Biola University
Over the past decade, there have been rallying cries among supporters of youth sport “to fix” youth sports. One reason youth sports is not working so well is the apparent and increasing incivility at games and sporting events. Today’s guest thinks Christian parents can do better. Ed Uszynksi (Ph.D.) recently co-authored the book, Away Game: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, and it’s sure to be a helpful resource for Christian parents who seek to demonstrate good sportsmanship and civility in today’s youth sports culture. Ed speaks with Tim and Mike on some of the key shifts that have occurred in youth sports in the last 50 years, the adult problem with youth sports, and the need to confront the truths and lies when being a supporter of youth sports.
Transcript
Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm the senior director of the Winsome Conviction Project. I've been at Biola going on 21 years, which is absolutely amazing. I'm also here today with one of the co-directors of the Winsome Conviction Project, Dr. Mike Ahn. Mike is the dean of spiritual development here at Biola University, and if you have heard us discuss the Pomona Dialogues us in Pomona College, we've been doing it now going on five years, Mike heads up that dialogue. Mike, thanks for joining.
Mike Ahn: I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be with you, senior director.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thank you. Hey, we are often asked, how bad is incivility today? And people are thinking the worst expression of this, of course, is political dialogue, political discourse, which of course we're not going to minimize, but we don't think that's where incivility raises its head on a daily basis. Both you and I have been involved in youth sports.
Mike Ahn: Completely.
Tim Muehlhoff: I have three children that have gone through it. They even attempted to referee to be umpires and quit immediately. We'll talk about that in a second, but pound for a pound if you talk about incivility today, and were to ask me, Mike, give me examples of this incivility where the gloves are off and the age of a person is irrelevant. You're getting my full wrath. In the time that our kids competed, there were two parents on our one team that had a restraining order against each other on the same team because one woman was so mad about playing time, feeling like her son was being neglected, and the other woman's son was getting her son's playing time, that she threatened to kill her. And police were called and a restraining order was issued, so think about this, all these games this woman is having to sit clear across the gymnasium with the other team because there's a yardage when it comes to restraining orders, and that is just one example of the craziness of incivility. And you are both a parent with kids competing right now.
Mike Ahn: That's right. That's right.
Tim Muehlhoff: And you're a coach.
Mike Ahn: My daughter plays varsity for her high school and my son is playing in a rec team for basketball and also in the club team. And wow, I got to tell you, my son's team for the club level is not the tallest team, but one time they were playing a team that was a little bit bigger and the parents would come and once their team would start to win, they would come and sit next to us as parents and start to taunt us and call us names and call us even racial slurs. And then even would taunt our kids because they're so small.
Tim Muehlhoff: With the game no longer in doubt.
Mike Ahn: The game was no longer in doubt. They were going to win the game. They were much bigger, they were much stronger, and the game was over. It's just they wanted to come and make sure that they rubbed it into our face.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh my goodness, Mike. And we could go on and on and on.
Mike Ahn: We can go on and on.
Tim Muehlhoff: We have some statistics we're going to share in a little bit because we just need some help here. There's a golden opportunity for Christian parents to rise to the occasion and to be different and to show sportsmanship. And I looked up the definition of sportsmanship, fair and generous behavior or treatment of others. And remember, when you go to watch your child compete or you're being a great-grandparent, you're being a great aunt, uncle, remember, we don't stop being ambassadors for Christ. 2nd Corinthians 5:20 Paul says, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God was making His appeal through us, so we are representing Jesus at these sporting events, and quite frankly, we need some help.
Mike Ahn: We do.
Tim Muehlhoff: And fortunately there's a great book out called Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, David Cook Publishers. It's written by two individuals. One individual is going to be very familiar to our audience, a very dear friend of ours, Dr. Ed Uszynski. Ed is an author, speaker, sports minister with over three decades experienced discipling college and professional athletes. He's written articles, essays, training manuals at the intersection of faith in sport, and is the lead strategist for content mercenaries. He has two theological degrees, one from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a PhD in American Cultural Studies from Bowling Green State University. He and his wife Amy, speak at family life marriage conferences. We've spoken together many times. They have four children. They live in Xenia, Ohio. Now you may be thinking listeners, wait a minute, Dr. Ed Uszynski, I absolutely know that name, that's the critical race guy.
