If you have kids are they interested in sports?

[ShyGuy]

Basically when I was a kid sports was like everything to me. To the point where I really didnt have many other hobbies or cares in the world besides it. While in my late 30s now that fandom has definitely waned overtime it still feels sort of in my DNA to at least follow/keep abreast of what's going with sports.


But it seems kids today don't really share that same interest. I came across this article


https://www.stack.com/a/kids-losing-...0aged%206%2D12.


This article talks about participation in organized sports dropping but I don't blame kids today for not being interested in general in sports. When I turned 8 for my birthday my dad bought tickets to a NJ Nets game in the bleachers and I thought that was like the greatest/coolest thing in the world. But it was a different world then in a lot of ways.



I'm not in touch with today's youth so I pose the question

[Hillsdale87]

I'm 35 and was the same as you. My son is 9, and he's pretty obsessed with sports. He'd watch every Reds game if I let him, plus Bengals, OSU football, and IU basketball (we've got split B10 allegiances - a bit weird). And then he watches golf whenever I put it on. It's pretty much all he and his friends talk about and play.

But I definitely notice a lot of what you're talking about. He's found the kids in the neighborhood that love sports, though none as much as him probably, but there aren't a lot of them.


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[Boston Red]

All three of my kids play sports. One is going to be a scholarship athlete next year. But 2 of the 3 have literally zero interest in watching sports. Makes no sense to me, but that's how they feel.

[SunDeck]

I cared about almost nothing but sports as a kid, and I was very good at the ones I played. However, looking back I realized there was much I missed academically from that hyper-focus, and I resolved to be a parent who encouraged my kids to seek out interests they enjoyed that would stick with them when their knees wore out, like music and art. My daughter became a standout swimmer and I was very proud to watch her excel, but I was even more proud when as a 10th grader she had the presence of mind to announce she did not want to swim in college because it would rob her of other experiences. I feel like that decision put her years ahead of me intellectually compared to when I was her age.

[Kingspoint]

We don't allow competition in our household. Don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

[KoryMac5]

My daughter will play soccer but only because I coach...its actually easier for me to coach her than to watch her play...

Other than that she has 0 interest in sports...except for wearing her Burrow jersey to school.

She has always leaned more to the artistic side with music and dance which is fine by me.

[medford]

I can't really recall how it compared to my youth (I was always sports crazy, but aside from offensive line where my smarts and hard work could overcome my limited athleticism I wasn't ever very good). However, I have 3 school age kids, 8th grader, 5th and 1st grader. I coach the oldest and the youngest in varying things and they both love sports. Middle child enjoys cheer for the social aspect (sideline, not comp cheer) but also realizes that she she cant do some of the things required of her to continue sideline cheer into high school, so next season is likely her last. She also does dance, which she enjoys though its not highly competitive. She enjoys watching them on TV with me sometimes, but by no means is she fanatical.

So with that out of the way, I'll talk about what I've seen in my 2 boys. Oldest has played football since 1st grade as well as baseball. Involved in travel baseball for the last 4 years, football was always a "rec" program, but it always has demanded a select level of commitment 1st grade thru 6, once he transitioned to middle school football (7th grade) the commitment level actually dropped a bit to only 2 practices (they play 2 games a week, an A game and a B game and the boys are required to be at both no matter which one they play in). In 1st - 6th they would practice 4-5 days a week until school started, then 3 days during school with a game on the weekend. Middle school doesn't have weekend competition. Anyhoo, it feels like his travel ball league is diminishing a bit every season in terms of the number of teams, but I get the impression that is natural as they move closer and closer to HS age ball and kids start giving up the sport. His 8th grade football team had as many kids as they have ever had for an 8th grade team in his district, something like 70 kids played last season. Overall its a very athletic class of kids with a lot of kids that do a lot of sports at a very high level, they have always had pretty full leagues in any rec level that he played (he played basketball a bit as well until 4th grade).

My youngest had a huge number of teams in his baseball league last season, coach pitch 1. They also had 8 teams of 8-9 players in rec level basketball and football wise (I'm on the board) we had as many kids involved in football/cheer last season as the program has had in quite some time (at least since my oldest was in 1st grade 8 seasons ago). There was a time the program often fielded 4-5 teams of 16-20 kids at every age group in football (plus cheerleaders on top of that), during Covid they were down to just 1 team per grade save my oldest son's grade which still had 3 teams plus another that was at 2. Last season we had at least 2 at every grade and 3 at several.

