Just Do It Right

Children feel pressure to perform at a high level in sports regardless of their enjoyment of it, to specialize early in a particular sport and to put winning ahead of participation. Out-of-school sports leagues can worsen these conditions as can parents who live fantasy lives through their children’s athletic achievements, place performance demands on their children and who, for instance, yell at coaches and other sports officials because they disagree with them. Those coaches are too often under-trained and don’t remain as coaches for more than a couple of years.

It shouldn’t need to be said that for many young athletes, these conditions do not exist – their experiences are positive, and they discover that sports provides them with valuable lessons about hard work, friendship, teamwork, discipline, competition and graceful ways to express winning and losing in addition to the physical benefits of regular exercise. But according to the comments collected in “Sports Done Right,” enough objectionable behavior exists, with more categories than are listed above, to warrant widespread reforms to Maine’s practices and attitudes.

“Sports Done Right” was created by, among others, Dean Robert Cobb of the University of Maine College of Education and Human Development and Duke Albanese, former commissioner of education and a co-director of the Sport and Coaching Education Initiative at UMaine. It was funded through a federal grant of $397,000 secured by Sen. Susan Collins. The booklet is only a small part of what its creators hope to achieve: they want communities to change the culture of youth sport and they are hopeful that school-accrediting institutions, such as the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, will incorporate its principles.

Those principles include school codes of conduct, an emphasis on coaches as educators first with sports linked to learning in the classroom, parental good behavior and encouragement without interfering with coaches, sports programs for all abilities, student-athletes playing more than one sport and well-defined seasons when a sport ends for the year.

“Sports Done Right” also lists what it calls Out-of-Bounds – no acting disrespectfully toward opponents, don’t set unrealistic goals for athletes, coaches shouldn’t lack self-control – that are true enough but could use more specificity so that when communities take up these ideas they will have a better sense of what the authors were thinking about. That is, parents, coaches and athletes already know bad behavior is not acceptable, but they do it anyway; a greater emphasis on how to avoid these behaviors would have been helpful. (One chart in the report, called Red Flags for Parents, was especially good in this respect.)

Maine has a solid beginning for improving sports culture in “Sports Done Right.” It is at the forefront of states addressing the problem and, coincidentally, reached its conclusions just as the National Association of State Boards of Education issued a report that would naturally lead to the kind of examination Maine has just completed.

The report is timely in another way. Perhaps not coincidentally, as a small group of gifted athletes are pushed harder and further than ever before, a growing percentage of Maine’s youth is obese and badly in need of regular exercise. Two problems with a common solution: School officials and parents would serve both groups of children better by putting the outstanding achievements of the very few in perspective and shifting the emphasis in sports to include more athletes.

That doesn’t mean rewarding mediocrity; it means giving more recognition to the value of sports, which lasts long after people with full lives have forgotten the scores of long-ago games.