Youth Sports, Healthy Families, and the Future of the Church

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Sports Announcer
It down the line, Jeff Francoeur on the run. This one is caught dead again. Gore, he did it again. One guy you’re not going to challenge is the guy who’s got the most assists the last five years in all baseball. That’s Jeff Francoeur, deep to left field, and it’s a long two run home run for Francoeur, who’s going to challenge Frank core, who comes up firing and right on the money. And what a throw Hudson’s going to be. Waved home. He’s going to test Frank core. Got him at the plate, belted to left field, and just like that, Francoeur ties the game.

Sarah Zylstra
In 2017 outfielder Jeff Francoeur retired from Major League Baseball. A few months later, he was back on the ball field watching his four year old daughter play T ball.

Jeff Francoeur
I’ll never forget the first year my daughter played softball tee ball, right? I just retired, and I went to, like, their first game. I wasn’t coaching yet. We just signed up late. And I remember watching just some of the parents coaches, and I remember thinking, Am I really watching this, like, five and six year old B ball softball, right shifting, you know, they’re putting three people on one side, and I’m like, I mean, I just want them to get the dang ball off the tee. No. And I just remember thinking, oh my gosh, I think I’m in for it.

Sarah Zylstra
He’s in for it. Over the last several decades, youth sports in America has done its own shift. When Frank courier was growing up in the 90s, he played all kinds of ball with friends, basketball in the driveway, baseball in the park, football in the backyard. Nobody specialized. Everybody played what was in season at school in the fall, frankour wasn’t at the ballpark most Saturday mornings, he was washing the car and cutting the grass. On Sundays, he’d go to church with his family. Sometimes he’d toss a ball with his dad on Sunday afternoons, but not every week. That’s not the sports world his children are stepping into his 10 year old daughter’s travel softball team played more than 40 games this spring. Parents wrote checks for fees and uniforms, booked overnight stays for weekend tournaments, and worried that they weren’t doing enough when the season ended in May, some of the parents asked if it could be extended into June. Now, Frank core didn’t accidentally move into a neighborhood of overachievers. That same shift has been happening all over the country. Over the last two or three decades, youth sports has been professionalized, which means parents are paying money to coaches and organizations to do the things they used to do themselves, or have the kids do things like playing catch, setting up games and supervising disputes over time. That grew to include things like scheduling tournaments, renting facilities and offering specialized camps, or one on one coaching.

This shift has led to a lot of problems. At the gospel coalition, we realized parents and pastors were worrying about it when we posted athletic director Ross daumas article called Why We pulled our kids from club sports in the beginning of 2024 so many people read it that it has remained our most read article of the entire year, the closer we looked, the more we saw the problems, but also the opportunities for faithful Christian parents. My name is Sarah Zylstra, and you’re listening to Recorded.

Speaker 1
Welcome back, whether your kids are in sports camps this summer training or maybe still in travel, baseball, sports have become an all consuming activity.

Speaker 4
Kids are pushed to take sports too seriously at too young in age. Why do we organize teams? Why do we have adults coaching kids when they’re

Ross Douma
We were young parents in our 30s, we wanted to get our children involved in daily activities and sports activities, and in doing so, we really look for opportunities for them to play a myriad of sports.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s Ross Douma, and one reason he was interested in sports for his kids is that he was an athlete himself. He played basketball at Northwestern College in Iowa, where he made so many three pointers and assists that he’s still on their list of all time record holders by the time his oldest son was in third grade. Ross was an assistant principal and men’s basketball coach at Chicago Christian high school,

Ross Douma
not knowing really well the landscape we just. Started to plug them into a number of different activities and learn that most of the time these activities spilled into Saturday and Sunday. These were, you know, I thought organizations that were very beneficial for our children. Looking back, we formed excellent relationships with the people that were part of the organizations, and our experiences were really positive, but we would go to work on Monday morning, having really sacrificed our Saturday and Sunday for a couple months of the year. Tired.

Sarah Zylstra
The organization Ross is talking about is the Amateur Athletic Union or AAU. Let me fill you in on them a little bit way back in 1888 most sports were done by amateurs who were playing for fun and by house rules. So a couple of athletes founded the AAU to get everybody competing by the same rules and to set up competitions. Americans love sports, and the AAU was immediately successful. In fact, it wasn’t long before it was too successful, the amateurs began organizing professional leagues, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, never mind the AAU said, we can still organize competitions for younger athletes, but after World War Two, lots of young athletes went to college On the GI Bill and the National Collegiate Athletics Association, or NCAA, gained ground. More and more young athletes were playing each other through school instead of through the AAU. It’s okay, said the AAU, we’re still preparing amateur athletes for international competitions like the Olympics, but then Jimmy Carter created the US National Olympic Committee and the AAU was left without much to do by the 1980s the only athletes left who weren’t organized, monetized and professionalized were kids,

Ross Douma
and I started teaching and coaching in the fall of 1995 until the time I moved out of of athletics in December of 2023 there were significant changes. I would say, first and foremost, that the the club scene, the AAU circuit, became much more organized. They became very succinct and comprehensive in terms of their programming. They became a significant business.