Post Covid there seems to have been a boom in the growth of sports in general for younger kids. Do they enjoy them as much as ever? I assume so because from what I can tell the numbers keep rising. I think parents and perhaps the kids realized just how valuable that time is when everything else got shut down. Do kids watch sports on TV or go to games as often as they did in the past? I have no clue, but I'll guess not just for the simple reason that there is so much more available to them. I think most reasonable parents limit their childrens screen time to some extent. So with so many options, including sports they are going to be able to expand their screen time to what their specific interest are at the moment. I didn't grow up all that long ago (45 now) but even in a house that had cable and HBO, saturday afternoon, sports were about the only thing interesting on TV. Double that on a sunday.

[RedTeamGo!]

I have a 7 year old son that loves sports. He is a good soccer player, involved with an academy here in Cleveland and the coaches seem pretty excited about him. He also loves watching sports. He asked to stay up on new years eve not for the ball drop but to watch the OSU/Georgia game. Was a good time. Every night after dinner he says "dad, are there any basketball games on?" During the football season it was "Dad, are there any football games on?"

He will watch anything. He will watch college women's lacrosse on big ten network. He loves to go to live sporting events. I guess I just hit the lottery with this kid, ha.

[15fan]

As soon our daughter was old enough, she was on a soccer field, baseball/softball field (including only girl in the kid-pitch baseball league where she held her own) or summer swim team. In high school, she either swam or ran depending on the season. In college, she’s on a very active club swim team for her small university. She also works for the director of football ops and will start traveling with the team for away games this season. Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, and she’ll tell you “I’m going to be GM of the Atlanta Braves.” Not “I want to be…”, but “I’m going to be…”.

So thinking back to the original question, I’m not really sure what my kid likes other than sports.

[Hillsdale87]

I have a 7 year old son that loves sports. He is a good soccer player, involved with an academy here in Cleveland and the coaches seem pretty excited about him. He also loves watching sports. He asked to stay up on new years eve not for the ball drop but to watch the OSU/Georgia game. Was a good time. Every night after dinner he says "dad, are there any basketball games on?" During the football season it was "Dad, are there any football games on?"

He will watch anything. He will watch college women's lacrosse on big ten network. He loves to go to live sporting events. I guess I just hit the lottery with this kid, ha.

I love getting those questions from my son.

"Is there football on?" No
"Is there basketball on?" No
"Is there golf on?" No
"Are there any sports on?!"

[Hillsdale87]

One of the things that's a struggle to me with my son is that the quality of rec sports has diminished significantly from the time I was playing 20-25 years ago. I was a good athlete, above average to good at everything, but far from a star. I played rec sports in Cincinnati, and there was pretty good competition without the crazy commitment that is often required from select/travel teams. But by the time my youngest brothers were playing, they were playing on select teams because the rec leagues had deteriorated so much as everybody moved to select.

My son is a better athlete than me, but at 9 years old I don't want him doing travel teams, both because I don't want our family to have something going on every night (we have 4 other kids) and because I don't think it's great for his life to revolve around sports at 9 years old. Last year he played baseball for the local rec team and had 18 games. The travel team for his age group played 70 and traveled almost every weekend... If my son is showing a lot of promise at 12/13, I'd consider doing something more time consuming, but it seems crazy at 9. But it's hard to find good enough competition without going that route. My son would be a good, but not great player on a travel team, but is so far ahead in the rec leagues. I wish there was a better middle ground option.

[medford]

Hillsdale,

For whatever its worth, not all "travel" teams play 70 games a year. Some do for sure and I would avoid that like the plague. My son's team is essentially a rec league all star type team, D3 travel baseball, certainly not the top end. I've seen some of those games and those kids are light years ahead of where our kids are at. I think we play around 30 games a year, all local, only a handful of tournaments, maybe 1 or 2 out of town tournaments. There is a level between rec league and D1 travel baseball if that is your main concern. Also note that unless your son is a real standout, it can be harder to make a select team down the road as many of those kids have been playing together for 4-5 seasons and a coach may not want to boot a kid that has been loyal to his team for a handful of seasons or that he has made friends with his parents. There are always openings but often its 2 to 3 at a time.

Biggest difference b/w rec ball and travel baseball that I can tell is the level of commitment out of the kids and parents and the weeding out of kids who really struggle athletically or are only out there because their parents felt they needed something to do outdoors. I do believe that travel ball is way too populated these days (and yes my son and I are certainly guilty), but it is also nice to work with the exact same core group of kids season after season and not having to start from square 1 because 3-4 kids on the team had never played any level of baseball before.

