Elite?: A Christian Manifesto for Youth Sports in the United States

By Adam D. Metz

Beyond an occasional sports-inspired sermon illustration, sports are generally regarded as having little relevance to the Christian faith. More often, they are viewed as a welcome and safe reprieve from politics and religion. Quietly, however, as they avoid the discerning eye of the church, sports are slowly overtaking families and overwhelming parents. Under the labels "elite," "select," and "travel," a new experience of sports has taken root in American culture demanding financial burdens, time commitments, and heightened pressures never before seen.
Community leaders from various public sectors have criticized many recent trends in youth sports, but, alas, where has the church been? This new "elite" expression of youth sports is quickly building an intimidating front against the church. As church attendance declines, "elite" youth sports participation is on the rise. This book ventures into the challenging, controversial, and powerful world of youth sports. Young people participate in sports more than just about any other activity, and the church has neglected its role in providing a voice of discernment for what participating in sports should look like. Christians are desperately in need of a manifesto for helping them wrestle with the complex, exciting, and often exhausting world of youth sports.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532603808

Adam D. Metz

Adam D. Metz has ministered for the Alum Creek Church in Columbus, OH since 2003. He has degrees from Lipscomb University and Fuller Seminary. His doctoral research explored the relationship between Christianity and sports. Adam has presented on the topic of youth sports at academic and youth ministry conferences while receiving firsthand training as a high school football official and volunteer coach for several of his children's sports teams.

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Elite?

A Christian Manifesto for Youth Sports in the United States

Adam D. Metz

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ELITE?

A Christian Manifesto for Youth Sports in the United States

Copyright © 2018 Adam D. Metz. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0379-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0381-5

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0380-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Metz, Adam D.

Title: Elite? : a Christian manifesto for youth sports in the United States / Adam D. Metz.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-0379-2 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-0381-5 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-0380-8 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Athletes—Religious life. | Sports—Psychological aspects. | Sports—Sociological aspects.

Classification: GV706.42 .M47 2018 (print) | GV706.42 .M47 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. July 1, 2019

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations designated NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

To Mary Beth, my lifetime companion and best friend. You make my life better every day, and I can’t imagine a better partner for watching our children play.

And to Grandpa. I love sports because of you. Go Browns!

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Just a Game

Part 1: A Theology of Sports

Chapter 2: Playing Games: A Theology for Sports

Chapter 3: There Can Be Only One: A Theology of Competition

Chapter 4: Sports as a Spiritual Power

Part 2: The Youth-Sports Industrial Complex

Chapter 5: Children at Play: The Power of Youth Sports

Chapter 6: From Playgrounds to Hallowed Grounds: The Industrialization of Youth Sports

Chapter 7: Youth Sports and Sports Ministries

Part 3: Ministering to the Youth Sports Industrial Complex

Chapter 8: Finding the Prophetic Voice of the Church in Youth Sports

Chapter 9: I Want to Be Like Mike: Sports and Identity Formation in Young People

Chapter 10: Youth Sports as Missional Frontier

Chapter 11: Redeeming Youth Sports

Epilogue

Bibliography

Beneath that thin, shiny layer of elite spectator sports is a system that is troubled, if not failing.

Tom Farrey, Game On, 21.

Acknowledgments

In writing this book I have learned much about sports and faith and the relationship between the two. I have also learned a great deal about the incredible circles of support and encouragement that surround me. I haven’t won an Academy Award and this is no acceptance speech, but it is a helpful time to pause and outwardly thank some of the people who were vital in helping bring this book into existence.

I usually skim through these acknowledgments and see the shout-outs to the authors’ families without giving it much thought, but now that I’m writing a book of my own I have a better appreciation for how much thanksgiving there is to share with my family. Mary Beth, you have been so gracious in giving me the space and support to see this through, and I am a better person because of you. Clark, Clementine, and Cecilia, you are excited to see this in print, and I’m grateful for your patience. If it wasn’t for you, this book would have never been written. Always know: I love to watch you play. All three of you gave me opportunities to keep the ideas of this book rooted in the experiences of the real world.

In writing this book, I have been reminded of all that my parents did for me when I was a kid, and I have never told you enough—thank you for watching me play!

Thank you, Alum Creek Church family. Thank you all for being patient with me through this long process. You are simply the best church family I could hope for. Thank you for supporting me in doing what I love, embracing my shortcomings, and lavishing encouragement on my family constantly. You are truly a blessing.

