Analysis Of Friday Night Tykes: Youth Sports Stereotypes

Support and encouragement by family members, especially by parents, are important in young athletes’ initial involvement in sport.” (Leff 187). Billingsley’s father, a former Panther State champion, is shown to be mentally abusive, running onto the field on the first day of practice to yell at his son for “not holding onto the football.” Winchell and his mother study football strategies at breakfast, all the while with her asking him if he’s going to get a scholarship. When a couple scouts come to speak to Winchell, his mother inserts an answer for him and when asked by one of the scouts if he thinks football is fun, Winchell is slightly hesitant to answer.

As these trends rise and more data is examined it is no wonder the youth football turnout is decreasing in pockets on America. Many parents are beginning to prohibit their children from participating in this dangerous game. When speaking to David Remnich of the Washington Post, President Obama said if he had a son, “ I would not let my son play professional football.” , NBA superstar Lebron James told ESPN.com “ It’s a safety thing. As a parent, you protect your kids.

This is where the training of coaches comes into play. From a parents perspective the individual that is coaching their kid is very critical to the process. For example, one in every four coaches is considered less than good as seen by parents of the athlete (Aleshire, 2003). In an observational and interview

“He’s at the 40, 30, 20, 10! Oooh, I don’t think he’s getting up from that hit.” Recreational and professional football players are fun to watch, but these players have higher risks of injuries, that they are willing to put on the line. As a soon to be parent, I would hesitate to let my son play football because of the obvious warning signs shown, consequences of playing, and the devastations of the injuries. On the stands, fans are going crazy and enjoying their time watching two hundred to four hundred pound men aggressively beat each other.

In “Do Sports Build Character or Damage it?” Mark Edmundson explains the pros and cons of children who grow up playing football. Firstly, he believes the perseverance it takes to show up for hard practices is useful later in life. Especially when they get frustrated with something and don’t notice the little bits of progress they are making.

The era of Football in America is slowly coming to a close. Football has been known as America’s sport next to baseball for many years now. The general physicality of every play isn’t(B3) matched by any other sport on the planet, and that is why football causes more injuries than any other sport on the professional, and youth levels. Parents are pulling their kids from their teams, even in the middle of the season because of the information that has been released over the past decade illuminating a big problem for the game.

Summary “Children Need to Play, Not Compete,” by Jessica Statsky is a thoughtful insight on the competitive sports for children. She is of the view that the competitive sports can ruin the enjoyment that games are supposed to provide. These methods of playing the games like adults can prove to be lethal for physical and psychological health. The author quotes from an authentic source that “Kids under the age of fourteen are not by nature physical.” (Tutko)

“I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you, if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football (President Barrack Obama)”. American Football is a full contact sport played by two teams of eleven players move the ball forward by running and passing . What makes it so dangerous is the amount of hits players receive during the match and during training. Letting their kids play football is a rising concern for many parents due to the amount of injuries and even deaths that happen on the field. Chris Borland, a professional player, retired from football aged just 24 due to concerns about his head injuries.

Frances is a field hockey player for her school team. One day, she got her report card and saw she got a C+ in Spanish. The next day at practice, her coach told her she was off the team--Even though Frances had been trying her best in Spanish. Frances thought this was unfair and ceased putting effort into Spanish. This is an example of how a child could be negatively by the No Pass, No Play rule.

Children who participate in competitive sports at a young age experience more serious negative impacts than positives, including a risk of severe injury, losing

Summary In “Children Need to Play, Not Compete,” Jessica Statsky tries to demonstrate the negative effect of organized sports on the physical and psychological health of growing child. She claims that the games are not festive but they end up in the wrong development of a child’s brain. The coaches and parents have high hopes for their children that result in the pressure building. This changes the purpose of sports from teaching tolerance, teamwork and sportsmanship to merely winning by all means.

“In the U.S., about 30 million children and teens participate in some form of organized sports, and more than 3.5 million injuries each year” claims Stanford Children’s Health. It’s definitely true that competitive sports can cause all sorts of injuries from big to small. The media teaches people simply that sports leads to horrific injuries and can cause stress, but what the mainstream media hardly discusses are the great benefits of competitive sports. While there may be some negatives to competitive sports, that’s just life, and to add on to that; there are plenty of benefits which are sure to override to media’s facts. Kids should play competitive sports because competitive sports teach children powerful life lessons, contributes to their social and mental stability, and because of the physical gain competitive sports provides.

Kids look up to their parents and coaches and would never want to disappoint them. The parents and coaches being the role models they are for the kids, that makes the pressure even more effective. Many kids around the United States have been leaving

“Coaching is the purposeful improvement of competition sports performance, achieved through a planned programme of preparation and competition.” (Lyle, 1999). “Motivation is the direction and intensity of effort.” (Weinberg & Gould, 2003). In order to create a psychological coaching manual, one must understand the needs of the specific group of athletes.

2022; LeRoy, 2021). Athletes are subject to many different types of abuse, McMahon (2022) discusses research done by Stirling and Kerr where they studied a team of college swimmers, who had experiences physical, emotional, and verbal abuse from their coach. The swimmers also experienced instances where their coach would act aggressively and hit or throw objects at them. Coaches are the biggest culprits for abuse at the collegiate level. With the growing awareness abuse student athletes are experiencing, they are resorting to psychological abuse, “Coaches have allegedly engaged in racial intimidation, sexual degradation, homophobic behavior, and bullying, causing psychological problems including suicidal thoughts” (LeRoy, 2021).