Organized sports, especially for children, is a rather recent phenomenon.  Not until the latter half of the twentieth century did organizations and independent ruling bodies emerge with the sole purpose of regulating youth sports events.  Now, they are everywhere.  It used to be that most sports, games, and other competitive events were unstructured and free from adult intervention.  It was a key attactor in play that children would organize themselves during and after school.  It wasn’t until high school that sports were more closely scrutinized and governed, and it wasn’t until close to the twenty-first century that those sports started much earlier in development and demanded much more.

Image Credit: Lorianne DiSabato

We hear it all the time, that there are innumerable benefits for children who play sports.  Supposedly, organized sports is instrumental in teaching kids how to work together to a common end.  By belonging to a team, kids selflessly throw in for “the greater good” and sacrifice their ambitions for the collective goal.  In addition, sports teaches fair play, coordination, spatial reasoning, and is a great way to promote a healthy level of activity.  Another benefit of organized sports is the development of rules that are geared towards safety for the promotion of the health and well-being of the children involved.

Some of these benefits are definitely a plus.  Others can be obtained by separate means.  And others still, such as fair play and fellowship are not only not found in organized sports, but are outright rejected instead.  Unfortunately, these harms caused by organized sports can have a greater and longer lasting negative impact than the good.

One of these lasting effects is the promotion of violence.  Where sports are supposed to bring us together, they all too often tear us apart.  What we fail to recognize is that violence is an important part of the recipe in some of the most popular sports.  Football is one such sport.  Football’s most identifiable physical achievement is the hitting and tearing to the ground of an opponent.  It’s called a “tackle.”

A tackle is, simply, violence.  It’s supposed to be controlled violence, but violence all the same.  This helps to raise the emotional stake in the game which is part of the drama that draws people in.  There’s inherent conflict that grabs our attention and the tackle is instrumental.  Violence elicits strong emotions in us all.  If we have already chosen a side in the conflict, because of one team’s proximity to our home or for other reasons, then we already have a pre-set target onto which we can focus our emotion.  Usually unreasonably so.  They become our temporary scapegoat for everything.  We yell, we jeer, we throw things onto these people because of their tribal markings.  Most of the time, violence stops on the field.  All too often, it spills over:

Jon Stonger hit upon our violent legacy and its connection to sports in an earlier article.  He states:

Sports taps into the violent tribal reservoir of the hindbrain, aka the lizard brain, aka the part in the back suggesting that the solution to any problem is to smash something. This allows us to act out our instinctive tribal desire to go invade the village across the river in a fantasy environment. The lizard brain can’t tell the difference, as long as it gets to yell and scream and wear paint, and there’s much less real violence when the animus is redirected into the safe, simulated environment of team sports.

 We know too well, though, that those safe, simulated environments, on occassion break down.  Especially in soccer.

Violent outbursts from overcharged emotions that are lit by the flames of competition are not relegated to team sports either.  It seems that organized sports can bring the worst out of anybody.

It is only in organized sports that violence is taught and tolerated.  Here’s an example.

Cute, right?  Wrong.  This may be one of the most despicable displays of the absence of supervision, especially considering that supervision is supposed to be a benefit of organized sports.  Were fights to break out on a playground like they do in hockey, the police would be involved every time.  Instead, escalation is imminent because of the positive reinforcement provided by the cheers and attention.  The problem with escalation is that the consequences are grave.  And where the fans, because of their detachment, forget and move on easily, completing the cathartic effect desired, the actors don’t.

You hear the commentator note that this was a “cheap shot” and that it was “unacceptable,” but the slamming of another human into a stationary object with excessive force that was intended to cause damage was “clean.”  What?  And what is the likely answer to my misunderstanding of how such violence can be clean?  “That’s a part of hockey.”  But why does it need to be a real part of people skating on ice and putting a puck into a net?  Where does it fit into the equation?  When hockey arrived, it likely was developed on frozen lakes without walls.  Somehow, it evolved into needing 75 pounds of additional protective equipment.

I could go on for days and days with video clips and news articles about violent outbursts and brawls related to sports, but I’ve made my point.  Violence is present in the inner-workings of organized sports.  It’s there to draw people in.  And this is done to cash-in on that drama.  That it happens in youth events proves that it is inherent in the sports themselves, that’s it is a taught and supervised practice, and proves how much is at stake in “winning”.

Really, that’s what organized sports is all about.  Winning. We all know the quote:

Next to the cause of winning, there’s no purpose in playing organized sports.  And when winning is the only thing, what does it matter what virtue there is in sports?  If I’m wrong, then those who are the most successful in their sports, those who have spent the most time, and who have benefitted the most from organized sports, they should be the most well adjusted, right?  Think again.

Let’s not blame Alex Rodriguez solely for what happened.  Of course he is ultimately responsible for what he puts into his body, but the pressure that he speaks of cannot be discounted.  A culture of performance and winning both in the organization and its supporting fan base are active and unwitting participants of such behavior.  It happens in the professional arena with drugs.  It happens in high school athletics with time commitments and social pressures that deteriorate our educational system.  And it happens on the smallest levels, when children are the most impressionable, and learn cruelty, aggression, and intolerance from their emotionally involved parents and teachers.

The problem here, again, is the break down of rules.  Rules are supposed to be a big benefit of organized sports.  Now, rules aren’t exclusive to organized sports.  Rules are what defines the game.  The difference is that in unregulated play, enforcement is up to the players; self governance is necessary.  In a game of pick-up basketball, for instance, you call your own fouls.  In this situation, it is crucial for you to be fair, lest you reap what you sow.  In organized basketball, there’s an old saying, “If there wasn’t a whistle, there wasn’t a foul.”  Such logic is taught to players from a young age and it removes responsibility of action from the actor to the official.  What happens next is the inevitability of the inability of the official for perfect officiating.  The lack of perfect justice.  The result is escalation.  The players retaliate, the fans eat it up, they fuel the flames, and then they become directly involved.  And none of it is ever anyone’s fault.

Organized sports teaches us nothing that can’t be learned somewhere else.  In those other places, the risks aren’t nearly as high either that the negative consequences will outweigh those benefits.  Theater, debate, pick-up games, and skill related activities that involve sports and athletics are all ways to form friendships, balance the social order, achieve self-reliance, learn responsibility, stay healthy, problem-solve, strategize, and have fun.  We don’t need organized sports to do these things.  The removal of responsibility, the lack of proper guidance, and the emotional traps that organized sports provide us is a recipe for disaster and it is costly. 

Winning isn’t everything.