This entire project owes its genesis to Dr. Craig Detweiler, whose class helped inspire this convergence of interests that continue to lead me to new places. Thank you for your constant support of my work.

From the outset, I was committed to making this book speak to as many people as possible. To that end, I enlisted a group of readers who have proved to be a vital sounding board throughout this process. Your commitment to me and this book is more encouraging than you will ever know. Special thanks to Dr. Megan Birk for providing an outsider’s perspective. Your questions pushed me to think more deeply, and your suggestions made for a better finished project. Stuart Rogers, you also proved to be a tireless reader whose input was more valuable than I am able to convey to you. Mark Spence, thanks for encouraging me the past several years as these ideas were first formulating, I appreciate your friendship and thank you for your encouragement. JP Conway, you also remained a steady voice of encouragement and reassurance that this message is an important one to pursue—thank you! Chris Harrell, thank you for making time to work through the early drafts; your encouragement has been inspiring. Thank you to everyone else who took time to be part of the reading team: Brian, Julie, Mark, Karen, Matt, Tammy, and Robert.

Dr. John Mark Hicks, you provided insightful feedback for chapter 3 and have remained another bedrock of encouragement for my work. Your theological influence on my thinking is undeniable, and your dedication to working as a pastor for pastors is more valuable than you can know.

My good friends and brothers, Nate and Dion—I love you guys and your influence has helped shape every part of this book. Our text thread often gets me through the day.

Through my years at Alum Creek, I have had the wonderful blessing to watch over scores of teenagers whom I have watched play all kinds of sports. I have loved to watch each and every one of you play. Thank you for putting up with me through the years, and to my most recent group of kids—I love all of you and am thankful I get these years with you.

As I write about in this book, I can’t help but think of the many people whose paths I have crossed because of sports. To my old coaches, Jeff and Carlos, you helped make sports enjoyable enough for me that I still want to play them all these years later. Thank you to all the parents, who have indulged me with conversations about youth sports these past several years. There is a long list of coaches, officials, fellow parents, and (of course) young people that I know and have known because of sports. You have all helped shape my understanding of this world, and it is because I have had such wonderful experiences that I want others to see sports for the good that it can be.

1

Just a Game

Somewhere in the basement of my house, sitting amidst cobweb-tinged shelves crammed with Christmas decorations, suitcases, half-full cans of paint, and boxes of pre-digital-age photographs is a storage container full of my childhood mementos. Most people, I think, have the same kinds of boxes full of the same kinds of keepsakes. The relics vary, of course, as each one of us has our own unique mementos directly tied to our own unique childhoods. As years have turned to decades, I have watched what was once a collection of several such boxes moved from my parents’ house shrink to this one small container. As childhood memories fade like dreams, the collection of must-have memories has been slowly weeded down to the few trinkets most directly tied to the most enduring of my personal recollections. Inside the storage container is a potpourri of items that are as eclectic as a Jeopardy! category: the first Bible I was ever given, a baby blanket my mom made for me, a stuffed Cat in the Hat given to me by my great-grandmother one year for Christmas, and even copies of my elementary school grade cards.

Through each family move and every paring down of these mementos to a smaller box, among the reminders of my childhood that I seem to have had the most difficult time parting with is a 1989 Defiance Boys League baseball runner-up trophy. With the exception of a brief foray into both basketball and football (each for one season), the sports of my youth were baseball and soccer. Although my hometown of Defiance, OH, has become a kind of haven for professional baseball talent, I was a case study in mediocrity who never won a championship and was excited just to be on a team that won more games than we lost. The one exception to my entire experience of youth sports was this 1989 Boys League baseball team. Too many years have passed for me to remember all the details of the championship game and the season itself is even foggier in my memories, but I do remember that we overachieved in finishing second place. My old baseball coach Buhrer recently reminded me that we lost the championship game, but it ended under protest due to a base running interference call. Later, the protest was upheld, the game was replayed from the moment of the interference call, and we lost. Again. Even in the midst of that season’s disappointing conclusion, I can still remember swelling with pride at having had such a successful season. It may have been a small league with a small number of teams in our small town, but the feeling of victory was anything but small. Back then you only got trophies if you finished in first or second place. It felt as though we had done something and that I was a part of something. It was one of the rare times in my youth that I felt as though I had accomplished something. For a ten-year-old boy, that is just about the best feeling you can ever hope to have.

