I Used to Play Lacrosse- Confessions of a 10 year old boy
“I used to play lacrosse”, the 10 year-old boy told me as we walked across the main campus at Mishawaka. “It just got to be too much,” he went on. “Practice was at night, and I had soccer practice after school, so I never had any time. I liked it though”, he added as we went on to our afternoon activities. For a long time I have struggled to write about the relationship kids have with organized sports in a way that doesn’t seem to shame parents for signing their kids up for these opportunities. The pressure parents feel to provide these experiences for their children is real. And the loosely organized cabal of the Industrial Youth Sports Complex is so effective at making parents feel that if they don’t play the game, they are leaving their children behind. I felt this pressure myself as the parent of two children
We Can Agree, But
We can all agree that playing a sport as a child is a good thing. Sports help kids develop physical and social muscles that serve them their entire lives. They provide an in-person social network that is rooted in shared values and goals. These activities are also the basis of friendships and real relationships that can constitute a teenager’s world at just the time that having these connections is so important. But when does it cross a line?
“There’s this push to specialize earlier and earlier,” said Meredith Whitley, a professor at Adelphi University who studies youth sports. “But at what cost? For those young people, you’re seeing burnout happen earlier because of injuries, overuse, and mental fatigue.”A recent article in the New York Times points out that the share of school-age children involved in sports fell by nearly 6% from 2017 to 2022, with nearly 70% of children dropping out by age 13. The reasons: repetitive stress injury, burn-out, and the realization that it’s no longer fun. In a survey by the Aspen Institute, 11.4% of parents believe that their children can play professionally. (The actual number is closer to 1%, 16% for baseball, .025% for football, and .0077% for the WNBA)
At Camp, we often find ourselves in the middle of this dilemma. At Camp, we’ve had 13 year-old boys who have had Tommy John surgery - a procedure to correct a torn ulnar nerve from throwing a lifetime of pitches. We have had young girls who must wear wrist braces because of repetitive stress injuries from gymnastics. We host young children that tell us they used to play soccer, tennis, or any number of organized sports but were “selected out” (told they were no good at it) at an age when they had not even fully developed. Last summer we arranged for several children to return home mid-session to attend a mandatory try-out for their fall sport. And, just yesterday, a 15 year-old veteran camper withdrew because her club volleyball team is requiring participation in several summer tournaments. Both parent and child were heartbroken.
Powerful Forces at Play
According to the Aspen Institute study, the youth sports industry generates about $40 billion dollars in annual revenue. It should come as no surprise that private equity has taken note and that in 2025 two hedge fund titans began buying up leagues, camps, and facilities. Today, Unrivaled Sports owns the largest collections of youth sports properties in the country. In 2024, KKR, another large private equity firm, paid $4.5 billion for Varsity Sports- a company that makes uniforms and organizes cheerleading competitions.
Parents are hard-wired to provide opportunities for their children. It can come with pressure and a mix of shame,that if they don’t provide every opportunity they are somehow failing their children. The forces that align to drive parents to maximize every opportunity are powerful and as effective as any marketing strategy I have ever seen. Last summer, we had an 11 year-old boy trade his session at Camp for a summer of “elite” lacrosse tournaments in Nevada, Arizona and Florida, as if there weren’t enough other kids to play with in his city of 650,000 people.
Finding a Middle Way
I was a 16 year-old camper with a friend who went on to play Notre Dame football for 4 years. This surely wouldn’t be possible today. He stayed active at Camp and followed his summer workout schedule pretty well. It didn’t seem to hold him back. Today, he would likely be in the gym or field 3-4 hours a day, and find himself moving from one select camp to the next. He cites his time at Mishawaka as being just as formative as his time playing football.
We have a recent camper who is playing Division 1 basketball. He is an incredibly talented athlete, as you might imagine. In his case it was his talent that allowed his parents to just tell the coach that he would miss the summer tournaments, and for the coach to accept it. Not everyone is in this position. By coming to summer camp, he developed other muscles, and social skills that no doubt continue to serve him well on the court.
I don’t think that sending a child to camp was never intended as an act of resistance, but today it does require making hard choices, often forgoing other opportunities. Helping kids learn to make difficult choices is part and parcel of the camp experience, but it is my wish that there was a way to keep “and” in the equation just a bit longer. A kid can play lacrosse and go to camp, a way for a child to go to camp and do cheerleading. Sport specialization can lead to wonderful things, discoveries of talents and passions, and even open the door for college participation. But I am not sure we do our children any good by forcing them to choose at 11, or at an age before they have a sense of themselves.
I don’t have the solution to the dilemma, but it seems to me that the end consumer - in this case the parent who pays for it - has a lot more power than they might imagine. Maybe even enough power to change the way we can all preserve childhood. If that’s an act of resistance, viva la revolution.
