In Support of Unorganized Sports

American family life has gotten too busy. Organized sports, extracurriculars, and overbooked schedules are such an assumed part of family life I don’t even need to give examples for you to know what I’m talking about.  

But this whole go go go lifestyle leads to a fractured life. Certainly kids being involved in dozens of activities throughout the year means they will get only surface deep into any of them. There may be value in having a wide experience, but dabbling in a handful of structured things (often involuntarily) isn’t a great way to teach discipline, commitment, or imagination.  

The other side of the coin is the overcommitment to one particular activity. A baseball league some of the boys were in last year sent out a note about their upcoming travel team tryouts. To their credit they were up front about the commitment which included: practices every day of the week, tournaments on weekends (as many as four games per day), and out-of-state travel. This was for nine and 10-year-olds.

Sometimes I think parents are made to feel guilty if their kid(s) aren’t constantly participating in some sort of organized activity. Play and kids interacting is important, sure, but I think we’ve gone to such an extreme to capitalize on the benefits that we’re trying to force them into a rigid framework. And, as every kid knows, there’s nothing like coerced and prescribed play to suck all the fun out of it.

Adults my age, and certainly the two generations before me, lament the loss of kids playing outside or in the neighborhood. Unstructured (or at least kid-structured) play like freeze tag, kick the can, cops and robbers, and just playing outside were the order of the day. When we say things like back in my day we played in the street, drank from the hose, and only came inside when it got dark – modern kids think we’re kidding.

It's all so unimaginable to them. No coaches? No lessons? No adult supervision at all times? Inconceivable!

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for organized activities. I had great experiences in Little League as a kid and several of the boys have had good times in Pony baseball. But it’s easy to go overboard and to forget there’s more than one way to experience sports. Playing backyard baseball with my older brother using a foam ball and duct taped plastic bat as a kid is still one of the most fun ways I’ve ever played the game.

However, I’m convinced in order to explore unstructured play, kids need to hit a certain level of boredom. If we’re filling all their time with lessons, practices, and classes (and probably screen time too) then not only won’t they get the experience of imaginative and unstructured play, but they’ll probably lose the ability to do it. Could that be why you rarely see kids playing outside in the neighborhood?

Non-organized activity isn’t lost time. But it’s going to be lost in the shuffle of modern family life if you don’t make time for it. So here’s a reminder and your permission slip: just let the kids play.