Becoming a human is a complex and difficult task. We start out as little screaming poop generators and develop over time into the most remarkable and dynamic lifeforms in the known universe. This process takes about 25 years to fully unfold, and no one is really given a guidebook. At least, with the decline of religion in America, it might be more precise to say that people aren’t reading the guidebooks the species grew up reading with as much regularity.
One of the most significant difficulties that America faces in regards to helping children become full fledged people is the fact that America doesn’t really have a child development system. We have an education system, which is distinctly not the same thing as a child development system.
The difference between an education system and a child development system is like the difference between a human being and an advanced computer. The computer is very good at processing information, but processing information isn’t the sum of the human experience. We do process information, and in fact we do so better, faster, and with more versatility than even the best super computers, but that isn’t all humans do. We also experience emotion, we socialize, we act on instinct.
The complexity of the human experience is well encapsulated in a quote from Mark Twain: man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to. The entire idea of embarrassment demands a complex layering of memory, imagination, and emotional reaction. One needs to be able to reflect on their actions, requiring a dynamic memory, while also being able to imagine an alternate action, and then feeling an emotion about the hypothetical alternative not taken.
Because human beings are so much more than simple information processors, we need a developmental system that engages more than just the cognitive aspects of our life. What we have is a system that tries to reduce its responsibility to just the cognitive domain, relegating socialization, morality, emotional regulation, self-care, mental health, etc., to the increasingly overworked and unavailable parents to figure out on their own.
Part of the problem is that we built our education system before we really understood either education or systems. In the wake of the western enlightenment, school systems were developed in an environment of information scarcity. The point of the school system was to disseminate limited information from centralized authorities, much like an irrigation system for a desert. On top of failing to account for the holistic nature of the human experience, the educational system has become even further obsolete with the paradigm shifting advent of the internet.
Our education system is as well equipped to deal with the new modern reality of ubiquitous, almost unlimited information access as a desert irrigation system is well equipped to deal with a flood. The central problem which the education system was designed to address, information scarcity, has become utterly defunct, and the system is struggling to adapt. As it stands now, the education system is predominantly good for doing exactly one thing really well: keeping children out of the way until we are willing to recognize them as fully fledged human beings.
Unfortunately, just keeping children occupied and out of sight so parents can devote their day to making enough money to keep food on the table is not the same thing as equipping those children for life success once they have aged out of the elaborate day care system.
For a very long time, religion filled that gap in teaching children how to human beyond just the empty recitation of details their phone could find in a second. Kids were taught morality and social justice in Sunday School, socialized in youth group activities, learned collaboration in church plays and fundraisers. With the decline in religious participation sweeping across the country, many of those more interpersonal developmental needs are going unmet.
Or, for an increasing number of children, being met through their engagement in youth sports, team sports in particular, although even most individual athletic competitions involves training in groups, which accomplishes many of the same developmental goals.
Many of the benefits of youth sports are pretty well established at this point in time. Children who participate in sports score almost 40% higher on standardized tests, have 15% increased likelihood to attend college, and average over 7% higher lifetime earnings. The simple fact of the matter is that participation in youth sports drastically changes a child’s developmental trajectory for the better.
The question is, why?
Does anyone think the ability to hit a ball makes one better at testing? Is there anyone who believes that kicking a ball increases the scholastic drive to attend university? Does being competent at wrapping up another human being and driving them into the ground seem like a reasonable prerequisite to earning more dollars on the open, non-tackling labor market?
On the face of it, there isn’t a direct correlation between athletic participation and achieved positive life outcomes, but that is before digging into the nature of youth sports participation.
I have spent my entire adult life teaching children, in some fashion or another. I spent a decade as a youth pastor before transitioning to coach full time for the next two decades upon running into a quote by the greatest collegiate basketball coach of all time, the inestimable John Wooden. Mr. Wooden was once asked how he did such an amazing job developing such incredible basketball players. Coach Wooden, who was famously gracious, responded with as much acerbity as was possible for him as he answered, “I am not in the business of making basketball players; I’m in the business of making young men, using the game of basketball.” That quote resonated with me, as of the thousands of kids that I have had the good fortune to coach only a few dozen or so have gone on to become professionals. They all, however, went on to become adult humans, so I focused my efforts on making humans, using the game of soccer. Along the way I learned a lot about what it means to develop children, eventually going back to school to get multiple degrees focused on child development, where I got the opportunity to do some teaching in a more traditional academic environment.
The difference between being able to engage with students in the context of sport and trying to engage with them in the classroom was absolutely staggering, and contributed in no small part to the development of the ideas in these blog posts.
Engaging in the classroom was like pulling teeth. Every session was a new fight for the students’ attention, a new challenge to try and pique their interest, and this was in college where the students had voluntarily chosen to learn about the subject matter. The difference between the level of engagement, both in depth and breadth, took my breath away. On the field, even resistant children could be reached with the right structure of a game, the right joke or example.
To be fair, there is a very good chance that I was just a better coach than I was a teacher. I am sure that there are teachers who can engage a classroom in the classic Dead Poet’s Society, Emperor’s Club sense where the children are really learning about life in a way that reaches them, but that seems to be the rather drastic exception rather than the rule. That such vibrant and engaged classrooms are rare is unfortunate, because that kind of classroom would actually make better humans rather than just better parrots of information.
