The former Penn men’s basketball standout and NBA journeyman knows what’s wrong with organized youth sports in this country and has made a career out of delivering the news to the perpetrators of the crime: Parents.
By Kathryn Levy Feldman | Photography by John Soares
Sidebar | Report from the Field
Bob Bigelow C’75 is pumped. Maybe not in the same way he was when he pounded the Palestra boards as a member of the 1973, 1974, and 1975 Ivy League Championship basketball teams under Hall of Fame Coach Chuck Daly or during his four years in the NBA, but these days it is a different type of challenge that gets his adrenaline flowing. For the past 10 years, Bigelow has been on a mission to return youth sports to its rightful owners: the kids who play.
According to Bigelow, there are 30-35 million children between three and 14 years old playing organized youth sports in this country, approximately three million adults coaching them, and tens of millions of parents cheering from the sidelines (among other less welcome activities). These adults, he says, “are overly invested, overly zealous, overly stressed. When they set up structures and systems for their children, they looked at the only models they knew: varsity high school, college, and professional sports. With adults at the helm, youth sports teams and leagues grew exponentially.”
Today, the leagues have leagues: A Teams, B teams, travel teams, select teams. It doesn’t matter what sport or sports your child plays, chances are it will overtake your life. “Some parents need computer printouts to keep their weekend straight,” Bigelow says. “Husband and wife never see each other—they have to be at different fields at the same time. Working parents say getting back to the job on Monday is a relief.”
If parents weren’t so exhausted from shuttling their kids to practices, games, and faraway tournaments, maybe they’d have the energy to laugh at themselves. Instead, they’re too busy trying to outdo each other. “As one parent would spill his or her litany of weekend activities, a full run of stuff that would exhaust Alvin and all the chipmunks, another would start right in,” wrote Tom Moroney, a columnist for The MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. and co-author, with Bigelow and Linda Hall, of the book Just Let the Kids Play [“Briefly Noted,” this issue], in a 1997 column. “If you listened closely, you would swear each parent was trying to one-up the parent who had just spoken. He who dies with the most miles on the odometer by Sunday night wins.”
Is it any wonder that sleep-deprived, guilt-ridden, over-competitive spectators often take it out on the refs, their kids, and even each other? While the case of “hockey dad” Thomas Junta, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of another father and sentenced to six-10 years in prison in January, received a lot of media attention, according to Bigelow incidents of sports rage are nothing new. “Read any newspaper, watch any television newscast for a week, and most likely you’ll see at least one instance of over-the-top parents at a youth sports event,” he says. “It’s worse than you might think.”
Parents themselves have created the conditions that prompt such outbursts, Bigelow adds. “The ways in which many youth sports systems are organized and run—particularly the ways in which children are evaluated and ranked, selected for or excluded from teams, or subjected to politics among the adults—are often catalysts for explosive emotions.”
Bigelow knows parents don’t set out to sabotage their children’s athletic success. If anything, they believe that volunteering to coach or administer the league in which their child participates will let them participate more fully in his or her life. Which is fine until the notion of winning gets in the way.
According to Michael Sachs, a sports psychologist at Temple University and coauthor of The Total Sports Experience for Kids: A Parents’ Guide to Success in Youth Sports, the reasons children participate in organized youth sports include wanting to improve their skills, getting some exercise and/or staying in shape, and socializing with their friends. “Winning is way down on the list, ranking 10th,” he pointed out in a November 2000 article for USA Today Magazine.
Contrast that with what Bigelow describes as “adult coaches [who] show up at games—with all that Management 101 mind-set, all that desire to achieve,” whose “coaching is almost solely based on the outcome, which is the score,” and you begin to see the root of the problem.
“What adults want and need from youth sports is often not what children want and need,” Bigelow explains. He raises his two fists in the air, holding them about three feet apart, to illustrate his point. One hand, he says, represents the kids; the other, the parents. At the moment, the two participants in this drama are moving in opposite directions. “It’s as though the adults and the children live in different worlds and speak different languages,” he says.
Not only does Bigelow know how to bring his two fists together, he knows the importance of doing it quickly. “An estimated 70 percent of children who play a youth sport end up quitting that sport by the time they are 13,” he says. “It is perhaps in their name that we need to fight the hardest.”
