Playing versus performing

Jeff Jones, a woodshop teacher at Central High, has spent his life in sports. Now a father, he coaches or attends games in a wide variety of sports.

And he can offer up a litany of dumb and bonehead actions by fanatical parents and coaches in the name of trying to get kids to kick some tail.

He once saw 7-year-old football players made to run until they collapsed because they’d lost a game. At another football game one night, a little kid told him, “I hate this game. I’m never playing it again.”

Adults push little ones until they throw up. Jones has seen it, and he’s got that raw, niggling sense that hits adults any time they’ve seen a kid done wrong and feel called to do something—anything—about it.

He tried talking to the parents himself, but that didn’t work. “They looked at me like I was an idiot.”

So Jones went a-Googling and found Bob Bigelow, a retired pro basketball player and author of Just Let the Kids Play.

Bigelow, now 57, was a first-round NBA draft choice and played for the Kansas City Kings, the Boston Celtics and the San Diego Clippers. He went on to become one of the country’s foremost advocates for kids in sports.

Jones has been lobbying in his Central community and school to bring Bigelow to the area to run a clinic for coaches and parents. But it’s an expense that few are interested in taking on. For many, he says, you’d have to pay them to change their attitudes.

Over the phone, Bigelow, who lives in Boston, is an odd combination of the Car Talk guys and John Tesh.

“I tell ya, getting to Tiger Stadium. That’s definitely one that’s on my bucket list,” he says. “Yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk.”

Bigelow is an encyclopedia of organized kids’ sports trivia.

After World War II, he explains, sports for kids began to be institutionalized. But the majority of sports were still played on sandlots or playgrounds—without adults.

In 1979, soccer arrived in the United States. It was a turning point. Here was a game that included girls. It was also a game that came from overseas, so the kids needed an adult to teach them the rules.“It took hold in the suburbs of this country,” Bigelow says.

Adults are involved in and hover around most kids’ sports now. Most adult coaches are zealous parents or volunteers who haven’t had a shred of child development training or a physical education background. They watch sports on TV and think their charges should emulate those athletes.

“My overall calling is to get the ego out of youth sports,” he says. “Too many adults want to compete through children.”

Bigelow says adults are obtuse when it comes to sports. He calls it the “Tiger Woods Syndrome.” Parents sometimes believe that if they start kids younger, and get them to play more, the kids will crank out results and eventually win college scholarships or become stars.

In Florida, he says, there’s a state T-ball championship. “That means there are little boys in Pensacola sitting in front of their Sponge Bob lunch boxes debating the big game.”

Bigelow just wants the madness to stop.

“Children want to play,” he says. “They want to develop skills. They want to make friends and they want to run around. Winning is way down on the list.”

Bigelow tells the story of young Michael Jordan, who was awkward and seemingly untalented at a young age. He had to play junior varsity in high school, until a growth spurt put him in a higher tier.

“A kid like that today would’ve been blown out of the system in 10th grade,” he says.

“Do you want your kid to be a player, or do you want your kid to be a performer? Way too damn many kids in this country perform in sports when all they should be doing is playing.”