Mike Ahn: That's right. That's right.
Tim Muehlhoff: Well, no. Yes, he is.
Mike Ahn: He is.
Tim Muehlhoff: But man, he's an expert when it comes to this area and the book is really good. I don't even have kids competing anymore, and I couldn't put it down. I thought it was really well done, so Dr. Ed Uszynski, welcome to our podcast.
Ed Uszynski: Great to be here. Great intro. When you said we need some help, what went through my mind is where are we going to get help? Is that under my book?
Mike Ahn: That's supposed to be you, Ed.
Ed Uszynski: I know. I need help too. It's such a mess. And that's part of even what prompted us to write it in the first place. I don't want to get out ahead of you, but we just realized we needed an intervention, my co-author, Brian Smith and I, as we were entering into the youth sports world with our own kids, I have four, he and his wife Lindsay have three. And we were coaching and we were watching what other parents were doing. We were watching what we were doing. We just looked around and said, "We are on this fast speeding train that we got on and we need some help on this thing. We don't really want to get off of it entirely, but we don't know where to go to get help." And that's really what started us down the path of saying, well, why don't we try to put some of what we've learned both in our own experience as dads, coaches, but also ministers like you said, across decades of working with college and professional athletes, what could we put down on paper that might be helpful to all of us?
Tim Muehlhoff: And Ed I was serious when... We've been doing this for five years, the Winsome Conviction Project and obviously political discourse, disagreements over mask mandates, COVID. I've seen some pretty tense meetings where voices were raised, but I remember a Pop Warner football game where we beat a team. Ed and the other parents were walking across the field to fight us. They had been progressively drinking during the game and we beat them and they're coming. We had to call 911 and honestly protect the kids because there's a mob coming. And by the way, one police car showed up and we're waving them on and these two police officers looking at us like, "Nope, we are waiting for backup because we are not..." I've never felt threatened physically in a political conversation. That night I'm thinking this thing could get really ugly and people could get seriously hurt, what is about to happen. Now fortunately the police backup came pretty quick, three other police cars and they came with mace and tasers ready to go. And I'm not talking Democrat, Republican.
Mike Ahn: No.
Tim Muehlhoff: I'm talking to Pop Warner, which is what age? What age is Pop Warner?
Ed Uszynski: I don't know. It's elementary school.
Mike Ahn: Eight to 12.
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, eight to 12 and we're about to throw down, Gangs of New York. I'm like, are you kidding me?
Ed Uszynski: Most of us, this is the thing, Tim, even as you set this up and said that youth sports is actually a more relevant site to study incivility than political discourse, and I thought, wow, in what ways is that true? The reality is most of us are probably not getting in political discussions with our co-workers day after day after day. If we delve into it at all. It's usually you tap your foot in the water and then get out quickly so that you can get on with life with each other, but youth sports is every day. If you have kids who are in different sports you are at some field, some practice, some game, some stadium, I don't know, five days a week, six days a week, depending on how many kids you have involved.
And so your exposure to the incivility reality really is a daily thing, which I think is interesting. Again, most of us just don't think about it that way, but we really do need help. We need to step off of the train and try to transcend the youth sport moment to ask ourselves what exactly is going on here? Why is it having the effect on me that it's having? And as a Christian, what does it look like to be different here, like you said? What does it look like to represent a different kingdom in this space?
Tim Muehlhoff: And your co-author is equally qualified to write on this. Brian Smith is a graduate of Wake Forest University, has a master's degree in theology and sports studies. How wild is that, through Baylor University? And he lives in God's country, Lowell, Michigan with his wife and three kids, and writes regularly at christianathlete.com. Hey Ed, before we say how did we get here? Let's find out what the here looks like. Mike, you did some digging on statistics and paint a picture, a macro picture for us how bad things can get.
