Youth sports is for something specific. It’s not what most people think it is.
It is not preparation for college. It is not a slow-cook for the next varsity roster. It is not a place where you find out if your seven-year-old can throw with their elbow up. The rejection of these framings is not a soft take. It is the actual job, written down.
The job is three things.
One. Have a ton of fun.
Watch a six-year-old at a tee-ball game in May. Watch them run to first base when somebody yells go run. Watch them stop halfway because a butterfly went past. Watch the dugout chant for a kid who hit the ball six feet because that is, in fact, an event.
If your six-year-old is not having fun, the system is broken at that level. Not the kid. The system.
Tee-ball doesn’t have strikeouts for a reason. The rules were written by people who knew that a six-year-old who strikes out three times in a row won’t come back next week. The rules are doing real work. They say: this is for the kid first. The score is third. Maybe fourth.
When the parent on your team starts coaching from the stands at the six-year-old level, the right move is to remind them what tee-ball is for. The point is not to win the four o’clock game. The point is for everyone in that dugout to want to play again on Tuesday.
Two. Learn the rules and how to play.
A kid who plays a sport for two seasons should know the basics. What position they are playing and why. What the count means. Where the ball goes when they catch it.
These are the actual content of the activity. Teachable. Repeatable. No private coach required.
If a kid plays tee-ball for two summers and does not know what an out is, somebody dropped the ball. That is on the coach. Not the kid.
Learning the rules and how to play is also why coaching the same kid for too many seasons in a row can hurt them. If you are the only voice they hear from age six to age eleven, they get one version of the sport. They need other versions. They need the assistant coach who explains it differently. They need the league clinic that hands out wristbands. They need to be coached by someone who is not their parent.
Three. Want to come back next year.
Only one metric matters in youth sports under twelve: Did they come back?
If a kid quits at eight because the coach yelled, that is a failure of the program. Not the kid. If a kid quits at ten because their best friend made the A team and they did not, the program failed at sorting kids. If a kid is the best player on the team and they quit at eleven because they are bored, the coach failed to pull the next thing out of them.
The objective at every level under high school is for the kid to want to play next year. Everything else is downstream of that. Skill, character, friendships, lessons about losing. None of it works if the kid quits.
What this means for you
If you are coaching, the test is not the W column. The test is who shows up to next year’s signups.
If you are the parent of a kid in the program, the test is not whether they made the A team. The test is whether they want to be on a team in twelve months.
If your league or coach is talking about college recruiting at the eight-year-old level, that is a tell. They are coaching for the wrong thing. They are not coaching for the kid in front of them. They are coaching for a fantasy version of the kid that is statistically unlikely to exist.
A note on the recruiting math
About seven percent of high-school athletes go on to play any college sport. About two percent play at the Division I level. Most of those two percent are not on full athletic scholarships. The number who go pro is so small it is not a planning input.
Don’t chase recruiting if a kid wants to. Do keep it from warping the youth experience for the ninety-three percent who will not play in college.
The kid in your minivan is, almost certainly, in the ninety-three percent.
The job is for them to have fun, learn the sport, and come back next year. That is the whole job.