Sarah Zylstra
If the AAU wanted to survive, there was really only one market left, but it was a big one. In 1990 there were more than 50 million American children between the ages of six and 17, so

Ross Douma
we moved, really from very few AAU teams that were very select in nature, that were very competent and high achieving to providing au teams and club teams for students of all ability levels. This

Sarah Zylstra
makes perfect sense and actually sounds really good. The organization that previously only catered to top tier athletes, was now opening its services to all kids by 2004 the AAU had half a million memberships. Today, it’s nearly a million. This

Ross Douma
is important to note, there are a number of AAU and club teams who really want to step into that gap and really want to provide a wholesome experience for children, and who do it in a very God honoring way they do wonderful things. Those organizations do exist as well, but more organizations exist from the standpoint of trying to make money, and that’s just the honest truth. Let’s

Sarah Zylstra
be clear, human beings have always made money off of sports, from early Olympians winning cash prizes, to 15th century Americans betting on horse races, to Michael Jordan advertising Nike shoes. The AAU brings in about 20 to $30 million a year. That might sound like a lot of money, but friends, it is not. The AAU is one of the biggest players in the game, but it is far from the only 1000s. Of other organizations, from Little League to Pop Warner Football to us youth soccer jumped in to offer seasons and tournaments, team and individual coaching, sports camps and clinics, and right behind them were the sports psychologists, companies making uniforms and equipment, and real estate developers building giant sports complexes by 2010 the American youth sports industry had grown to about 10 billion. Nearly a decade later, it doubled to close to 20,000,000,004 years later, in 2023 it had doubled again to almost 40 billion. By 2029 it’s predicted to reach $72 billion in comparison, the amount of money the NCAA awards in college athletic scholarships each year is $3.5 billion let’s talk about money. As a Christian, I believe God has given me both the gift of work and the gift of a salary. The Bible tells me. That he means for me to give generously and to care for my family. That doesn’t mean I can’t sign my kid up for a soccer camp. It just means I need to be thoughtful about what I spend and about what I think I’m buying. In the fall of 2022 parents spent, on average, $168 to register their child for a team in their primary sport. They spent another $150 on equipment, 260 on travel, and 300 on lessons or camps. All told, parents, on average, spent about $885 per kid, per sport, per season, depending on your paycheck. That’s a lot to spend for kids to have fun playing ball with their dads. But that’s not all parents are buying. Brad Williams told me he was the athletic director of a Christian school near Atlanta, Georgia for seven years before becoming their Associate Head of School. He’s also the co founder of pure athlete, an organization that helps parents think wisely about youth

Brad Williams
sports now, it seems to be, it’s a means to an end. The parents seem to think, a lot of times, have an end goal for their kid, and that end goal could be them making their high school team. That end goal could be, I want them to go get a college scholarship, which is a very, you know, big deal

Sarah Zylstra
in a 2021 survey of parents of eight to 18 year old basketball players. 90% thought it was possible their child could receive a college scholarship to play basketball. 50% said it was somewhat or very likely. Now I completely understand the appeal. Since the NCAA started offering athletic scholarships in 1956 the cost of college has skyrocketed in 2023 the average price of attending a public in State University was more than $27,000 a year since that price rises faster than inflation, the younger your child is, the more of your income their college tuition is going to eat up, If only that child could get a full ride scholarship, wouldn’t it save hundreds of 1000s of dollars in the future? Ross spent nine years as the head basketball coach at dort University, and then another six years as their athletic director. He has looked at hundreds of scholarship applications.

Ross Douma
It’s important to be realistic about one’s chances of playing in college. And I think where I become frustrated is that clubs and AAU programs, they really sell parents on the notion of a college scholarship, when in fact, I think they know that many will not be able to do it, or if they do play, they’re going to get a very nominal scholarship.

Sarah Zylstra
So I know it seems like colleges have gazillions of dollars to spend on athletics. If you walk into their facilities, it certainly looks like they do, and it is true that media rights donations and ticket sales do pull in billions of dollars for division one schools. But listen to this, those same schools are also spending billions on coaches, administration and facilities. In fact, of the 130 Division One athletic programs, only 25 turned a profit on athletics. In 2019 the median program lost nearly $19 million that is why only 2% of high school athletes will get a college scholarship. The average payout for a division one male athlete in 2019 was about $18,000 a year in Division Two, the average annual scholarship was around $6,500 in the NAIA, it was around 8000 and there are no sports scholarships in division three schools or in the ivys. So when you get an email asking you to sign your child up for a camp or a clinic, hinting at the possibility of a future financial payout, be aware that that is a sales pitch. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were just out 100 bucks for a training camp. But there’s something even more insidious at work here. Here’s David Prince, an assistant professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the pastor of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, and the author of the book, in the arena, the promise of sports for Christian discipleship.

