Agassi, LeBron on what's wrong with youth sports

As noted here before, I'm compiling a list of pro athletes who speak out about adults messing up sports for kids. Today, two new, high-profile additions, LeBron James and Andre Agassi.

I just finished Shooting Stars, James's recent book chronicling his early basketball life, with an emphasis on bonds forged with his rec league and later high school teammates. Not your typical "How I Overcame Impossible Odds" story. A good read.

James makes the list for opposing the national schedules played by the top high school basketball teams, including his, St. Vincent's, in Akron, Ohio. The last half of the book is filled with stories about this small Catholic school sending its basketball team on the road for games at Pauley Pavilion (Los Angeles), the Palestra (Philadelphia), Trenton, NJ, on and on. (In LA, James writes, scalpers were getting $250 for a ticket - to a prep game). It's what you do if the goal is achieving USA Today's No. 1 high school ranking, as St. V's was.

LeBron writes: "Was it insane for a high school basketball team to jet around the country? At the time, I thought it was exciting, going places I never ever thought I would get to see in my life when I was a scared, lonely young boy. Now I believe it was excessive. I believe it was too much, for us and every other high school around the country that followed a schedule similar to ours....I can virtually guarantee that when we traveled, there were plenty of promoters who enjoyed a nice payday on us as high school kids, knowing that our presence would fill arenas."

Agassi's new book, Open, is getting attention for admissions about his drug use. Descriptions of what his dad did to raise a tennis champ were as disturbing to me. Actually, more.

This is an excerpt printed in Sports Illustrated:

"I'm seven years old, talking to myself, because I'm scared, and because I'm the only person who listens to me. Under my breath I whisper: Just quit, Andre, just give up. Put down your racket and walk off this court, right now. Wouldn't that feel like heaven, Andre? To just quit? To never play tennis again?

"But I can't. Not only would my father, Mike, chase me around the house with my racket, but something in my gut, some deep unseen muscle, won't let me. I hate tennis, hate it with all my heart, and still I keep playing, keep hitting all morning, and all afternoon, because I have no choice. No matter how much I want to stop, I don't. I keep begging myself to stop, and still I keep playing, and this gap, this contradiction between what I want to do and what I actually do, feels like the core of my life."

Other than shame, what does a parent feel reading that?

Business of youth sports gets a little bigger

News flash (from the Baltimore Business Journal):

"Under Armour Inc. is going into business with a global sports marketing agency to create a standardized scoring system for youth athletic performance.

"The Baltimore sportswear company and IMG are planning more than 100 global one- to three-day combines for high school athletes next year at which participants will be scored on a range of metrics, including physical attributes, mental stamina and sport-specific skills."

If fixing youth sports were up to me, this wouldn't be my first move.

NFL concussions and the "trickle-down effect"

Two great articles this week on concussions in youth sports. Alan Schwarz in today's New York Times continues his remarkable coverage of the issue.

This quotation from Alan's piece gets to the heart of the issue. (The issue being, until the NFL takes seriously, or seriously enough, the consequences of head trauma, neither will the millions of youth leagues).

“Walking off the pain in an N.F.L. game turns into walking it off in a Little League game — the trickle-down effects on high school and college players are very real and can be fatal,” Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, said in the hearing.

Over at The Daily Beast, Buzz Bissinger takes on pretty much the same subject, though he argues more broadly against the macho sports culture which reaches down to high schools and, in some communities, even youth sports. There's also a nice mention in Buzz's story of Until It Hurts, specifically to reporting in the book about avoidable injuries.

Those of you who've read it know a 16-year-old pitcher in my family had one.

Hand stands and back flips at the kitchen table

Spanning the globe for youth sports dysfunction.

Giuliano Stroe, the Romanian gymnast with the washboard abs, is, as the caption reads, five years old.

Thanks (I think) to Ed Wiest for alerting me to this.

Message to sports parents: "You do not know what you're talking about"

I'm posting two opinion pieces, one pulled from the Denver Post, another from a lively weekly podcast produced by students at the Park School in Baltimore.

Here's what these two commentaries have in common. In both, the authors make the case that sports for kids aren't what they could be, and for that they fault the adults. In both, tellingly, the commentators also are teenagers.

Thanks to Ed Wiest for the tip on the Denver Post article, and Ben Hyman for the lead on the Park School podcast

On the podcast, choose "Season Five," then "Episode 85 - The Park Culture." The commentary begins at 16:36. So, cue up the audio feed to that point. It takes a few seconds, but is well worth the effort.

As concussions mount, a better hockey helmet

I'm linking to a short take in BusinessWeek (second item) on the new M11 hockey helmet. The story is that this helmet protects against head injuries far better than the helmets almost everybody is wearing, NHL to biddy leagues.

Head injuries in hockey are getting closer attention these days. As I write in the BW article, some studies indicate that 10 to 20 per cent of teen hockey players suffer a concussion each season. If that is so, many - most? - teen players are affected before they hang up their skates after high school. And that says nothing about other head blows, ones that, while serious, do not cause concussions. Chilling stuff.

Mark Messier, the NHL Hall of Famer, helped develop the new helmet with Cascade Sport. Messier is on the board of Cascade Sport. So there's no attempt here to paint this as purely a mission of mercy. Speaking with him about the so-called Messier Project, though, I was impressed that this is about more than making a buck. He hopes to get NHL players to wear the helmet - this year, eight are. And in time, to have millions of kids following the lead of their hockey heroes.

My first question for Messier, who played 25 seasons in the NHL, was: How many concussions did you have in your career? He said he couldn't remember, and we had a laugh - a nervous laugh - about that.

Until It Hurts on Weplay.com

Over the next few weeks, Weplay.com will be running adapted excerpts from Until It Hurts. First up, a short piece on what kids observe - and what they'd like to change - about the adults who show up to coach their teams and root them on.