A few years ago my son was booted from his under-six soccer team.
It was done very politely – “sidelined” might be a better term for it.
It was delicately suggested that “another team” might suit him better; that in the following season their focus was changing.
It was a semi transparent way of telling me he wasn’t quite good enough. They were on track to win, and having a child who had only kicked the ball a few times in the season (let alone a goal) wasn’t their idea of a successful combination.
Failure to qualify at the age of six.
My son wasn’t too bothered he had liked soccer at the start and by the end of the season hated it. He cried each time I told him he had practice. He stuck his five-year old boots in the ground and refused to run on. He wasn’t enjoying it. He wanted to quit.
It’s not unusual. In fact across many developed nations, including Australia, the number of children playing team sports is falling.
In Australia about 250,000 children drop out of organised sport each year and the dropout rate is rising by 10 per cent every year.
The main age is by 13 – when 70% of kids drop out of organised sport.
In an article for The Washington Post Mark Hyman, a professor of sports management at George Washington University and the author of several books on youth sports said that the problem was that many of the sporting bodies tailor their programs to meet the needs of the most talented kids.
He said that the fact participation rates were falling came down to one thing: overly competitive parents.