Eine neue Studie legt nahe, dass Pickup-Basketball und Nachbarschafts-Kickball heute weniger verbreitet sind als vor Generationen und stattdessen organisierteren und formelleren Jugendsportarten Platz gemacht haben, die den Kindern helfen sollen, weiterzukommen. Der sozioökonomische Status und die intensive Elternschaft spielten eine Rolle bei der Neigung zum formellen Sport.
https://news.osu.edu/a-shift-from-the-sandlot-to-the-travel-team-for-youth-sports/?utm_campaign=omc_science-medicine_fy26&utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social
10 Kommentare
Article published in Leisure Sciences: [https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2026.2620528](https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2026.2620528)
I hated playing baseball and football that was formalized. Neighborhood kids getting together was so much more fun.
You can force the kids to get off their damn phone and participate with formalized sports. QED.
I am an athletic director, and across all sports an anecdotal observation that myself and our coaches have noticed is how good our athletes are at running drills and practicing from earlier ages and how comparatively bad they are at making quick game time decisions that require improvisation. We blame it on exactly what this study is referencing.
I’m an inner city High School baseball coach. I have some of the best athletes I’ve ever seen on a baseball field. But none of them had played baseball before they got to me in high school which makes it impossible to compete with the suburban kids who’ve been playing together since they were 5 years old. Athleticism can get you a ways in this game, but 4 years isn’t enough time to catch up with kids who’ve been playing ball their whole life.
In baseball it wasn’t just a shift to organized sports but a shift to expensive travel ball/competitive models that killed the sport in inner cities. My kids were priced out of the game from the git-go. They don’t grow up playing the game. So they don’t grow up watching the game. I have to walk the halls recruiting kids just to field a team. And then when we play we get absolutely stomped by the suburban teams and can only hang with the other inner city teams that cater mostly to poor brown and black kids who are in the same boat.
It’s great watching my boys fall in love with the game and get better every day. But it’s discouraging for them to get their asses kicked in 90% of the games. A lot of them are such good athletes that they’ve never really had to try to be good at something. That doesn’t translate well to baseball. It’s a tough game to learn. But we’re getting there.
1. We don’t allow kids hour upon hour of unsupervised time anymore.
2. They have far more entertainment options than we did.
3. Organizing a pickup game was a *TOTAL* pain in the ass unless you’re playing 2 on 2 basketball, and even that was a minor pain.
4. A suitable place to play said game. We usually walked the quarter mile or so to the school we went to. Our street was just too busy to do anything but play catch.
I found this funny that at the current moment, my son and about 7 of his friends are currently outside trying to play kickball in the court in the snow.
Intensive parenting or people calling the cops when you let your kids playing at the park down the street without a parent?
Might also have something to do with the fact that a group of unsupervised children in many neighborhoods will result in a CPS call these days. Kids get very little unstructured group play time.
You’re also expected to account for your child at all times now, you went to the basketball court and Parks because you weren’t allowed home. They were community youth gathering places