Also 70 games for 9 year olds is crazy as you said, those kids would be much better served spending half those games on a diamond working on baseball skills than playing in a weekend tournament where winning is too often the only focus.

[Boston Red]

Youth baseball could use its own thread. I've been coaching my sons' teams for the last seven years, and I hate the current system At least the one we have here.

Essentially, you have to form your own team (or join a club team that is generally expensive). You usually start out with kids from your school, but quickly it becomes clear that some kids actually want to play baseball, some kids actually CAN play baseball, some kids have no interest in playing baseball, and some kids have absolutely no ABILITY to play baseball. Parents are generally terrible at understanding which bucket their kid falls into. So, for one reason or another you spend June and July of every year re-tooling your roster. Because someone is probably leaving because they think they're too good for your team (they're not always wrong!), some kid decides he doesn't want to play baseball anymore (unfortunately I've known that since the second practice of the year in most cases), and some other parents are going to take their kids and play elsewhere unless you cut some of the dead weight and improve the roster. As you might imagine, that leads to some hurt feelings and parents who avoid you at all costs (often people you see at school events). We're going into year 4, and there are only three kids (plus my son) from the original 12 that will still be playing together this year.

So we'll go from playing 20 games last year to close to 40 this year depending on how well we do in tournaments (that's about as far as I possible see pushing it). We'll "travel", but that really means in about a 30-40 mile radius to see pretty much the same teams over and over. And then one trip about 2 hours away at the end of the year for a "AA" state tournament. I think we finally have a decent roster of kids and parents and coaches that all are generally on the same page in terms of how seriously they want to take baseball, but it was a ridiculous road to get here, and I'm sure it won't last past this year as people keep looking around. We have one kid who's an absolute monster, and he only plays with us because we're neighbors and I work with his dad. He's definitely getting better offers, and I suspect he will take one of those offers soon enough.

Contrast that with the much better system of my youth (IMO). Everyone shows up for a 5 minute tryout, the coaches draft 10 or 12 teams, and every team has 2 great players, 2 terible players, and 7 mediocre ones. You play your league season, have an all-star team that represents the league in a tournament at the end of the year, and that's it. Until we were 15 years old, the worst kids just by signing up with the local league got to play with and against guys who went on to play major college baseball and professionally. Now those kids generally get sucked into the best club/travel teams, and the only way the average kid gets to even play against the top talents is in a game where your completely overmatched team is getting beat 15-0 in a tounament that your team never should have entered. I do not like it.

[Betterread]

My son is interested in playing sports and watching them, but he does not follow sports too closely. And he definitely isn’t emotionally involved in any team. He does like to wear the gear.
Youth sports are pretty stratified these days. If you don’t have your child on a competitive track or team, they are playing a lot less as those teams have events 3-5 times a week. It’s also really tough to play more than one sport, as the off-season is pretty short.
Basieally it’s an arms race of paying for training (I hear of more and more kids having private coaches), putting pressure on kids to make the “right” teams starting at age 6-7.
But if you don’t even try to keep up, you can only do rec leagues, which are low key but also low level competition. If your kid is athletic at all, he or she will run by or run over most of the kids. It’s not even like old pickup games, because those games had a mix of kids from the neighborhood but they all liked the sport at least. The one qualifier is if your kid does rec leagues at an older level - 2-3 Years older. If they are under 10 and can hang with kids 2-3 yrs older they can keep up at a more competitive level.

kids are way more skilled, much earlier and are more serious about sports. But there is far more pressure on them also. Pressure from parents. So I think they get burned out on their sport more often, and also maybe why they are not that into following sports.

[ShyGuy]

Interesting responses. Perhaps it's because I asked the question on a sports site but most posters children here seem pretty active with sports.

My experience was I was sports crazy to the point of all else up until high school. My dad never really shared my enthusiasm. I played sports up until then and was average at them. I choose to go to an all Catholic boys high school because of it's sports programs and the education involved and I wound up hating the school. Tried out for tennis the 1st year and didn't make and found the whole process/ my other classmates extremely unpleasant to the point I didnt want to be involved in sports in high school. But I thought it was weird though even for that kind of school pro sports was rarely talked about by anyone. Long story short I dont miss that place.


Me personally I could see how hyper competitive parents and kids can be a turn off. One coach I had in middle school basketball was real intense... especially on his son who I think he had high hoop dreams for. Our team was decent but I never really enjoyed playing for this coach.