Bigelow’s philosophy of youth sports is rooted where he is, in his hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb north of Boston. Today, the six-feet, six-inch (“I’ve shrunk an inch since Penn,” he laughs) member of the Big Five Hall of Fame lives “about a mile” from where he grew up, with his wife, Nancy Jannarone, Tufts University women’s swim coach, and their two sons, David, 14, and Stephen, nine, both of whom have played youth sports since first grade. Even during his NBA career (1975-1979) Bigelow never strayed far from Winchester. During off seasons (and summers at Penn) he always went home to conduct basketball clinics in and around town. After retiring from professional basketball in 1979 he bought a house in town, moving “Nancy in and two roommates out” when they got married in 1984.
Bigelow admits that his was a typical “Ozzie and Harriet” childhood. His father, Bob, practiced law and his mother, Kay, was a “stay-at-home-mom.” The second of four children—he has an older sister and two younger brothers—Bigelow grew up playing backyard and playground sports with the other kids in the neighborhood without leagues, drafts, schedules, practices, or fancy uniforms.
“You headed for a backyard park or vacant lot. Mysteriously and inevitably, everyone found his or her way to the game,” he recalls. “The games themselves were spontaneous and fun. They had no beginning and no real end, except when the chilling reality of darkness set in or your mother called you home for dinner.” The sports he played were dictated by the seasons. “In the fall, we’d play kickball or baseball until the day it got too cold and then someone would run inside and grab a football,” he reminisces. In the winter, he played street hockey or went sledding. In the spring, they would rediscover baseball until it got too hot. Then everyone went swimming.
It was, he realizes, a kinder and gentler time. “On the playgrounds and in the backyards of my youth we made our own rules and sometimes our own baskets and bases. We got muddy, we got tired, but we never got burned out. If we got hurt, we went home,” he says. “We didn’t have parents screaming at us to pay attention. No coaches growled that we should have cut to the basket, taken the shot, faked the pass, or executed the fancy play that was rehearsed ad nauseum at the last practice.”
There was no search for “talent” to put together an elite or select team. “When I was 10, I was the same uncoordinated kid as the uncoordinated kid who lived down the street,” he recalls. “My parents let me play with my pals and I never gave the NBA a second thought.” In fact, Bigelow never played an “organized” game of basketball until he was 14 years old and a freshman in high school.
By the end of his junior year in high school, he caught the eye of Penn basketball coach Dick Harter Ed’53. “Our team had done well in the Eastern Massachusetts tournament,” Bigelow remembers. “And I was the best player on the team.” Bigelow was also a good student, whose college decision came down to three schools: Penn, Dartmouth, and Duke. He chose Penn, he admits, because, “it was the best of the three in basketball.” In 1971, he points out, Penn was the third-ranked team in the country. Ironically, Bigelow never played for the coach who recruited him. Harter went to the University of Oregon and was replaced by Chuck Daly, previously an assistant coach at Boston College—who, as it turns out, had also been recruiting Bigelow.
When Bigelow was a freshman, “Corky” Calhoun W’72 and Bobby Morse C’72 were on their way to establishing the decade of the 1970s as one of the most successful in the history of Quaker basketball. Bigelow helped contribute to that history during his varsity years (1973-75) when his team won three consecutive Ivy League championships and three consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament. For the 1974-75 season, Bigelow led his team in field-goal percentage and earned first-team, All Big-5 honors as well as the award for Most Improved Player. “I have nothing but wonderful memories of Penn,” he says. “I’ve been in a lot of basketball arenas, and the Palestra, in terms of its size, is one of the most impressive and by far the loudest.”
Bigelow went from setting records for the Red and Blue to “pretty much sitting on the bench” during his first two seasons in the NBA. But for a 21-year old bachelor, the opportunity to defer half of his four-year $400,000 salary for twice the length of the contract beat, as he puts it, “signing with Gillette.” In the middle of his third season with Kansas City, the league cut the number of players on a team from 12 to 11, and Bigelow was sent packing. He came back to Winchester and “played with the Celtics for 10 days.” The next season, the San Diego Clippers picked him up. Although the 1978-79 season was probably his most satisfying in the NBA (“I got the most playing time and had the most fun,” he remembers), at the end of it he decided “it was better not to be there than to be there.”