David Prince
You talk about unhealthy pressure for performance, then that’s going to come, because the parents gonna say, I invested all this money and now you’re blowing it. So the child is going to resent the parent. They’re going to resent sports. The character deformation is going to happen, and it’s going to end up with everybody disappointed. But sports were not the problem in that instance, the problem is a parent who has created a value that is not biblical and treated it as if it’s the most important.

Sarah Zylstra
It’s easier for us to over prioritize youth sports, even to make an idol of it when we’re paying a lot of money for it. This is natural. If the uniforms are expensive, we expect a nicer. Form. If the registration is a lot, we expect a higher quality team. If the ticket prices are high, we expect better facilities. And if we invest a lot in a child’s development, we begin to expect results in the basketball parent survey, nearly 80% said it was moderately to extremely important to their family that their child earn a basketball scholarship to attend college,

David Prince
I tell people everywhere I can do not use sports as a tool to try to get an athletic scholarship or to become a pro. Enjoy sports, learn from sports, form character through sports and whatever comes from that comes from that.

Sarah Zylstra
Ross and his wife saw how much money AAU was costing them, but what bothered them even more was how much time it was taking.

Ross Douma
Looking back, after a few years of really living that lifestyle, we realized that we were really a tired family that was really not living as close to the Word as we possibly could. And it wasn’t just one or two or three things that transpired. It was just small touches over a period of time, a slippery slope, if you will. Our children were having good experiences, but we weren’t spending much time together as a family. We were missing church services on Sunday, we didn’t have recreation time together as a family on Saturday, because we were really being dictated by the schedules of youth sports. Part of that is our fault, for sure, because we could certainly, as parents, step back and evaluate and discern that we were involved with with too many things, but sometimes when you’re just in it, you become a little bit inclined to just go and go and go. And you look around and you begin to think, this is normal. So it took a bit for us to step back and say, This isn’t probably the best for our family, and this isn’t the normal that we desire.

Sarah Zylstra
In September, 2022 more than half of children were spending three to four days a week playing organized sports. Nearly a quarter said they played five to seven days a week. Parents are basically doing the same thing before covid, kids spent about 13 hours a week total on sports. Parents said they were averaging 12 hours a week doing things like driving to practice, cheering at games, or buying and passing out team snacks. About 20% of parents spend more than 20 hours a week on these things. Nobody has noticed this more than pastors. You

there aren’t surveys on how often families skip church for sports, but at the gospel coalition, it is one of the top complaints we hear from pastors and youth leaders they can’t preach to encourage, mentor or disciple people who aren’t there. In a recent survey, 40% of evangelical pastors told LifeWay Research, it is never okay to miss church for sports. Evangelical church goers, on the other hand, felt differently. Only a quarter said it was never okay to skip, and a third said a few times a year was all right. 8% said that skipping many times a year was fine. It’s tricky, because a few decades ago, this wasn’t even an issue. When Jeffrey cour was growing up, the culture was so Christian that nobody scheduled games for Sunday mornings. That’s different. Now, when faced with a rigorous sports schedule, what are Christian parents supposed to do? Here’s David Prince,

David Prince
First of all, as that question is given to me often, I like to say this, that’s not a problem. That’s an opportunity. Everybody wants to frame that as this great problem. Sports have never caused anybody to miss church, ever. Not one time in the history of the world. Sports can’t cause you to miss church. You choose to skip church. You’re not a victim to the sports team schedule any more than you’re a victim to anyone else’s schedule. You decide what you do and what you don’t do. I always say I grew up in an area that had a lot of really nice lakes, and the lake never, ever caused anybody to miss church, even though a lot of people skip church to go to the lake. So this is not a problem. It’s a parenting opportunity. The rest of your life, your children are gonna have to navigate choices about what they do in this world versus their commitment to things that they say matter ultimately. So certainly you’re not using sports to disciple your kids if you never hardly go to church, or if during the season, you just skip church all the time, you’re teaching them that there’s something more important than church.

Sarah Zylstra
Okay, I can see his point. It is logical that kids who grow up skipping church for games might later skip church for birthday parties or for brunch with friends. That’s not great. But what about being faithful to your kids? Commitment to your team, honoring the coach, not letting down your teammates. I asked David, who not only played college baseball, but has eight kids working their way through youth sports.

David Prince
We tell the coaches up front, we don’t skip church to play athletics. I’ve never had somebody be negative about that my kids would make the all star team in baseball. And so I’d say, Hey, listen, those are weekends. We’ll be there Saturday. Most of the championship games are saying we won’t be there if you do not want them on the team, because they’re going to have to miss some time. I completely understand that. We won’t feel persecuted. That’s a completely valid thing for you as a coach to make a decision on behalf of that team, and so we won’t have any problem with you not wanting them on the team, because we’re gonna have to miss some time. We’re perfectly content to have consequences for our values and decisions, and uniformly, they’re all said, No, we want them on the team. If you’re up front, if you’re up front with people and honest, and you tell them about your convictions and you are supportive and there when you can be generally, it’s not a problem. What they don’t want is you to be on the team and now spring it on the backside. Oh, coach, we’re not going to be here. That

Sarah Zylstra
makes sense to me, especially when they’re younger. But what about older kids? Their games are more competitive, and weekend tournaments can be important. David knows this. His daughters played competitive tennis.