Mike Ahn: Tim, you were talking about violence that is happening. You put in youth sports kinds of things on YouTube and you just see coaches getting into feuds with the other side and you see coaches actually even driving cars into people because the violence gets so heightened. There's a stat that says 70% of kids quit organized youth sports by age 13 because the pressure is too high, the mental health is too draining. It's just not something that they want to deal with anymore. Youth sports has become a professionalized kind of environment now. There's a religiosity to it, if I could say. There's a way that community is built and there's an allegiance that is built on, this is my team, we're going to go against your team. And the way sports has been, has been a way of we're going to defeat your side and there's a good way of approaching competition, but again, maybe we've taken this a little bit too far.
Tim Muehlhoff: We're going to crush you, not defeat you. We're going to embarrass you. We're going to embarrass your team.
Mike Ahn: That's right.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay, so Ed, when it comes to race... No, I'm just kidding.
Ed Uszynski: That would be easier. Let's talk about race. That would be easier.
Tim Muehlhoff: But in your opinion what has brought us away from this Norman Rockwell famous painting of a little leaguer with the bat on his shoulder to today's moment of what Mike just described, give us the 50,000 foot, how did we get here?
Ed Uszynski: Well, and obviously anytime you start try to talk about that, in a few minutes you run the risk of being overly simplistic, but there really are some threads that stand out over the last 50 years because it really is something that's just happened in the last 50 years where youth sports has become a $40 billion industry. Again, that's the kind of stat you can just breeze by and not let sink in. But $40 billion is making its way through youth sports now, which it changes the game altogether when entrepreneurs got behind it. And Brian and I say this, as do other people, there's nothing wrong with making money on youth sports. If you're going to set up a business and you're going to set up a club, there's nothing inherently wrong with the person that's putting in the work to do that to make money. But we also know that when money becomes a driver, the concern, or at least in this case, the concern about what's best for kids starts to fall further down the list of priorities and concerns.
And so that's been happening now at a fever pitch pace for the last couple of decades where more and more money is involved and there's less and less concern about developmental needs for the kids that are participating. I made this list for myself a while back, and again, just think about the contrast here, where sports used to be primarily about play, they really did. I don't know if anybody can remember that, but it really was... When I was growing up in the seventies, it really was just about playing a game. And now it's way more about performance and winning. Winning's always been part of it, but it's just like that's at the top now of the mountain. It's about performing in a certain way and winning matters, even in a five-year-old soccer game. It went from being primarily kid-centered, it really did, where adults were trying to make sure that kids had a certain kind of experience to now it's more adult and coach and parent-centered. We've become much more a part of the narrative and our concerns, our fears, our imagined future that we're trying to produce now in our ten-year-old.
It went from being more affordable, this is an interesting conversation where literally everybody across the socioeconomic spectrum had access to being able to play baseball or be able to play football or soccer or whatever to now it's becoming a luxury. It's very expensive.
Tim Muehlhoff: Especially travel teams.
Ed Uszynski: Which it cuts out a ton of kids from even being able to have access to that. It went from being local where you just played games five minutes down the road with your friends in your community to now it's intrastate. That's just become a norm now where you're going to be traveling hours to play teams. And it went from being seasonal, think about this to where you'd play baseball for two months in the summer, structured baseball, and then when that ended, you didn't touch baseball again until next spring, unless you wanted to play with your friends like we used to do, just go down to the park and play home run derby or wiffle ball or whatever, but there was no structure to it. It went from being seasonal to being year round. And so Mike mentioned that professionalization idea, which again is very interesting, but we're really bringing a model that used to be reserved for collegiate and professional in terms of expectations with your schedule, with your time, with the money that's involved, with the demands, the performance demands, the... What's the word?
The specialization, where you're just focusing on becoming great at this one thing. We've taken that collegiate and professional model and we literally have brought it down to the six, seven, 8-year-old level. And we brought that expectation down to where right away now you're being expected as a... Again, before you even get to being a teenager, you're going to focus on this sport. You're going to do it year round. You're going to pay lots of money. You're going to be enticed to get specialized training. What's going to be dangled is that you're falling behind. You're already behind. If you haven't done X, Y and Z, you're already behind from making your high school team.
Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, one quick comment about that, Ed, is the Muehlhoff boys, you've actually helped them. I remember you helping them run routes in football. I have a son who's a physical therapist and he has great job security. And here's what he said to me one time. He said, "Dad, injuries happen when there's no cross-training, so you take one thing of anything, throwing a baseball, throwing a javelin, shooting a basketball, and you never deviate from that one thing," he goes, "that is where the wear and tear injuries happen." And he said, "The people that I see high school level are all one sport and they do this repetitive actions and their bodies literally can't handle it."
Ed Uszynski: It's one of the reasons, again, one of the reasons because I think there's others, but it's one of the reasons why you see so many Tommy John surgeries on collegiate and major league pitchers. It's one of the reasons why you see so many Achilles tearing and knee injuries in basketball, the overuse, the focusing just on that part of the body to the exclusion even of the other muscles around it that would help that part of the body. Again, none of this is new. The research has talked about this. Scientists have talked about it, doctors have talked about it, but nobody wants to take on the beast and confront the $40 billion industry that is creating this in our athletes.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I have a question for Mike real quick as a parent and coach, but just to augment what you're saying, that's why I couldn't just do modeling. Just walking up and down the catwalk in that repetitiveness I needed to-
Mike Ahn: It strains the calves. It strains your calves.
Tim Muehlhoff: It was. I was getting cramps and I know we're laughing about it, but it hurt and to be objectified like that, it just wasn't good for my soul. And the fact that you're laughing, Mike is also hurtful. Mike, do you feel this pressure to get specialized training to get your kids the advantage to get them ahead of just normal practices?
Mike Ahn: I just want to affirm what Ed said too. Just seeing twelve-year-old boys, my son's 12 years old and a lot of the boys that he plays with, they all have knee problems right now. They've been playing on the club circuit for a while, and as they are starting to grow their knees, the... What do you call it? The things are growing in the knees and then as they keep playing it ruins their growth plates and things like that, so a lot of them, they can't play for certain seasons because of the amount that they're playing. But my son just started playing at the club level, so he's in seventh grade. He started playing for about three, four months now, so not too long. But again, we're way behind. We are. And again, it's not that we feel like he's going to play in college or even after that, it's he just feels the pressure from his peers. There's so many basketball players, and again, on a basketball team, there's only five people on the court. He's one of the smaller people on the court.
There's so many guards. And so because of that, it's like we just didn't feel... I think what we do is we try to right-size expectations. We want him to grow, grow in basketball and skill and working hard and being a good teammate and being a good sportsman, things like that. And we try to say, "Hey, we don't expect you to play in college. That's not even really a thing. We just want you to have fun. We want you to develop good skills." Again, we just right-size expectations with him. And that's kind of my goal as a parent with my son, but also with the coaching for the rec team. The recreational level is not as intense. It does get intense, but I try to make it a lot more fun for our kids. And again, just right-size our expectations. And again, being a coach and being a dad in that position of power, I completely understand where other parents get carried away with certain things and their kids feel the brunt of the pressure. But for us, that's the way I try to approach it.
Tim Muehlhoff: Ed, somebody in Mike's position, how do you balance that fun, but you feel a little bit that your child is falling behind? We had our kids try a travel team, each one of them, and it was ridiculous. One, expense-wise it was crazy. Second, we were never together as a family because our kids weren't on the same travel teams, so we were literally passing each other like strangers in the night and we just said, "We're not going to do this anymore. We are just not going to do it." And I really did feel like it hurt my kids skill-wise because I did feel like they did fall behind a little bit heading into high school, so how do we balance this?
Ed Uszynski: Well, I wish Brian was here because this is something that we bat around with each other literally every time we have this conversation with anybody. And it's confronting the lie, the truth and the lie of falling behind. Here's the lie of it, you think or I think the way it's being fed to me that if I do X, Y, and Z, it will increase chances of starting on the high school team, let's say. And again, some people are shooting for college, but even let's just say it's going to increase the chances of starting on the high school team. But here's the reality and why that's a lie. And we know this being on the other side of this, Tim. With our kids, there's a million things that are outside of your control that have to go a certain way for your kid to wind up playing as much as you want on that high school team. You don't know what kids are going to be in the district at that time.