He retired to Winchester and tried his hand at “various careers,” including coaching (he spent two years as an assistant basketball coach at Tufts University, where he met his wife in 1982), business (he earned an MBA from Babson College in 1983 and helped found a service-quality company called the MarComm Group), and sports management (he ran a lot of basketball camps and conducted a lot of basketball clinics). Seven years ago, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association hired him as a Wellness Consultant to travel to schools throughout the state and speak about the medical risks of smokeless tobacco. “My wife can’t believe I get paid for talking,” he jokes.
At 8:30 on a cold Saturday morning in February 1988, Bigelow walked into the gym of the Winchester Middle School to do what he had done perhaps 500 times before: conduct a basketball clinic for eight- and nine-year-old boys. When he arrived, his audience of approximately 100 kids was doing what comes naturally: running around the gym, dribbling and shooting basketballs at the hoops and each other, and making a fair amount of noise. The parents of the group were huddled over their coffee cups in the stands. He introduced himself, gathered the groups together, and launched into the subtle and strategic nuances of the classic offensive play.
“About three to five minutes into my explanation, I noticed the kids were getting restless,” Bigelow recalls. “After about 10 minutes, they looked like they wanted to do anything but listen to me. So I quit.” The kids went back to doing what they had been doing before he arrived, and Bigelow went home, as he puts it, “with his tail between his legs.”
“I left the gym that day feeling embarrassed because I knew the kids hadn’t learned a thing,” he says. “I had a sense that I had been trying to teach something they simply were not ready to learn, but I didn’t understand the entirety of the challenge.”
That epiphany wouldn’t happen until four years later in August 1992, when Bigelow was invited to lecture at the New Sport Experience Camp for boys ages nine to 15, about 20 miles north of Augusta, Maine. As he toured the campus, Bigelow noticed that the counselors, all of whom were teachers, were “continually asking children what they liked or didn’t like about the activities, what they wanted to do and what they needed.” Bigelow was struck by the fact that all the kids, even the youngest, had definite responses.
He questioned Jeff Beedy, the camp’s owner, and currently headmaster of the New Hampton School in New Hampshire as well as director of the same camp (now called Sports PLUS), about the unorthodox approach. “When I founded this camp what I wanted to do, ultimately, was to give sports back to the children,” Beedy told Bigelow. The campers were his customers and he had based his curriculum, which was continually being adjusted, on their needs.
As Bigelow drove home to Massachusetts, he contemplated Beedy’s philosophy in light of his own experiences with youth sports. “So much of what I had been feeling and thinking during the previous four years began to gel,” he says. “I thought back to that awkward clinic, with me trying to teach the pick and roll to third and fourth graders. In youth sports, the kids are the customers. The adults should meet their needs. A pick-and-roll clinic for nine-year-olds is not good customer service.” By the time he hit the New Hampshire border, his crusade was born.
As Bigelow tells it, over the next year, he read everything he could get his hands on that had been written on the subject of organized youth sports. Then he befriended the experts in the field, including Martha E. Ewing and Vern Seefeldt, founder of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University; Rick Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports Parenting and author of Coaching Kids for Dummies, and Dan Doyle, founder and executive director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island.
The more brains he picked, the more Bigelow realized that he was not alone in his belief that the elaborate systems of youth sports in this country were taking their toll on America’s children. But no one was spreading the word. “The sociologists, child psychologists, and pediatricians have done a wonderful job of research, but a terrible job of marketing,“ Bigelow says. “So, I’m their emissary.”
In 1993, he took his show on the road. By June of this year, he will have given more than 450 talks to thousands of parents and coaches—more, he says than anyone else in the country. “Bob is one of the people out there on the cutting edge, educating moms and dads on how to be better sports parents,” says Wolff. “He is passionate about his belief that the current generation of parents have made the idea of playing sports very difficult for their children.”