David Prince
Tennis is tough because the tournaments are all on weekends. Championships are always on Sunday almost. So you got to travel to play the big tournaments to get your ranking up behind. And so we just didn’t do that. We played only local tournaments close by. We didn’t skip church to play all those kinds of things. Those are just choices we made. We have two daughters who their ranking was never as high as it could have been because they didn’t play all the tournaments. But they’re both played in college. They wanted to play in college, and they’re playing in college on athletic scholarship and and living out their drink. And so if, if the kid has the right work ethic and they’re good enough, they’ll have the opportunities. And if they don’t, okay, no big deal.

Sarah Zylstra
David’s daughters currently play for Georgetown college and NAIA school and for Cedarville University, which is NCAA Division two.

David Prince
I know a pastor friend of mine who’s totally right perspective of this. His daughter was a fantastic basketball player, but didn’t have the exposure though a lot of people have, and so he took three weeks off when she was a junior in high school, and they went and played AAU showcases. And so she did really well, got a d1 scholarship, came back. So here’s somebody who never really skipped church or anything like that, and said, Okay, let’s put her out there and see how she does. There are all kinds of things you can do. I’m

Sarah Zylstra
impressed, and I also get it. I know it takes a ton of hard work and drive to play collegiately, but I also think it takes a naturally athletic body, which is a gift from God, I can see how a really talented athlete could be more relaxed, playing multiple sports, not playing on Sunday and taking long breaks and still be successful. So I asked Jeff Francoeur what he thought his dad would have done if there had been Sunday games. And Jeff didn’t even hesitate. He said we would go to church and I would play whatever game was after that, and that would be that I believe him, because Jeff’s dad didn’t put a lot of emphasis on baseball. When Jeff was 12 years old, he told his dad he was tired of it and wanted to quit. Jeff spent the whole summer swinging golf clubs instead, and he never did specialize. All through high school, he played on both the baseball and the football teams from June to January, every year, he never even picked up a baseball, but he was also Six for 225 pounds and could throw harder than 85% of Major League players. When he graduated from high school, Jeff turned down a scholarship to play football for Clemson, a d1 school because at the same time he was also a first round draft pick for the Atlanta Braves. Okay, so some kids, those who play professionally or even collegiately, are exceptionally gifted by God. But what about the regular kids, the kids who just want to play with their friends, have a good time and get some exercise. What are they supposed to do? In 1993 a Swedish psychologist named Kay Anders Ericsson published a study claiming the difference between an expert and a mediocre violinist was how many hours they practiced, specifically, an average of 10,000 hours. He also noted that the earlier one begins to practice, the better 15 years later. Author Malcolm Gladwell used that study to advise readers of his book Outliers, that if you want to get good at something, you need to start young and put in at least. Least 10,000 hours. Five years later, a group of researchers in Chicago wrote that, quote, these concepts have been extrapolated to sports. End quote, they defined athletic specialization as an intense year round training in a single sport with the exclusion of other sports, and they noted that it’s becoming increasingly common. Here’s Brad, the athletic director of a Christian High School in Atlanta.

Brad Williams
The big theme we get from parents is my kid falling behind because he or she’s not playing this sport year round. And there’s kids doing this year round, and when they compete, this kid who’s 12 is going to beat my kid who’s 12.

Sarah Zylstra
This is especially worrisome for parents of regular kids, because if my child can’t compete, then he can’t play on the team. And not only is it fun to play on the team, but that’s a built in group of friends to practice with, laugh with, and compete with. That social piece is really important, because we know we live in a world where screens are isolating our kids, our anxiety is fueled by our own screens, because on social media, it seems like all those other kids are having a great time winning games, going out for ice cream and having birthday parties with their team friends. Here’s the thing about anxiety, it is so often a sign of idolatry, if we are depending on a sports team for identity or belonging or hope for the future for our children, it cannot hold the weight. In fact, it’s already buckling. The Chicago researchers found that early specialization in sports does not work the same way it does in music. Actually, it’s the opposite. They found that intense early training is more likely to lead to injury, psychological stress and burnout. Ironically, it doesn’t even lead to particularly good friendships. Here’s Ross.

Ross Douma
Our children were 10, 11, 12, 13, and there was really no reason for them to be as busy as what they were. It was something, again, that they formed good friendships with, but they could have formed friendships at a much lesser intensive level, playing baseball and soccer and basketball.

Sarah Zylstra
Brad did that back when he was playing in the 70s and the 80s.

Brad Williams
What was so much fun was I did. I played in organized leagues. There wasn’t travel teams. There was like, All Star teams. But the cool thing was, back in the small town, is that a lot of the teams I played on were with my friends from school or from my neighborhood. That was what made it so much fun, is that not only were we playing like in our backyards, but we were on the same football team, and so over the same basketball team. And so it was a social thing, not just a sports thing, and it felt, I guess, you know, back then, it felt serious, but not nearly as serious as it feels nowadays.

