The middle school years can be an awkward and confusing time for youngsters.

While they’re desperate to begin weaning themselves from a childhood dependency on their parents, they’re often baffled about what their newfound responsibilities bring to their lives. Once the hormones kick in, as any parent can attest, your average middle schooler can turn into a supercharged bundle of physical, emotional and social conflict.

The prevailing middle school philosophy nationwide is to accommodate this difficult period of roller-coaster growth and change by providing an atmosphere that encourages children to learn all they can about their emerging selves through the exploration of a broad range of activities both inside and outside the classroom.

Yet according to a recent survey of Maine’s middle school-level educators, coaches and parents, school sports appear to be a glaring contradiction to this all-inclusive approach. Children who have enjoyed community-sponsored youth and rec league sports since they were 5 years old may find themselves suddenly relegated to the sidelines for the first time after a cut list says they’re not skilled enough or big enough or fast enough to make the middle school team.

As a result, many of them become soured on sports for good, leaving behind the playing fields of childhood before they’ve even had a chance to grow into their rapidly developing bodies.

“Statistics show that a large majority of kids drop out of sports completely by the time they’re 15,” said Ed Brazee, a professor of middle-level education at the University of Maine, and part of a task force that’s examining the shortcomings of the state’s middle-level sports programs.

If the mission of middle schools is to nurture growth and change, he said, then an athletic program modeled on the highly competitive and largely exclusionary nature of high school sports may be doing children more harm than good.

“We want kids to keep playing sports in the middle school years, to remain active and physically fit, and not to dramatically cut participation prematurely,” he said.

In a survey of Maine’s middle schools, researchers found that nearly all of them – 96 percent – offered some form of interscholastic athletic programs. Yet, only 42 percent of schools offer an alternative athletic program. And while 68 percent of schools use cut lists to decide which kids are good enough to make a team, only 8 percent offer intramural sports as an outlet for those who aren’t.

“The big issue is balance,” said Brazee. “Too often, sports seem like a separate, stand-alone program in a school philosophy that emphasizes opportunities for all students. Should we be excluding kids from basketball because they haven’t yet had a chance to develop physically? After all, the superstars in middle school won’t necessarily be the stars in high school.”

The survey, conducted with the Maine Center for Coaching Education in Orono, also shows that many parents are convinced that the competitive, cut-list approach is the formula for athletic success later in life.

“They point to the fact that if sports is not competitive enough in middle school,” he said, “their kids won’t be able to develop the skills they’ll need to be top high school players who might then win college scholarships and possibly go on to the pros.”

In fact, Brazee said, that kind of thinking prevailed among many of the parents who recently attended meetings to discuss the building of a middle school near Augusta.

“Their biggest concern was to make sure that the interscholastic teams continue the same competitive level of the travel teams their kids were also involved with outside of school sports,” said Brazee. “That tends to leave most kids out of the picture who are considered too slow or uncoordinated because they’re in a growth spurt. When kids are told they’re no good at an early age, they usually leave and don’t come back.”

The MCCE and its task force are sponsoring a statewide conference on middle-level sports March 5-6 at the Augusta Civic Center to address that concern and others. Coaches, administrators and all interested parents are invited to join in discussions about alternatives to cutting children from middle school teams, the pros and cons of tournaments, how to keep teachers in coaching, the problem of schools that compete for the same young athlete, and poor parental support and behavior at games.

“The concerns about middle-level school athletics have been overlooked, for the most part, and pop up only when there’s some publicized incident about outrageous behavior by a coach or a parent on the sidelines,” Brazee said. “But there are parents and coaches and teachers who recognize that things are really out of whack, and that very young kids are being pushed too fast, too hard and too early. It’s happening everywhere.”