The reason youth sport participation offers such a broad range of developmental benefits is because sports offers a uniquely holistic environment for development. Again, I will say that team sports offer more than individual competitions, but many individual competitors still train in a group environment and so reap many of the developmental benefits.
What exactly are the developmental benefits from youth sports? Well, there are many, but we’ll take a look at a few.
The first and most obvious advantage that sport has over the traditional education environment is that sport is inherently game based, and games are more fun than sitting at a desk learning to recite minutiae. Another added benefit is that sport is inherently active, and engaging the body while engaging the mind has a significant advantage over trying to engage the mind alone, while the body becomes fidgety and anxious.
Sport is interactive, and well-built games create a sliding scale of engagement where players can each find a challenge that is appropriate to their relative skill levels. Take for example a simple game to help children learn to dribble, the act of controlling a ball with one’s feet while running. A coach can set up a field with a bunch of different sized gates. The players then are given a short window of time, a minute or so, to dribble through as many gates as they can. The more skillful players can challenge themselves by dribbling through the smaller gates, while the less skillful players can either go slower or target the bigger gates.
More importantly, games are dynamic, things are always changing in a game, so the players are learning to solve problems in real time, problems that they can learn to anticipate and plan for by learning to keep their head up as their feet learn to control the ball by touch. In the aforementioned game of dribbling through gates, for example, the players might pick a gate to dribble through and then find that another player is in the gate when they get there. The player then has to figure out how to avoid the other player, while keeping control of the ball at their feet. By keeping a head up, they might see the player approaching the gate and either slow down or head to another gate. In such a way players learn how to anticipate changing conditions in realtime, the kind of skill that is very useful off the field, as well, in a world that is constantly changing in realtime.
We can then build on that game, adding more skills to the task, say, performing a specific move when going through the gates. This allows us an opportunity to use the other players as examples using a teaching technique called Catch Them Being Good, the focus of one of the most excellent coaching books I have ever read, and I read a number. The idea is that instead of correcting every error, the coach looks for a player performing the skill perfectly and calls attention to that player. The player is then asked to perform the skill again with all their compatriots watching, because it is well documented that kids learn significantly better from peer modeling than from authoritarian instruction.
This modeling makes it much easier for students to visualize and accomplish their goals, which has a trickle down effect of increasing their confidence in their ability to improve, in general. It pushes back against the ‘I can’t do that’ attitude that pervades the educational environment.
Can you even imagine trying to do build a peer modeling style of instruction in a history class, for example? The teacher might assign a difficult question that some of the students can know the answer to, but others don’t, then walk around peering at every student’s work, and upon seeing the question answered ask the student to go up and write the answer on the board or something. The problem is that it is considerably more difficult to model a cognitive task like remembering something than it is a physical task like manipulating a ball with one’s feet.
This difficulty adds to the isolationism of the educational system, an isolationism reinforced by the individualistic nature of grades and standardized tests. This is an added problem because life isn’t lived in isolation. Almost everything that humans do we do in groups and either succeed or fail in groups. Even classroom environments aren’t the isolated experience that we like to think of them as. I’m sure many people have had an experience in a class where there was a joker who added to the experience or one who detracted from the experience. Regardless of whether the other students in the classroom made the experience better or worse, the grades given at the end of the class treat each student as if they existed in a vacuum. Teams give children a very direct and accessible understanding of grouping, understanding their role as part of a larger whole.
Beyond the instructional benefits like game based teaching and peer modeling, sports also teaches children about morality and social justice in a way the traditional classroom either doesn’t, or, in many cases, can’t. Because the rules of sport are largely arbitrary, the game depends entirely on players willingness to play by the shared rules, which is much like adult life, except the rules of the game are more explicit. They are written down, in fact. Players learn that by following the rules, the game is allowed to exist, as without the rules the anarchy would swallow the game. Children learn not to kick each other, and sporting behavior is one of the thing that coaches focus directly on, as opposed to the school system where punishment is handed out without regard for teaching students the value of playing by the shared rules.
Additionally, sport gives direct access to the pluralistic value of anti-prejudice. When players are competing side by side with players who are different than they are, they come to appreciate that we are all one species, with shared characteristics that bond us more than our differences separate us. Take the movie Remember the Titans, for example, the story about a desegregated school where the players learn to move past racism through their shared efforts on the field. Remember the Titans is a Romeo and Juliet story for interracial bromances, as it repeats the classic lesson that has made Shakespeare’s tale one for the ages: that the experience of genuine love is possible across any line of conflict, whether familial, class based, or racial. That possibility of genuine love is one of the many things that binds us as humans, that gives us hope for a future beyond conflict, and the shared-goal striving of sport makes that lesson accessible for children in a real and powerful way that classrooms just can’t.
These genuine bonds that happen on the sports field can be some of the deepest bonds that children make, especially children like myself who maybe aren’t that good at making friends in the first place. I don’t remember having many friends as a child until I got involved with competitive sports in middle school, and the friends I made there are still some of the closest friends I have to this day.
The mind-body unity, the peer modeling, the collective engagement, and the clear rule structure combine to make sports a powerful system for developing well rounded human beings with a moral compass and a group inclination. Add the dynamic nature of the game promoting versatile problem solving skills and the lifelong friendships with diverse other players, and it is easy to see how participation in youth sports better equips one to be more successful at becoming human than the traditional classroom environment.
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