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Article Excerpt
HI MY NAME IS SAM, I am a Softball Dad' and these are my transgressions. I took my perfectly contented daughter, Maisie; out of her cozy, relaxed little neighborhood fast-pitch softball league and propelled her into the hyperaccelerated, hypercompetitive, brutally expensive, and, to many people, absurdly professionalized world of youth tournament sports. You know, "select" teams. [paragraph] Yes, I am one of those parents. I can't help myself. I am the sort of person who will spend $150 on a bat and later wonder if I have spent enough. Unless I miss my guess, we are headed very quickly and very irrevocably in the direction of a $225-plus Miken carbon-shell bat. One of my daughter's teammates got one, and we all agree that it is a very fine bat. Very fine indeed. We spend $80 for Ringor baseball cleats, which happen to be purple (matching the team's primary color), as are my daughter's wind suit, helmet, and other pricey paraphernalia, all of which also bear her name and number. Though I have not yet shelled out upward of $1,000 for a backyard pitching machine, I confess it has crossed my mind. More than once. We spend $110 a month for hitting lessons and $100 a month for pitching lessons. We send Maisie to softball camps. We spend two weekends a month (December excepted) in glamorous places like Seguin, Willis, San Marcos, Katy, Richmond, Harlingen, and Killeen, watching tournaments in which the girls play as many as eight games, often ending at midnight or later. We practice long hours in the blistering summer heat and in the icy northers of January. If I sound like one of those middle-aged, testosterone-crazed, frustrated former athletes who are playing out all their pathetic dreams of glory in the lives of their children, well, I would like to point out that I have plenty of company. There are millions out there like me whose children play for select teams--privately run organizations that practice and play far more often than traditional recreational teams. They, and their sons and daughters, are attending marathon volleyball tournaments waged across forty nets at convention centers. They drive five hundred miles so that eight-year-olds can play hockey, pay $400 a month for traveling soccer teams, and fork over $3,000 to attend a single national competition. There are even select dance teams these days.
Like it or not, this is all part of the brave new world of kids' sports, and in case you are wondering, the families who participate in them are not all Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Most are ordinary, middle-class Americans who are stretching to afford it. Since the eighties, when America decided that it was quickly becoming uncompetitive with the rest of the world in everything from automobiles and electronics to mathematics and Little League baseball, select teams have been multiplying like bacteria. Remember when we were all appalled to learn that the Taiwanese Little League boys played year-round? Not only that but, unlike their more relaxed and eclectic American counterparts, they focused on only one sport. And they played it all the time. Oh, the horror. After a number of butt-whippings in baseball, soccer, and other youth sports, America got the message: The more you practice, the better you are. Which brings me back to me, and us. I am not suggesting that massive global forces beyond my...
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