What Is The Goal: The Truth About the Youth Sports Industry
By Jean Linscott and Ken Ruoff
Offsides Press
168 pp
DISCLAIMER: Your Founder and co-author Ken Ruoff were college classmates.
The last quarter-century has seen numerous stories and examples of the abuses found in youth sports in America. Whether it was the story of the overage Danny Almonte in the Little League World Series, or the rise, fall, and rise of Jennifer Capriati in tennis, or the complete collapse of the U.S. Soccer Development Academy in 2010, or the consistent drumbeat of exposure of youth coaches getting involved in sexual scandals, the shortcomings of the $20 billion pay-to-play sports development apparatus are on display for all to see.
Jean Linscott, a clinical child psycholgist, and Kenneth Ruoff, a history professor, have seen many facets of what they term the Youth Sports Industry (YSI) as parents of youth soccer players. In their book “What Is The Goal?”, the pair tell stories from the eye-opening to the lurid. The book also delineates what has led to the realization that youth sports is an industry, and Linscott and Ruoff are not afraid to call it that — the YSI.
The book’s main thrust is succinct: “The main difference is that the U.S. Youth Sports Industry, as it currently exists, may do more harm thatn good to many of its participants.”
The book touches on the chase for college scholarship money, including the narratives surrounding the Varsity Blues scandal, which implicated some rich and powerful people and some universities in rigging the system to get non-athletes into college.
The most damning statement comes in the preface: “These youth have become valuable commodities to the parents who seek out this industry to land their child in the right college and to the sports clubs who secure greater earnings in a very lucrative industry if they play their business cards right.”
In other words, parents are willingly allowing their children to participating in a YSI where the players don’t play for fun, but play for keeps. There is little time for other extracurricular activities or even academic study. It is a system fairly free from governmental oversight, and without any sort of national standards. It is also a system which could expose players to predatory behavior on the part of coaches.
Too, the grind of training and overtraining is not good for physical or mental health, the latter of which is laid out late in the book. The problem is, parents who have put their children in the YSI feel as though they have to continue because so much money and time have already been invested in the sport.
So, what is the solution? The book posits that the YSI, as an industry, needs to be regulated like any other industry in America. Any the youth sports program — whether it is baseball, softball, lacrosse, or swimming — would have to be run in a safe and developmentally appropriate manner. A roadmap of this was compiled in 2021, the Aspen Institute’s “Children’s Bill of Rights In Sports.
The book also calls for the elimination of preferential admission for student-athletes for colleges. However, the book was largely written before the House v. NCAA decision which has increased scholarships for many sports in NCAA Division I. This also would include changes to what are called “ID Camps,” where many coaches select players for various sports.
That leads to a call for pressure to be brought to bear on colleges who may profess to be a vessel for social mobility, but who give college admissions spots to student-athletes whose well-connected parents either have paid tens of thousands of dollars to the YSI, but who sometimes have crossed the line by paying brokers to find information on how to game the system, which was all exposed in Varsity Blues.
But a major portion of future reforms for the YSI involves health care. Not only is it recommended that doctors take a greater role in preventing head injuries and injury from overuse/overtraining, the book mentions the role of medical insurers.
“If health insurance companies eventually grow weary of the astronomical cost of stitching back together yougn athletes and start to change the rules of what is covered — and if they can show that the inury resulted from overuse — clubs might be viewed as complicit and thus liable,” the book posits.
Linscott and Ruoff’s book lays out a messy picture of youth sports in America. It also lays out a complicated series of reforms in order to rein in the YSI’s power and influence, especially in the world of university admissions. These reforms are, regrettably, very far away.
