Hats Off to Fred Bowen

Fred Bowen is the sports opinion columnist for the Washington Post Kids Post page.  In his weekly column, he explains the complications of the world of sports in language kids of all ages can understand. His March 7 column What You Don't Know Might Hurt You is especially noteworthy because it advises kids to keep sports in perspective.

He offers the following tips:

1.  Avoid injury by staying alert on the playing field

2.  Don't ignore pain.  Even though professional athletes try to play through pain and TV announcers make a big deal of their doing so, kids should never play through pain.  He advises his young readers to tell a grownup if they are hurt.  Let's hope there are fewer and fewer and ultimately none of the Vince Lombardi, "winning is the only thing" coaches in kids' sports who will listen to the injured child and let her or him stay out of the game and give or get help when he or she is hurt.

3.  Get plenty of rest including taking a day or two off from sports every week to let the body recover.

People like Fred and Brooke de Lench at Mom's Team need to be listened to more to make kids' sports inclusive and fun and get more kids to be active.  

Parents of kids in sports ought to read Fred's column every Friday also.

Another Blow to Children's Fitness?

One of the major causes of American children's obesity and lack of fitness is that more and more restrictions are imposed on children's free play.  Parents restrict free play time by over-scheduling their children's activities, and schools do so by restricting what children may do during recess or cutting recess time or even eliminating it altogether.

Just yesterday, April 15, The Washington Post carried a story At McLean School, Playing Tag Turns Into Hot Potato on a McLean, VA, elementary school not allowing tag because tag had become "a game of intense aggression".  The school principal hoped to restore tag and touch football after review of school policies.   

This is ridiculous.  We as a society have to learn to let our children take some risks for their physical and mental well-being and their social development.

What if Athletes Have a Drug That Let's Them Go Beyond Their Natural Endurance Level?

Almost every day the sports pages carry new reports of athletes in many different sports using drugs like steroids or human growth hormones to enhance performance.  Many other ways to enhance the body's ability to perform are here already or soon will be due to the continuing life sciences revolution.

On February 12, New York Times health and fitness reporter Gina Kolata reported on an experimental drug that lets mice "keep running long after they would normally flop down in exhaustion".  The article Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles says that Dr. Andrew Marks and a team of Columbia University scientists developed a new class of drugs called rycals that stop calcium leaks while not blocking calcium channels and thereby prevent heart damage from exertion.  Dr. Marks patented and licensed the drugs to a start-up company and hopes to start testing one of the drug this Spring.  The article notes that athletes may be tempted to use the drug if it goes to market.  Given the highly competitive nature of today's sports world, I think will is the more appropriate verb.  

Now that a major cause of muscle fatigue is apparently understood and a drug to alleviate it may well become available, sports governing bodies will have to decide whether athletes will be allowed to use it or not.  As with steroids, the issue will be whether use of the drug by some competitors gives them an unfair advantage of those who choose not to use it.

Of course, also given the tendency of young athletes to follow the example of professionals and to wish to become professionals even though only a few will be good enough to do so, there will be a great temptation for them to use such drugs whether they acquire them legally or not.  The professionalized culture of elite youth sports may tacitly or openly encourage such drug use.

The sports world cannot continue merely to react to ways to enhance the body in hopes of enhancing athletic performance.  It must use foresight to provide sensible regulation before use of body enhancements gets out of control.  How many Congressional hearings will be needed before the sports world develops this foresight capability.

Hats Off to David S. Broder

One doesn't usually find reference to sports on the Op Ed pages of major newspapers, but political reporter David Broder's column in the April 10 Washington Post The Sports World in Foul Territory addressed some of the darker aspects of the modern sports world.  In it, he was rightly critical of the big money world of professional and college sports.  He cited a recent agreement among leaders of high school, college and professional basketball leagues with corporate sponsors on a $30 million program to promote youth basketball.  He wrote of the perpetual low graduation rate of college athletes, and he was especially critical of the "unseemly competition" among cities and nations to host the Olympics.  He concludes with this sentence, "The way things are going with sports, politics is looking better and better." 

However, Broder did not go far enough.  He did not state the real danger, which is  that all this sports hype filters down to the youth of America and probably to that of other nations too.  It nurtures false or exaggerated hopes by parents of college sports scholarships for their children and by youth of college and high paying professional sports careers that only a few can ever hope to enjoy.  And, it encourages youth sports programs to be highly competitive and exclusionary instead of inclusive and fun and robs children of the benefits of free play and condemns those who don't make the team to the health hazards of a life without sufficient physical activity.

Broder might some day mention the efforts of groups like Moms Team to change the emphasis of youth sports and turn sports away from the professionalism that is filtering down from the pros to youth sports teams at the grade school level.

I'd like to think that politics is not looking better than sports, but, with the seemingly perpetual scandals and big money sloshing around the sports world these days, I think Broder is on to something.