Even now, far removed from my experiences in youth sports and in addition to the many memories I have of playing soccer and baseball, I have memories of playing basketball and football at my school even though I only played those sports for one season. When I take a step back, it seems ludicrous that these experiences are equally embedded within my memory bank alongside other more important memories like my wedding day, the birth of my children, and my baptism. While these memories of playing sports may not be as important as my other memories, I would be lying if I said they were any less vivid. These memories do, however, seem less absurd in light of former United States President Bill Clinton sharing his memories of playing church league basketball in Arkansas. One night I was the leading scorer on our team. I scored sixteen points in a church league game, never before or since . . . and I nearly dunked the ball!¹ If, after serving two terms as the President of the United States, Bill Clinton can still remember scoring sixteen points in a meaningless church league basketball game, then I feel at least partially justified for hanging on to my second-place Boy’s League trophy for all these years. It is difficult to overstate the significance sports plays in the lives of young people.

When I wasn’t playing sports, I was watching sports. Cheering on my teams to win championships (which they seldom did) and celebrating their victories with my peers was a big part of my experience growing up. In many ways, my playing sports felt like a connection to the professionals that I loved to watch on television. It is difficult to disentangle memories of my youth from either playing sports or watching my favorite teams play sports. It would be disingenuous to say sports were a hobby for me, something I enjoyed in my leisure time, and nothing I took too seriously. If I am being honest, sports has been a big part of who I am for a long time.

When cheering for a losing team, a better man might just shrug his shoulders and say, We’ll get them next year, and move on to weightier aspects of life. I’m not proud to admit that when the Indians lost the World Series in 1997 I was in a bad mood for a week, or that I had trouble sleeping the night before the Cubs-Indians World Series Game 7 in 2016. I would feel like a better Christian if I could dismiss the fact that these memories had a truly formative effect on my life. What kind of holy man or holy woman gets rattled from the results of a sporting contest? Probably the kind that holds on to a baseball trophy from when he was ten years old. The reality, however, is that in 1997 and in 2016, when the Indians lost the World Series, it affected my mood for several days and has remained emblazoned among my most significant memories. I had a wonderful childhood and often recall many fond memories, but I have held on to that Boy’s League trophy for all these years because something special happened on that day.

This is the same realization that Catholic philosopher Michael Novak ponders in his classic book on sports and religion when he asks of himself (perhaps half-pondering and half-confessing), How could I be forty years old and still care what happens to the Dodgers?² Novak’s question was provoked by reflecting upon professional sports, but today’s world of amateur sports, particularly among young people, provides a rich opportunity for revisiting careful, critical reflection on the role sports play in our society.

Sports are taking over the lives of families with young athletes in unprecedented fashion. It has gotten so out of control that the Tennessee State legislature had to pass a law in 2017 that forbids school sports teams to mandate practice on holidays, weekends, or religious holidays.³ This book is written for Christians who feel unprepared for and at a loss to deal with a youth sports scene that seems to be spiraling out of control.

Seven years ago, I innocently walked into a new stage of my life with sports when my wife and I signed up our four-year-old son, the oldest of three, to play T-ball in our local community league. The subsequent years have seen all three of our children involved in a variety of sports: baseball, softball, basketball, football, swimming, soccer, and dance (so far). Suddenly, my wife and I have become confronted with new realities of sports that I never had to deal with in my bygone sports days: paying league fees, regularly buying new equipment for our constantly-growing kids, managing practice schedules for three different children, dealing with the diverse personalities and styles of coaches, making decisions as to which leagues to sign up for, and the ever-present reality of the politics present in youth sports. The logistical challenges are real, but they often pale in comparison to the unique psychological and spiritual challenges that come from being a sports parent. Now I am learning to consider things like how much pressure I put on my children to succeed in athletics, how my behavior from the sidelines and from the stands affects them, how to find a healthy balance between inactivity and over-scheduling, and the spiritual impact sports’ schedules have on their identity formation. As we dove headfirst into the experience of youth sports, we found countless parents who are struggling with many of the same challenges we were.