Sarah Zylstra
I heard the same thing from Britt Lee, who works with Brad in Atlanta.

Britt Lee
Intramurals today is really a picture of what sports used to be when kids were younger, and you just play intramurals for fun, and you play everything. It doesn’t matter how good you are at one of them, you’re playing with your friends, your buddies. This season, it’s softball, and then it’s basketball, and it’s flag football, and then it’s might be tennis, and so, I mean, intramurals was, like, my favorite part of college.

Sarah Zylstra
Here’s what I’m noticing. These guys aren’t talking about making friends on the team. They’re talking about making a team out of their friends. And here’s what else I’m noticing, for the first time, we’re talking about having fun. Listen to how Jeff, who played major league baseball for 12 seasons, grew up.

Jeff Francoeur
I think back to when we were young, right? Like, you would get home from school, me and eight buddies would get together, we get a football and we’d go roughhouse for an hour. But then what? When we were tired, we’d stop. And I’ve always said, I think that’s the injuries in sports too, because kids are doing it so much where, like, maybe they get tired, but the coaches, Hey, you gotta keep going. You gotta keep going. Whereas, like I said back when we were there, you play free play. It’s like you play when you’re tired. We’re done. Let’s go do something else. Now we have these two hour practices, two and a half hour regimented, and these kids just can’t handle it. Heck, I can barely handle it when I played in Whitley. How are these kids going to handle it at 10 years old,

Sarah Zylstra
When 12 year old Jeff quit baseball, it wasn’t regimented practices or even his coach who lured him back. It was the love of the game, and it was his friends.

Jeff Francoeur
When I was 13, 14, 15, I went back and played, you know, baseball and all that, but I also played on a travel team that was close to my house, and it was with my buddies that I was going to play high school with.

Sarah Zylstra
I’m not saying your child can’t make friends, good friends on a travel team. Of course they can. But in general, it does seem like those friendships are more transitory, because those teams change from season to season. Those kids don’t usually go to school or to church with your. Kids, they aren’t usually hanging out together outside of practice in games. When I talk to college students who played competitively in high school, they compare sports friends to work. Friends actually compared to the rough and tumble backyard play of the past. A lot about today’s youth sports, from the schedules to the logistics to the stat tracking looks like work. Jack Lee worked hard during high school to play tennis at a d1 college. He left school at noon each day to practice. He played dozens of tournaments when he suffered overuse injuries, he patiently waited to heal and then headed back to the court, and he made it. Freshman year, he played tennis for Kennesaw State, a d1 school,

Brad Williams
Yeah, when they say that college sports is a job, they are not lying. So basically, my day would be, I’d get up, go to class. After class, had to lunch, and after lunch would head to practice. So basically, practice was about two hours every day, finish practice and then immediately either go to weight or conditioning. It basically would switch off on the specific day. But after after weight, might grab one more bite to eat and then head to study hall. For me, being a freshman, I remember study hall was the most hours you could have. So try to get a certain number of hours a day, and then after study hall, would it probably be late evening, head back to the dorm. Remember just being worn out after study hall, not really wanting to do anything else. So it was crazy like that every day. So it was, it was, it was tough.

Sarah Zylstra
And that was in the off season. In the spring, he’d add 6am pre class weightlifting and weekend tournaments.

Brad Williams
So I remember it was definitely fun to be a part of, I think for me, though, I didn’t really get to play a whole lot my freshman year, and for most freshmen, unless you’re a really high recruit or just really good coming in your first year. I don’t think most of them, most of us, got to play. So I think for me, though, it was kind of hard to just be really working my tail off in practice and then not really get to translate that into matches in games. So and I’m sure for a lot of other freshmen, it’s the same way. Just really you’re working again, working so hard, and you’re not really getting to translate that on the court. So I think for me and a lot of other people, again, it just, it just feels like a job.

Sarah Zylstra
Here’s what Jack was thinking. He didn’t have a big sports scholarship. He’d chosen Kennesaw State so he could play tennis, but it wasn’t where his twin brother was. He was having fun with his teammates, but he didn’t have time to make other friends. He tried to get involved in young life, but he was so tired at night, it was hard to make it to the meetings. So at the end of freshman year, he quit. This was a big deal. Jack had been playing tennis since he was around 10 years old, so basically half his life, and he’d been playing competitively since seventh grade. I asked him what sophomore year was like.