Bigelow’s first recommendation is to eliminate select and/or elite teams before grade seven. Calling them “youth sports caste systems” that ultimately, and ironically, “discourage and derail the very children who, had they been supported as young players might have been sports stars at maturity,” Bigelow finds the concept insidious.
“When I was in sixth grade, if you had put me in a gym with 30 other boys in my class, I would have been ranked 20th, maybe even 25th in terms of skill, coordination, and maturity,” he elaborates. “I could have been cut easily during my pre-teen years and eventually I would have caught on to the not-so-subtle message that I wasn’t good enough. Luckily for me, when I was growing up there were no organized youth basketball programs at that age level.”
Robert Malina, retired director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, wrote in the Spring 1997 issue of the Institute’s newsletter, “Early identification of ‘talent’ is no guarantee of success in sport during childhood let alone during adolescence and adulthood. There are simply too many intervening variables associated with normal growth, maturation and development and the sports system itself.”
As an example, consider Michael Jordan (the one who didn’t go to Penn)—who, Bigelow points out, was cut from his high-school varsity basketball program as a sophomore. Jordan grew six inches between his sophomore and junior seasons in high school, kept on growing at UNC and went on to become perhaps the greatest player in the history of the game. “I had no idea all this would happen,” his father told the Chicago Tribune in 1990. “If I had, I might’ve pushed him too hard and screwed him up. As it is, everything happened very naturally.”
Natural is exactly what Bigelow is after, which, in addition to eliminating select teams, also translates into a death knell for the common practice of early sport-specialization. “My childhood sports were as diversified as you could get,” he says. “By the time I was ready for serious high-school varsity ball, my hands were ready because I played so many varied games as a youngster, and not because I had specialized in basketball.”
In July 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement warning against sports specialization and elite training and competition on a year-round basis for young athletes. “Those who participate in a variety of sports and specialize only after reaching the age of puberty tend to be more consistent performers, have fewer injuries and adhere to sports play longer than those who specialize early,” the statement warned.
While Bigelow remains convinced that the informal play of his youth contributed to his success as a basketball player, he is also the first to admit that times have changed. “As much as I like to reminisce, this plan to reform youth sports is not based on nostalgia,” he insists. “Systems for organizing children are needed, if nothing else but to keep them safe.” What he does advocate is “organized disorganized play,” based on the elementary-school recess model. “The adults organize the time—that’s the need of the modern family,” he explains. “But we don’t organize the process.”
In Bigelow’s ideal youth soccer league, for example, 20 seven-year-old boys and four adult supervisors show up to play for an hour on Field A at 8:00 a.m. The rest of the parents are dismissed. “The 20 boys, meanwhile, are told that this is their time to play. This is their field. They’re in charge. Here are the soccer balls. Have fun,” Bigelow explains.
And the adults? “The adult supervisors stand around ready to help when needed,” he says. “A child has to go to the bathroom, one needs encouragement to join in, another needs to be cautioned not to be too rough. These are the kinds of situations teachers on recess duty take care of every day when elementary schoolchildren go out to play. The same should go for our roles as parents and coaches in organized sports.”
What about learning the rules, developing skills, making plays? Forget about it, says Bigelow. “Let them make their own rules, even if they make no sense to you,” he advises. “I remember any hit to right field in three-on-three baseball was an automatic out because there was no one to play right field.” And as for learning game strategies, they’re too young to process the concept, much less the plays.
A second baseman turning a double play will employ a multitude of what Jack Hutslar, author of Beyond X’s and O’s and founder and director of the North American Youth Sports Institute calls “serial skills,” the “linking of related skills together in a flowing motion.” Add to that complicated sequence the noise of a coach and/or a parent barking additional commands to “pass,” “shoot,” or “hit the open man,” and you’ve created “cognitive overload,” a surefire formula for frustration.
According to sports psychologist and author of Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies Jay Coakley, “This inability of children is frustrating to parents and coaches. Without understanding why children have such a difficult time conforming to team strategy, adults accuse them of not trying hard enough, not thinking or having a bad attitude. This, in turn, is frustrating to the young players who are trying and thinking the best they can. Like their parents and coaches, they do not realize that their inabilities conform to normal developmental processes.”