As much as we try to tell ourselves and our children that sports are just a game, the effects and ramifications that accompany sports seem impossible to dismiss as simply just a game. My children know that I have held on to that Boy’s League trophy all these years. They are also aware of how all-consuming their sports’ schedules become with each passing season, and they are increasingly aware of the financial burden sports become to our family’s budget. Some of my fondest memories and some of our best family time have occurred around sporting events. My purpose in writing this book is not to dismiss sports in their entirety. As we will see, I believe sports have a crucial role in our lives and, especially, in the lives of young people. However, when we stop and consider how much of our time, money, and attention sports demand, it is difficult to dismiss them as just a game. Christians must begin to take more seriously the implications of their involvement in sports, and my hope is this book will offer a significant step forward in doing that.

Just a Game?

On one hand, this familiar refrain serves as an important reminder for amateur athletes and sports fans everywhere as to the proper place of sports in life. To remark, "It’s just a game," is to remind participants and spectators alike that the game is not the most important experience in a person’s life. This declaration suggests that sports lack the significance and sophistication of the world’s more serious matters like politics, religion, education, science, or economics. Sports, according to this line of thinking, exist as a welcome respite from these much more complex and significant matters. During the contentious 2016 Presidential election, I often turned to sports radio because I knew most of the talk-show hosts would avoid political conversations. People are seldom comfortable in the mingling of politics and religion, but the mixing of sports and politics or religion is often viewed with similar angst.

On the other hand, to minimize the importance of sports in this way seems to woefully understate the actual experiences that both athletes and spectators have during sporting contests. Beyond that, it seriously undermines the effect sports do have on the most significant and complex aspects of culture. When American gold and bronze medalists John Carlos and Tommie Smith thrust their black-gloved hands into the air atop the Olympic podium in Mexico City in 1968, were they part of just a game? Do over 100,000 fans show up on a Saturday afternoon to watch just a game? Do families enroll their toddlers in sports clinics and their teenagers in elite sports leagues to play just a game? Can a teenage girl who bursts into tears as she walks across the field to play the final game of her high school career be convinced that this is just a game?

As hard as we may try to sell the idea to our athletes (and to ourselves) that their chosen sport is just a game, all other evidence surrounding the game seems to indicate that they are much more. Few realities carry the same cultural swagger in the United States that sports do. CBS pays the NCAA over one billion dollars a year to broadcast the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament on its family of networks every March. Celebrity athletes are paid millions of dollars for the clothes they wear, products they use, and food they eat. Cities often look to sports for justification of their status as a major city—the more teams you have . . . the more major league you are.⁴ When we regularly read news reports of parents assaulting other parents in the stands of their children’s sporting events, witness coaches berating game officials at youth leagues, and hear about countless cheating scandals involving everything from birth certificates to performance enhancing drugs at nearly every level of competition, it is difficult to sell the message that sports is just a game.

Playing Games in the United States

The desire to minimize the role of sports and games in the lives of young people is rooted in the notion of play. Philosophically, play is often said to be autotelic—an action done simply for its own sake. In A Brief Theology of Sport, Lincoln Harvey describes play as radically non-productive, a passing event in which time, energy, and skill are invested for no apparent reason.⁵ This is fully on display when children are told by their parents, Go play. Upon returning from play, the children’s parents are not expecting a full report or even to see evidence of what the children’s play accomplished because play, in and of itself, fulfilled its goal. British theologian Robert Ellis pushes the notion a bit further by suggesting play is more than simply an end in and of itself, but that it is something that we enjoy for its own sake—something he describes as autocharatic.⁶ The next chapter dives into the nuances of this conversation, but at this point suffice it to say that both descriptions, whether trying to frame sports as autotelic or autocharatic, are simply sophisticated ways of describing sports as just a game.

Athletic scholarships have become the treasure at the end of the rainbow for countless families caught up in the youth sports arms race, and in large part, pursuing them has come to dictate much of the way in which youth sports operates. If playing sports is intended to be autotelic, then playing sports in hopes of one day earning a scholarship betrays the very nature of play. The pilgrimage to elusive scholarships is beginning to occur at earlier ages and is accompanied by more intense specialization. Furthermore, the life of American families increasingly beats to the rhythm of sports commitments to the detriment of all their other social connections—especially their faith communities. Families can’t load up their SUVs every weekend, drive hundreds of miles, check into hotels for weeks at a time, spend tens of thousands of dollars a year, and then try to convince their children that their sport isn’t that important. Quite the contrary, as a father who expects to pay $90,000 on his son’s basketball career told author Tom Farrey, "If a kid comes up to you and says he wants to be a doctor, do you tell him he’s