribble. Stop moving. Stop!
I see many things in youth sports–the 16 kids rotating slowly together around the field like a cluster of bees – the ball their honey comb – and their coaches shouting useful instructions like “Spread out – will you just spread out!!”
There’s that fantastic theater when Johnny scores for the other team and his mom accidently swears into the recorder, “Oh S__, Johnny, that’s the wrong hoop – go the other way”, or little Petey, who never had a hit until he laced a hit during the last game of the season, only to run to third.
We come of age on ball diamonds that smell like freshly mowed grass and grape Italian ice, and in YMCA basketball gyms with those sandy floors and three bleacher rows with gum stuck beneath the seats. There are those moments you snap a picture and you see Andy, that kid with orange hair tearing the ball away from his own teammate, your son, prompting your wife to politely yell, “Same team!” There’s Kim tangling her hair, Raymond tying his cleats as the ball rolls by and little Stevie laying on the field swallowing his own snots. There’s gramma knitting a scarf, grampa yelling profanities at some kid to tag up, and Uncle Pete getting sucked into playing monkey in the middle with the cousins.
It’s a place where the little girl who used to suck her thumb and eat sand in the playground behind home plate is now striking out boys, or that kid who crapped through his diaper all the way up to his neck every Sunday at Church is now leading a fast break.
For everything youth sports is to our families and our scrapbooks, if we’re to boil it down, they are if nothing else a way to teach kids to appreciate competition, learn how to play a game and deal with failure in a productive way… that’s basically the goal. But somehow we’re failing at this more than we realize. We’re positive, no doubt, but often so positive we miss opportunities to teach and end up undoing the basic principles of sport, which only hurts the kid long term. Somehow in the last 10 years as my own kids have come of age on the field we’ve found a way to turn some competitions into chaos and turn a lot of kids, and coaches, off from sports.
Here’s the disconnect for me and, all cards on the table, my own father called me out looking in a little league game when I was 7 – not swinging, looking – so when I tell you I think we introduce losing and actual consequences far too late in youth sports I’m speaking as someone who had to skulk back to that dugout, not get a fourth strike, or a fifth, or a “let’s just let him go to first base” directive.
The disconnect is we don’t blow the whistle but we flash the 32 to 13 score at halftime. The logic isn’t clear to me: calling the travel or double dribble would be way harsh but promoting how much the Zebras have taken the Bears to the woodshed in this 8-year-old game, that’s sport?
There has to be a winner and a loser, right? Not exactly.
There’s the kid who is not traveling or double dribbling and whose team loses by 6 (says the scoreboard), but who doesn’t understand why no one blew the whistle when the other kids traveled. There’s her parent on the car ride home who doesn’t know how to explain why that is.
When we blow the whistle, and some of us do, we take the ball away from the kid but brace for those looks from the other coaches or parents. It’s not a Barbie doll, you think to yourself — it’s a ball and it’s a game – and we don’t snatch it away like her brother would have!
Frankly, most of us want the kids to learn and want to blow the whistle but we just can’t because it’s no longer easy in youth sports to tell a kid we don’t raise that they are doing it wrong. At times some of us are like that kid on the playground who watches Bobby pick on little Arthur. We’re afraid to help Arthur because we fear Bobby. As parent/coach/referee, we keep the whistle dangling–we give kids a 4th and 5th strike–because we fear the other coach, the parent, and the child’s tears.
Frankly, we fear the consequences – the short term ones.
We promote our youth leagues as focused on “development” then we schedule 12 games and 6 practices, and when we hold practices, we scrimmage. At a clinic last year, me and my dad encouraged youth basketball coaches who had all played in college to stop using lines and give everyone a ball, to use the walls for passing, to let the kids shoot on hula hoops. It looked funny and it was chaotic, but the kids developed.
At games, we expect to see the development but we ask players to step back defensively to allow mom’s iPhone to record us in action then we discourage “teaching” on the court, so as not to disrupt the flow or interfere with the integrity of the game.
We let Sandra dance.
We also just desperately want the kids to appreciate baseball because that’s what we played as kids, but rather than play 3 small games on a Saturday morning with 3 infielders, 1 or 2 batters and no one sitting, we play 1 big game with 7 infielders, 4 outfielders, and 5 kids sitting. Four assistant coaches hover and clap, holding clipboards, even cameras, looking as comfortable as that kid standing “on” home plate with the helmet covering his eyes. Then we yell at Sara and James to stop rolling down the hill and watch the game because they’ll be in the next inning, but then we tell them to go to right field 240 feet from the ball.
Imagine if we told James to sit in the hallway during math class?
We tell our best hitter, Kevin, to stay at first base after he rips one to left field then wonder why he’s hesitant to stretch a single one year later. The bases are for rounding, not perching, right?
It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we do. We care too much, especially about the kid’s feelings and less about the sport. We try — you, me, all of us — but a lot of times we’re going about it all the wrong way. Not all youth sports have messed it up. Soccer, admittedly my least favorite, holds smaller games without scoreboards and encourages kids to learn in a 3 on 3 format, but you still see coaches afraid to teach, afraid to stop the game.
As kids get older we don’t necessarily get any better. We struggle as leagues and coaches to balance playing time and development with winning and consequences.
We celebrate mediocrity. We hug it, we love it, we make sure it’s okay.
There it is. The dirtiest word in professional and even collegiate level athletics has trickled down to youth sports and small towns just trying to be nice. Let’s just make sure we’re in agreement, mediocrity does not mean average. Average is where you are, you’re level and there are a lot of parents who would love if their kids were average in sports. No, mediocrity is a state, it’s being content…it’s being scared.
If I had to guess, we probably celebrate mediocrity because it’s easy–we don’t want to have that painful, hard-to-have conversation–not the one with our kid or their teammates, but the one with ourselves. If we blow the whistle, it may be our kid who we’re whistling. The scholarship isn’t coming sir, those “mom goggles” — they need to come off, as much as Mrs. Goldberg from the 1980s era TV show loved wearing them when her son performed “ka-ra-tay.”
“You are really good Barry – keep doing it!” she would say. “No you’re not, Barry, you’re terrible – please stop,” Mr. Goldberg would argue.
The mediocrity celebration extends beyond the pitching mound and center court and onto the sound stage. Kids with a cute pony tail but a bad pitch are given the lead role as first graders – we clap politely and then lie to her family about how great she is – then years later little Susie’s cut like everyone else after auditions, sent a form email that says thanks for the great effort, it was a really difficult decision with so many wonderful children, but we can only choose one lead. Translated, your kid is cute but flat. Mom and dad are stunned.
This is the brutal consequence of mediocrity run amuck – we aren’t ready for the thin envelope, nor are our kids.
A good friend of mine was a good high school baseball player back in the 80s from a competitive town, but was going to get cut from the team. His coach made him an offer: “I can put you on the team, but you won’t play.” It was blunt, but real – there was nothing mediocre about that message. It was so 80s.
Oh, where are you Mr. Goldberg? Please help us….