You don't know what the coach is going to be like, what he or she is going to feel about your kid for one reason or another. You don't know what the politics are in the school district of why some kids get more attention than others do. You don't know what his interest level or her interest level will be at that point in their sport journey and how much they actually even care about it anymore. You don't know who's going to be eligible or ineligible, who's going to get pregnant, who's going to have tons of family problems that winds up distracting them from being able to be there. It just goes on and on. The things that are outside of our control that factor into whether or not my son, Eric, wound up playing at his school or not. And so that's the lie. You making all these decisions right now really has very little to do with it. And in fact, if they're going to be good, it's really going to wind up being because they want to be good.
If they're going to be collegiate level, it's going to be because God gave them a certain body that operates in a certain kind of way and he gave him or her a mentality that goes above and beyond what the normal person does. They're physically gifted and they're mentally wired in such a way that they always do the extra rep, that they go out and take another a hundred shots on their own, not because they're forced to by parents or overbearing coaches or whatever. They make it because they're wired that way. We have spent a lot of time just saying, "Parents take a deep breath and realize you're not falling behind in any true sense of the word." On the other hand, the truth of it is maybe he or she is falling behind, so what? Again, we need to come back to this place of, is the goal really that they have to be in the starting five by their senior year or else their whole youth was a failure?
Mike Ahn: Completely, completely.
Ed Uszynski: What difference does it make after those three months of the senior year are over in that sport? What difference did it really make on the other side of that, whether they got a ton of playing time or they didn't? And again, I'm not saying that naively, I want my kids to play. It's fun for me. I'm really the one that's going to feel it almost more than my kids will
Tim Muehlhoff: Amen to that. Amen to that.
Ed Uszynski: Maybe in the second segment we just need to drill down into that more that so much of this whole journey really winds up being more about me and my issues than it is my kids or them having some problem with youth sports. The reason they're all quitting by age 13, let's just say this and that stats been out there for a while, is that they've been playing now for six or seven years, and it's parents and coaches that make it a miserable experience. It's not because they don't like the game, it's because it stopped being a game. And it became something that, why would I voluntarily go into this misery with my parents and with these coaches?
It's an adult problem, and again, that all sounds really negative, we've really been framing this positively that if you realize that you're not really falling behind anything that you can control, if they're going to get good, it's going to be because they want to do it, not because you haggle, it frees you up both to just enjoy the process, really just enjoy the fact that today they are playing something and you get to go watch and be a part of it with them. And you can focus your energies on maybe some other growth areas that are going to matter way more when they're 25 than whether they ever actually were able to hit the pitch on the outside corner or not, which isn't really going to matter that much at 25 when they're filling out job descriptions or job applications.
Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, you said something that, we would love to bring you back, Ed, because this really piqued my curiosity. You said this is an adult problem, not a child problem, and when it comes to the instability that we're seeing, we need to deal with this as adults, as the parents, the grandparents, the uncles, the aunts. Would you come back on our show and let's talk a little bit about how we can combat what is welling up in us as adults and how to disciple our kids in civility and sportsmanship?
Ed Uszynski: Absolutely. I think that'd be a great conversation.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's awesome. Ed, thank you so much. We will have you back on. But listen, you need to check out Ed's book, Away Game. It is a really interesting book and I think it's a great book to give to someone who may have children currently competing. But man, this is a book not just for parents, it's for coaches, youth pastors, if you have a sports ministry at your church, if you're aunts, uncles, grandparents, my goodness, there's just a goldmine of wisdom, so go ahead and check that out. It's called Away Game: A Christian Parent's Guide to Navigating Youth Sports, David Cook Publishers. Ed, thank you so much for being with us.
And of course, thank you for listening. We do not take you for granted, so thank you so much. Please give us a like wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, you can go to our website, winsomeconviction.com, sign up for our quarterly newsletter. And we have some exciting news coming out about the Winsome Conviction Project, some interesting funding that's going to allow us to do some very strategic things to combat today's argument culture, be it in politics or in youth sports.
Mike Ahn: Youth sports.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's right. Mike, come back and join me as well when we have Ed back on.
Mike Ahn: That'd be awesome. That'd be great.
Tim Muehlhoff: Thank you so much.
