Cut 9-year-olds from travel teams, though, and you’re with it in today’s world.
“Imagine living in a world where sharing the importance of developing happy, healthy, balanced, well-rounded athletes, mentally & physically, is considered modern day counterculture..
And cutting 9-year-olds from travel teams is considered “normal”.
What a world!”
-Ray Zingler on X
We’re so far away from understanding the concept of development that most wouldn’t even know where to begin even if they wanted to.
Financially motivated charlatans have been peddling “advanced” training (fitness & sport) modalities for so long that most believe development is “private lessons”.
At 8? 10? 12-years-old? Are you kidding me?
The first disservice to our kids is the lack of PE in our school’s. And yes, I understand your kid might have a semester of PE on his or her schedule, but it ain’t Physical Education.
Are they teaching gymnastics? Calisthenics? Exposing them to a wide variety of movements? Running, jumping, sprinting? Of course not.
They are playing “touch” football, or pick-up hoops, sometimes, while mostly playing on their phones en route to an easy A.
The second disservice to our kids is lack recess. And yes, recess “should be a thing” for middle school and high school kids, too.
Unstructured, free play, whether that be on the playground, field, or court is critical to development, but like any good thing, let the government get their hands on it and watch it get ruined.
So, we have kids today whose “exposure to development” is nothing more than “playing sport”.
And then we go from “playing sport” to “lessons for sport”.
And then they work to pigeonhole them to a specific sport earlier and earlier to increase the profitability of the child.
We can ignore this truth, play make believe, and act like this isn’t how it is, but it’s how it is, whether you want to believe it or not.
And for whatever reason when you bring it up and talk about it on behalf of the defense of the kids, it’s taboo. Shhhhh. Don’t say anything.
It’s counterculture to speak out against the bullshit.
But you know what happens to be “with the culture”?
Cutting 9-year-old’s from travel teams.
Yep.
Cutting kids, who, statistically (who cares about statistics though, amirite!?) are walking away from sport earlier and earlier in life.
Unless good, educated people start putting their feet down, what is already extremely out of hand is only going to get worse.
And it’s the next generation of kids who will pay the freight of the adult greed and immaturity.
