by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

November 6, 2008

When it comes to organized youth sports, parents should keep their hopes high but their feet on the ground.

Rick Wolff, host of The Sports Edge, a weekly program on youth sports on WFAN (660 AM), assessed the current state of affairs for a gathering of 40 parents, coaches, and students at Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston on Oct. 30.

Among the issues raised were how to keep kids engaged if their team was having a poor season, how to make sure the coaches distribute playing time evenly, and how to be encouraging without turning into the dreaded “Little League parent.”

While he admitted not having all the answers all the time, Wolff has a wealth of experience that most parents can’t claim. He and his son, John, shared a unique bond: they both graduated from Harvard University and played two years of minor league baseball.

Rick Wolff remained in baseball as a psychological consultant for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1990s. It was there he made a startling discovery.

Talking to the players during one spring training, he learned half of them had decidedly unpleasant memories of playing organized sports as kids. Although they loved to play the games, they hated dealing with coaches whose practices they considered unfair.

“If these were the best and brightest [athletes],” Wolff asked, “what about normal kids?”

On the flip side, he said, well-meaning but overzealous parents may not be objective about their youngsters’ athletic talents. Wolff cited a study in which almost 50 percent of seven- to 12-year-olds said they did not want their parents to watch their games. Why? “We say, ‘Go out and have fun,’ but we really mean, ‘Go out and be a star,’” he said.

Wolff lamented that almost three fourths of kids who play organized sports will quit by the time they turn 13, the usual cutoff age for recreational programs.

One of the biggest culprits in feeding unrealistic expectations has been the increased popularity of travel teams. Parents feel they should get a return on their investment of time and money spent on lessons, fees, and equipment in the form of college scholarships. “Only 4 percent of high school varsity athletes go on to play in college,” he told the audience.

Wolff, 56, recalled his own days as a kid on the ball fields and basketball courts. “There weren’t organized sports or travel teams, but we went out every day and did some activity,” he said. (His remarks might have been beyond the ken the kids and many of the parents on hand who seemed to be too young to know about heading off to the park by themselves to play in pick-up games.)

“The concept of a ‘do-over’ is foreign to our children,” Wolff said, who said that such self-regulation taught kids valuable social skills. “Now we have referees and umpires.”

If the parents were looking for 100 percent approval, they weren’t about to get it from Wolff. In response to the many questions from the audience, he kept coming back to the simple concept of letting the kids enjoy playing their games and let them try different sports:

“Your kid might want to play soccer only to realize there’s too much running involved,” he said. As that child grows up, she might not even want mom or dad to serve as anything but chauffeur. As a way of rebelling, they might turn to activities their parents know little about, such as snowboarding or extreme sports.

In the majority of situations, parents had to listen to their kids’ comments and complaints, without interfering with the athlete-coach relationship, Wolff said.

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