The revolution that Bigelow is preaching is based on what kids create for themselves when adults get out of the way. “For decades, unwatched and unfettered by adults, children had passed the time playing made-up street games—from stickball to kick-the-can—and in playing them had learned how to arbitrate their conflicts and needs, how to compromise, how to build a consensus and make their own rules,” William Nack and Lester Munson wrote in a special report on violence in sports in the July 24, 2000, issue of Sports Illustrated. “Which is to say, how to get along in a democratic society.”
Ironically, it is a lesson that many of these children forgot when they grew up to be today’s parents. But here’s what Bigelow calls the kicker: “If adults choose programs that truly meet the needs of children, those choices will eliminate the roots of much of the preposterous, angry, and sometimes violent behavior in the stands and on the sidelines.” All the headlines go away if you just let the kids play.
Even though there are plenty of times when Bigelow feels he is “preaching to the choir,” for the foreseeable future he intends to keep talking. He knows his revolution is being fought in small towns in small steps, with those on the front lines facing plenty of opposition. But he is determined to stay the course. “The essence of any victory is perseverance,” he says. “You will win some, you will lose some, but making your case is important.” And for now, he believes the best ammunition is “education, education, education.”
So how’s he doing?
“I’m making dents,” he smiles. “But I won’t be happy until I make a lot more.”
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-based freelance writer Kathryn Levy Feldman wrote about mural artist Jane Golden in the March/April issue.
SIDEBAR
Report from the Field
Former alumni relations director Martha Stachitas CW’75 and her husband Len C’75, a pair of self-confessed “ex-jocks” raising three boys who have been involved in a variety of organized sports at the select and elite level since an early age, certainly know their way around youth-sports culture. But their view of the current system and its effect on children and parents is a good deal more positive than that of their contemporary at Penn, Bob Bigelow C’75 (see accompanying article).
Competition, they say, is healthy, and children should not be insulated from the experience of winning and losing, which imparts valuable life lessons. Even young children should learn the skills to play games properly—and can, with the right coaching. And while parents may log a lot of miles and can lose perspective at times, participating in sports with their children as spectators or volunteer coaches is for the most part a satisfying way to spend the weekend.
Chet Stachitas, now 18 and on his way to Saint Joseph’s University next fall on a basketball scholarship; and Tucker, who turned 16 in April, have been playing soccer and basketball since they were six; Ted, now 12, started even younger and “has been on travel soccer teams since he was five,” says Martha. Other sports that one or more boys have played include lacrosse, football, and track.
At the most hectic time in their sports-parent lives, Len recalls that, “Most weekends we had a minimum of three events, but usually three on one day and two on the other.” A certain amount of juggling was required, but at least one parent “managed to make almost every game for each child—missing any contest was a rarity.”
They say the effort was well worth it. “Being spectators as our sons participate in sports has been exceedingly rewarding and fun,” says Martha, and has “enriched our lives as parents.”
Len, who has also coached all three boys’ basketball and soccer teams, adds that their wins and losses, good performances and bad ones, “have given us chances to talk about appropriate behaviors and reactions, and, I am happy to say, for the most part they have taken those discussions to heart.”
As for the behavior of the parents on the sidelines, both admit to sometimes getting “carried away” over poor officiating at games—Martha’s words—or doing a certain amount of “ref baiting,” as Len puts it. But “rare is the time I have seen parents berating their own child for his or her level of play, and rare is the time I see parents berating a player on an opposing team,” Len adds. On those occasions when a parent does really get out of line in this way, “the other parents have made it clear that he or she is offensive.”
And, while winning may not be the number one reason kids say they play sports, Len notes that, even when the boys played in non-competitive soccer and t-ball leagues, where no official score was kept, “almost every child knew which team had more goals or more runs. The adults might not have been keeping score, but the kids were.”
He doesn’t see anything wrong in that, either. “We have taught our sons to try to do their best at whatever they do,” he says. “Exposing them only to non-competitive situations growing up would not prepare them for how the rest of the world works.” He quotes one of Chet’s former soccer coaches: “‘Our main objective is to have fun, but you will notice that the team that wins seems to have more fun than the one that loses, so let’s win.’”—JP