Loyalty in Youth Sports is Under Appreciated and Not Valued
Everybody loves a winning team. We love to root for winning teams, compete on winning teams, and watch our kids compete on winning teams. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. However, I think loyalty is such an under appreciated and overlooked character trait when it comes to winning.
Just as all people love a winning team, all loyal fans dislike front runners. You know those people who were New England Patriot fans in 2017 and then became Philadelphia Eagles fans in 2018. Or those Lakers fans from back in the day who now root for the Golden State Warriors.
When it comes to professional sports, front runners are par for the course. Non-loyal front runners are as old as the teams they jump ship to from year to year. What’s changed however, is their numbers. I would argue that loyalty in sports is now at a all time low. Loyalty is just not valued as much as it was when I grew up.
Front Runners Win in Youth Travel Wrestling, Loyalty is Punished
I think a big part of this comes from what parents are teaching their kids through youth sports. A fairly recent market trend in youth sports is the emergence of travel teams for the average spots family, not just the elite. For some sports such as baseball and basketball, these travel teams have existed for years. For other sports such as wrestling, travel teams are somewhat of a new phenomenon.
My kids wrestle, so this is where my perspective mostly comes from.
Even though wrestling is typically seen as an individual sport, there is also a significant travel team component. There are a handful of national “dual” tournaments in the youth circuit with teams of 16 to 20 kids slotted into specific weight classes. The best teams with the best wrestlers usually compete against each other in what’s called a Gold Pool. Then there are tiers of lower skilled competition on down from Silver, Bronze, Cooper, and Tin.
Some states have a defined process of having kids wrestle each other for a spot on a state Gold Pool team. This is a great process. However, many states don’t have a defined process for all tournaments. The states that don’t have this process depend on coaches and parent-coaches to put together the travel teams. This second scenario is where the front runner culture emerges.
By recruiting the wrestlers in their community, coaches typically have a shot at putting together a decent Bronze (maybe a Silver) team. On the other hand, the Gold Pool teams typically recruit state wide or even national “all-star” teams. Typically, however, the Sliver or Bronze teams will still have a few “Gold” tier wrestlers on their team.
The way it works is that if the entire roster of 16 to 20 kids is not solid, a team won’t make into the Gold Pool. So year after year lower tier coaches have two options:
- Work within their community to get the kids on their team better
- Recruit kids that are already really good from other teams
What happens is that lower tier teams typically stay in their tier using option 1. Gold Pool teams get back into the Gold Pool from year to year using option 2. This to me is the problem.
This is the problem because many of these Gold Pool teams recruit kids off of the lower tier teams once the kids prove themselves. Once a kid proves he is Gold Pool “ready”, parents are heavily encouraged to leave their current team. The coaches who sacrifice a ton of time, effort, and often money to put together those lower tier teams then get stiffed. However, without the sacrifices of the lower tier team coaches and parents these national dual tournaments couldn’t exist.
Loyalty is Under Appreciated and Not Valued
So this is how the front runner culture is taught to kids in a nutshell. The culture is for kids to compete on the same lower tier team for 1 or 2 years while they are up-and-comers, then jump ship once a Gold Pool team recruits them.
The result is that most lower tier teams never get a chance to move up to the Gold Pool. Often these teams eventually dissolve due to frustration. The kids are taught all that matters is being on the best team, and that loyalty to a team is not important. The kids are robbed of the lessons learned of building a team up from the bottom and working up to the top with a group of friends and teammates.
This is obviously a specific scenario from the sport of wrestling. But my hunch tells me that this is happening all over youth sports. I may be old school in my thinking, but my dad taught me to always value loyalty over winning in team sports. I want my kids to have those same values. It’s clear to me that the purpose of youth sports is about teaching these values. If more parents don’t get this message, the front runner, win at all cost mindset will eventually take over the entire culture.
Update:
A friend sent me this great perspective a coach shared about the youth soccer culture that echoes my sentiments:
Our children will not have the opportunity to remember matchups and rivalries developed over years, because everyone’s roster changes drastically from year to year and let me tell you why.
It is because there is an epidemic of parents and youth players looking for the next best thing. I am going to use my experiences at the club level during tryout time as an example. Parents and players are frantically trying to line up the best situation for our kids and many people’s moral compass and the ability to see the big picture is going out the window.