Brad Williams
So I actually transferred. I transferred to the University of Georgia, so my twin brother was there. I had a lot of buddies who were there. My older sister went there, so just was very familiar, and had a lot of people that I knew up there, which made the kind of this, the decision to where to transfer, easy. So transferred over there, and from the start, I mean, it was nice not having to wake up at 6am for weights or anything sports related. So I can’t say that. I can say I haven’t really played a lot of tennis since being here at UGA, which has been really nice. Actually, I’ve gotten to get involved in a lot of intramural sports, like basketball, flag football, softball, which has been really, really fun, because obviously throughout late middle school and high school, didn’t get to be involved in a lot of those sports. So it’s been great playing with buddies. And also I’ve really picked up pickleball too, which has really been super fun and kind of has filled that tennis urge that I might have without actually playing tennis. So Pickleball has been that’s that’s been great. I do young life here at UGA, which has been amazing, made a lot of great relationships with other college kids. Made a lot of buddies through that. I I’m actually a leader here at a middle school, private Middle School, which has been just so amazing and so rewarding. Just getting to kind of pour back into to middle school kids and get to share, share the gospel with them, and kind of help plant a seed, hopefully for them, which is, again, been so rewarding and awesome, but yeah, again, just not really worried about tennis at all anymore, which has been really nice in just being a college kid, which has again, been just really refreshing and been awesome. So yeah, I think I think I made the right decision.

Sarah Zylstra
At his high school in Chicago, Ross and his wife Sean, noticed that their kids, like Jack. Seemed to have lost the joy of the game.

Ross Douma
As I continued to coach and teach and observe other families, I saw the same thing that they were tired. Their kids were experiencing burnout. As I continued in the coaching profession, I saw more burnout with 15, 1617, year olds at the high school level. And there was usually a common denominator, and it’s that they played a lot of youth sports at an early age and were very busy on the weekends, and Sean and I looked at each other and said, Hey, that’s us. That’s what we’re doing right now.

Sarah Zylstra
That’s what we’re doing right now. This might be the most important sentence in this podcast, because while his kids wanted to play, it was Ross and his wife who were signing them up for travel teams, squeezing in practices after school and driving to tournaments on the weekends. I’ve read a lot about this topic, and most of the advice seems to boil down to asking your kids what they want to do. I am all for having these conversations, but I also wonder if we might be unfairly shifting some of the responsibility and hard decisions of parenting onto our kids. Because sometimes, yes, our kids want to quit because they don’t love hard work and they need to be reminded to honor their coach and the commitment to their team by showing up and working hard. Other times they might want to keep going, but we can see they’re tired and need a break, and it’s on us to make sure they get one, just like we did when they were overtired toddlers, and just like when they were little, we might have to watch for nonverbal cues, because even though they’re older, it’s not always easy for our kids to communicate with us.

Ross Douma
Parents are very well meaning, and I think they just simply want to give their children an advantage, and they want to help them be successful, and they want to see that through. And in doing so many times, they simply are involved in too many different activities, and the child in the adolescent years, early teenage years, don’t want to push back on mom and dad because they see that they are too sacrificing time and money, and to tell them that this isn’t fun anymore, that’s a lot to ask of a youngster. Parents really need to be able to ask that of the young person, their child, and saying, is this still what you want to do and really have that earnest discussion, because most of the time they’re going to tell Mom and Dad what to think they want to want to hear with regards to that answer, and so it just becomes really difficult. And I think that’s a lot of times where you see burnout, where you go two or three years of really living that hectic lifestyle, and the absence of joy continues to disappear, and the child just doesn’t have the gumption to tell mom and dad that this isn’t fun anymore, and so the cycle just continues to perpetuate itself.

Sarah Zylstra
If you’re a sports parent, it’s possible you’ve already noticed some challenges with the system. Down in Atlanta, Britt and Brad noticed so many with their own kids that they began having regular lunches to talk about what to do about tired kids, demanding sports schedules and overuse injuries.

Britt Lee
It’s super valuable to have somebody that you trust and that has some wisdom, and that is not I mean, it’s funny now, because I’m done with my story, and Brad’s son, Brady, is still in playing high school ball, so they’re experiencing things that I experienced and that were gut wrenching for me at the time, and I would talk to Brad about them now he’s talking to me about them, and they’re not gut wrenching to me at all, because It’s not my son. So, so I can see things in a different light. And so that’s that, to me, kind of proves out the value of having somebody else who’s not quite as emotionally involved in it as you are, because it’s, you know, we’re so emotionally involved in our in our kids.

Sarah Zylstra
Brad and Britt talked about it so much that in 2022 they created pure athlete to help other parents navigate the pressure. Jeff joined them in launching a podcast.

Brad Williams
We weren’t expecting it to resonate as much as it has.

Sarah Zylstra
The trio weren’t sure how many episodes they might record, but they ended up getting so much feedback, they’ve now released more than 80 they’re averaging 25,000 downloads a month, and they have more than 55,000 followers on Instagram.

Brad Williams
The response we’ve gotten from parents is, whether it’s the Holy Spirit or whatever our conscience, whatever it is in them, they’re realizing that it’s not healthy. And so a lot of them are calling and DMing us and asking us, you know, what do we do? There’s something their guts telling this is not right, and they’re asking, what do we do now?

Sarah Zylstra
What do we do now as Christian parents who want to glorify God and enjoy him forever, and who want our kids to do that too? What do we do? How do we play sports in a way that delights in the goodness of a perfectly executed pass or a beautifully arced shot, but also fights against all the ways sin has crept in? Sometimes it’s easier to get clarity when we ask somebody who is doing it wrong.

