“Go to a 10 year old softball game and watch the parents,” Lewis said in March at the Project Play Summit. “They care about that more than anything.”
Across campus at the University of California, another author, Richard Reeves, raised within a British youth sports system much more infatuated with playing than the material things you can get from sports, offered this reading of the landscape: “Travel sports is the work of the devil.”
Reeves’ three sons were around middle school age when he and his wife brought them over from the United Kingdom to America, and into the so-called youth sports industrial complex.
“You’ve got these kids being hauled around the country and thinking they gotta do this, parents shouting at the kids and they had scouts there and individual coaches,” he tells USA TODAY Sports. “I was horrified by the culture around it.”
Lewis had two softball-playing daughters and, like so many of us, gave himself to their careers.
“The most pathetic character inside it is the one who’s paying for it all,” Lewis writes in “Playing to Win,” his 2020 audiobook that details life in the complex.