Chances are you have a Youth Sports Story. Whether drawn from your days as a youth athlete, as a coach or as a sports parent, send us your youth sports story. Periodically, we will publish the best submissions here. Visit our archives to read past submissions to "My Youth Sports Story."
Playing for Love of the Game
By Kim & Ed Cristofoli
As a former collegiate gymnast (Kim), as a former collegiate and professional hockey player (Ed), and as sports parents, we have seen the emotional costs of pressure in youth sports. Fortunately, we have taken a lesson from our parents -- to play for the love of the game -- and are teaching it to our children.
As a family, we recently experienced pressure not just to win at all costs, but to play at all costs. After playing two seasons of high-level AAA hockey, our twelve-year-old son was registered for his team tryouts for the next season. Just before we left home for the tryouts, we received an email from the team stating, basically, that if we did not register our nine-year-old for tryouts within the organization, our twelve-year-old would not be allowed to try out.
We thought this was crazy. How could an organization demand that a sibling try out? Why were our younger child’s choices any of their business?
In youth hockey, typically, players progress from recreational hockey to Level A, AA, and AAA. Our younger son had been playing AA. Neither of our children were “stars” on their teams, but they both were solid players. Our older son was a top five player on his AAA team. The organizational leaders assumed we would want to protect our older son’s standing and therefore succumb to pressure to move our younger child up to AAA.
For the following reasons, we decided not to take our younger son to that organization’s AAA tryouts:
- Time commitment. We didn’t feel it was necessary for our third-grader to travel from Cleveland to Toronto, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and other cities for youth sports.
- Physical demands. Choosing to play soccer and hockey, our son struggled with asthma and illness.
- Confidence/self esteem issues. Although he was a good player, we felt he would gain confidence by playing at a slightly lower level.
- Coaching issues. Although we personally liked the coach our younger son would have had, he lacked experience in coaching high-level youth hockey, and we did not feel he was a good match for our son.
- Financial issues. With an older child already playing at the AAA level, the cost of having another child in AAA would have meant financial struggle for our family.
We made a family decision to try out elsewhere. Ultimately, participating in a given youth sports organization is a choice, not a requirement.
The head of the organization was furious and blamed us for ruining his team. This person assumed that we were recruiting children to play elsewhere, ruining his chance to have a strong ten-year-old team. Our twelve-year-old son was unfairly penalized as a result.
The organization didn’t expect us to uphold our values and emphasis on life lessons for our children. But we stood firm, because:
- Not allowing a child to tryout, who is registered to try out, is against USA Hockey rules;
- No child is “required” to try out;
- No child is required to play on a specific team;
- America is a large country, and there are always other teams, other sports, and other life choices;
- Life continues with or without high-level hockey.
Neither of our sons played for that AAA team the next season. The team called, inviting/begging our older son to return. Instead, he played up one age group at the AAA level in a different city, and our younger son continued successfully on a AA team.
Since then our oldest son has received several letters of interest from colleges and junior teams. We are happy we decided not to force our younger son to play at a level when he wasn’t ready; guiding him to play at the proper level meant he would continue to love playing hockey.