David Prince
My family wasn’t a Christian family. Basically, our community was the sports community, and that’s what we did. And so, you know, I grew up with a real sense of, I didn’t feel like I needed anybody or anything. You know, I was achieving the goals that I wanted to achieve athletically. I was in college, a guy invited me to church. He wouldn’t, wasn’t a godly guy or anything. He was. I’d go out and party with him, but he just happened to have a family that went to church. So I went to church, and the pastor read for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God, and it made me angry. I’m like, Who is this jerk to say that about me? So I decided I was going to go home find a Bible. We didn’t hardly have one in our home. My sister had one of those little zipper mural Bibles, so I found it, and I figured out where the book of Romans was, where he was talking from, and I thought, I’m gonna, I’m gonna prove this guy wrong. And well, you know, Romans has slayed better men than me. And so when you’re looking for self justification, Romans is a really bad place to go, and so by the time I got through reading about Chapter Five of Romans, I was on my knees crying out for God to save me.

Sarah Zylstra
The first question that David, the Christian asked himself was, should I keep playing sports? Not because he thought God didn’t like running and throwing, but because he thought becoming a Christian should change the way he lived.

David Prince
I decided I had always done this. I was going to keep playing. I was going to play as long as I could. But it never really left me, as a Christian that I ought to be at least asking the question, should I be doing this? And so now, as a dad of eight children, you know, I’ve still been dealing with that question.

Sarah Zylstra
To be clear, David’s not asking if his kids should be active.

David Prince
We’re all in with athletics. My boys were still at home. I had a batting cage in the backyard, of pictures, mound in the backyard, like I did growing up. So we’re all in. We love sports. I love baseball. With anybody I know I see a beautifully turned double play I say, Praise God.

Sarah Zylstra
David loves sports the way some people love music or dancing or the ocean. He loves it because God made it and it is good. Exercising is a way to honor and care for the bodies that the Bible calls temples and living sacrifices.

David Prince
The benefit of sports is that they test you. I always say sports don’t build character, otherwise, every athlete you know would have the greatest character. That’s not true. But What sports do is they expose character because they put pressure on you.

Sarah Zylstra
I know exactly what he’s talking about. I have sat on lots of bleachers watching my two sons play sports, and I have been amazed at the strength of my emotions, toward the other team, toward the refs, toward the parents on the other team. I can’t think of anywhere else where the dark sin of my own heart surfaces so quickly. I don’t think I’m alone. Every time a parent screams at a coach or a child throws his bat, that’s sin. And here’s David telling me that the exposure of that sin is the greatest value youth sports has to offer, not the potential scholarship, not the friends, not the wins, not even the exercise. It’s the chance to see your child’s character and your own, because when you see it, you can ask the Lord to help you work on it. For example, a child who hustled, encouraged his teammates and was always ready when the coach needed him can be praised and encouraged on the way home. And a child who lost his temper, sulked or quit trying, can be guided toward repentance and restoration. Both of those are heart issues, not performance issues. And whether your child is in T ball or March Madness, heart issues matter. Addressing them with truth and love will produce fruit that will last far longer than a sports season.

David Prince
The things that parents ought to be worried about is attitude, effort, energy, respect for coaches and those officiating the game, and enjoyment of the game. Everybody can control those. One of my sons wanted to trial for the basketball team at the school he was going to I said, Well, you can do that under certain conditions. You’re not in great shape right now, and so you’ve got to get up before school every morning, do two miles on the treadmill for a month, and then I’ll let you try out for the basketball team. So he did it right, and he showed commitment on the front end the team. He was pumped. He was excited. He was thrilled. He gets out there and first game, he doesn’t play second game, he doesn’t play third game, he doesn’t play all of a sudden. And he’s not as excited. His shoulders are slumped. And so we’re driving home in the car one day, I said, Man, you were so all into this basketball team, and I’ve noticed your attitude has really changed. What happened? And he looked at me like he said, I’m not playing. And so I said, you know why you’re not playing? He said, why? I said, you’re not very good, right? On this team. You barely made the team. That’s perfectly fine. You can work to get better. You should want to play. But even if you don’t play, you should do everything you can to make this team better because you’re on it. So this revolve around you. You’re at an age now where this is not you know, you play just because you’re on the team, you earn playing time, and you can try to earn playing time practice, you should go after those guys as hard as you can make your teammates better. And so we came up with this “how to bench warm to the glory of God” list.

Sarah Zylstra
Of course, I asked him what was on it.

David Prince
Sit on the edge of your seat. Don’t lean back in your seat. Don’t talk about anything with anybody during the basketball game that isn’t about the basketball game during mount you’re the first one off the bench. You’re high fiving your teammates as they come over. You’re listening to everything the coach says. You’re listening in the huddles like you’re in the game. Your energy that you’re showing on the bench is like you’re in the game, not not like you’re totally disconnected. You want to win as bad as the guys that are playing on the floor, because that’s your team in practice, you can out hustle everybody out there that has nothing to do with ability, and you might get some playing time, but whether you do or not, you can glorify God and you can make this team better. And so we completely reversed his attitude that says he had the time of his life on that team. All we had to do was take away this this expectation or this entitlement attitude. He has anything where entitlement creeps in, joy and enjoyment goes away.

