Youth Sports takes the Youth out of Sport

I am not sure when it happened, when the table tipped and the avalanche started, sometime in the 80's I suppose but it did and the youth of this country are worse off.  Now my perspective is from a parent in large metropolitan area in the south but I think it is pretty much the same across the country except perhaps the small and largely rural areas.  The table tipped, and youth sports are changed forever.  In today's environment if you want to play soccer, baseball, football, or any other team sport you can pretty much only do it under the direct supervision of an adult, one who is 99% of the time has a kid on the team.  Kids are no longer trying to organize their own sporting events, instead parents are spending a huge amount of time, money and effort on getting their future hall of fame athlete from one event to another.  Practices for 9 year olds are 3 or 4 times a week, games well attended by the entire family, and usually at field or tournament that is hours away.

There are many things that I find upsetting about this, and we will get into that in later blogs.  This fascination and expectation on youth sports puts the kid as the center of attention, as the most important member of the family if not universe, this I believe is not healthy for the kid.  More later on this topic.  The other upshot of this is that kids are no longer just getting together to play, to argue, settle their conflict, and learn how to manage their own affairs.  Instead they are almost always under the direct supervision of an adult, that will quickly step in and set the world right.  Kids can't organize their own games because they are all busy in an adult led league, being shuffled about by their parents.  They simply are not enough kids home at the same time to get together to play.

The effect of all of this is that kids cannot be kids, they are not allowed to grow up with Daddy or Mommy looking over them and this is a big contributor to the fact that adolescence is now extending well into the 20's.

Jeff Time

This blog is intended for nothing more than a holding of random thoughts and ideas that don't quite deserve much more than a passing interest.  Jeff Time comes from a off the wall idea I had a while back to take care of brain defect that I have.  At one time much of my business was out of state and in a different time zone, keeping track of what time it was in different parts of the country was not a big problem but scheduling calls and appointment always ended up with the same discussion about who's time it would be on.  This seemed like a waste of time and I thought adopting the Russian idea of having everyone on the same time zone seemed to be a good answer.  Then when it is 8 AM in your town it is the same for me in my time.  Not that we would have to be on the same work schedule but at least if I wanted to call you at 10 AM there was not confusion as to what that meant.

This led to a little research into time zones and how they came about.  Frankly I don't remember the specifics so much but in general at one time towns decided what time it was in their town without regard to other towns.  So instead of 4 continental time zones I suppose we had hundreds or even more.  Everyone was okay with this since we did not have the modern means of communication and travel that we have now.  Enter the railroads.  This created a lot of problems for the railroad operators and they were the imputus in getting time stardardized so they could manage their business better.  I think it is going too far to say that without the railroads we would not have standardized our time keeping, as other inventions need the same thing.  My idea is really nothing new although I claimed credit for it, as China and Russia have or had similar ideas long ago.

In my office others came to name my idea as Jeff Time, and so I felt that was a reasonable title for my blog.  For my business blog please go to JKGCollaborative.com and look for those posts, they are probably going to be more enlightening than anything here.