Sarah Zylstra
I love this story because it’s an example of how to love your neighbor, in this case, your teammates and your coach. And then David tells me, trying hard is also a way to love the other team.

David Prince
Competition’s a gift. You should play as hard as you can to defeat your opponent, not only for your sake, but for your opponent’s sake. This is how we iron sharpens iron are that we become better. They need you to do your best so they can figure out who they are. You know, I always use the example of Andy Roddick, who was an American tennis player, but he just happened to be really good at the time that Roger Federer was the best tennis player in the world. And so he always lost finals to Federer, over and over and over and over again. And so somebody asked him, Do you wish that you hadn’t played in the era of Federer, because you would have had a ton of Grand Slam championships. And he said, Are you kidding me? He said, You don’t know why we play. I became a better tennis player because I was trying to match the standard of Roger Federer. He said, one of the greatest privileges of my life was to compete against Roger Federer. See, that’s what’s going on here. For somebody who keeps this in the right perspective, this is about as someone who’s created in the image of God. How can I use these gifts as God’s given me and hone them in a way to find out how I can do this with excellence, and learn about myself and serve God better because of it, but you only learn about that through going through it. When Paul talks about perishable wreath and an imperishable wreath winning it there’s something more than a perishable wreath, but you don’t actually learn the lesson of the something more well through athletics, unless you really want to win the perishable wreath.

Sarah Zylstra
This reminds me of something the football coach at dort University said to me a while ago, playing sports is like modeling Jesus the Lion and the Lamb. Jesus the lion was unquestionably stronger than Satan or death, but Jesus the Lamb was completely submitted to the will of his Father, and because of that, we have salvation. When our kids play sports, they roar with all of their strength and speed and athleticism at the competition, but then in the space of a whistle, they set it down, completely, submitting without complaint or question to the ref, the clock, the scoreboard. We don’t think our kids are weak for obeying a ref or stopping at the end of the half, we know those limits are good and right. They’re even beautiful. Obeying them is what makes the game work. And that makes me wonder, can we as sports parents, also model the Lion and the Lamb? What would it look like to give youth sports our all? Maybe it means practicing with our kids in the backyard after dinner, willingly organizing the volunteer sign up sheet, or serving cheerfully as the assistant coach. Maybe it means waiting after practice for our kids to get in extra shots, buying team colored hair ties for. All the girls or offering to run the scoreboard during games and at the same time, we must be willing to lay down youth sports to submit it underneath the priorities of regular church attendance, real life friendships and healthy bodies. Maybe that means choosing a team with a lighter schedule or one that plays closer to home. Maybe it means switching sports throughout the year, or maybe it means quitting.

Ross Douma
We had been observing families then children and students that were becoming burned out, and I think we began to see that a little bit in our own kids as well that they were not loving the sport with the same passion and same intensity that they had it was more laborious for them to play two or three games a day on a particular weekend day, and it was just becoming more revealing to us that they were doing it because they were signed up For it was on the schedule, versus having a great deal of excitement, of wanting to play,

Sarah Zylstra
Ross and Sean thought about it, and then they quit club sports. I asked if it was hard on their kids.

Ross Douma
They really did not put up too much resistance. I think it was almost a relief for them. And again, those are our experiences, and other families may find something different, and other students and children may find something different, where they have such an appetite for more and more and more play and competition. But I think most folks, most children there, there is a tipping point, and I felt that because of the schedule that we were adhering to, that we were pushing them beyond what was enjoyable for them.

Sarah Zylstra
Ross and Sean’s kids didn’t stop being athletes. They still played ball at school. They even did some AAU sports, just at a much less intense level.

Ross Douma
Our rhythms were just more healthy. We had more we had more time together. But I think beyond the time together, what I saw was that there was a return to joy of our students, of our children and their play. It was less pressure. It was something they could do once again. It was more organic, where we would just go and initiate playtime. And that was really good to see.

Sarah Zylstra
Sports is a gift from God, running the bases, kicking in a goal or shooting a basket, are ways we can delight in the way God made our bodies and our kids’ bodies to move because our God is generous. Sports is also a way we can connect with and enjoy our relationships with other people, sports make a terrible idol for us and our kids. Let’s guard against that, taking care with our checkbooks and our calendars. Let’s pursue teams for our kids that are built from real friendships, model right attitudes and encourage virtue, and as we do, let’s give praise to God what a gift he has given us, just like music or dancing or the ocean to help us know and enjoy him better, and what an opportunity he has given us to see and disciple our kids’ hearts and our own.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Recorded which is part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. This podcast was written by me Sarah Zylstra and edited by Collin Hansen. Our audio editor was Scott Caro. This episode was produced by Terra Firma Productions. If you liked this podcast, please share it with your friends and leave a rating and comment on your favorite platform to support more episodes of recorded please consider making a financial gift at tgc.org/donate.