America’s youth sports system is a successful tragedy. The adults win while kids lose
He is 6-foot-4, left handed, and he should be starting his college hockey career this week, but instead he effectively quit two years ago.
Rather than try to play in college, Max Engel will attend Indiana University as an undergrad starting on Monday.
Max is my nephew. He lost his father, my oldest brother Frank, early in 2020 to cancer. Although Frank could not skate, he introduced his son to the sport when he was 5 and Max took to it naturally.
Max is a good athlete, much better than his dad. In fairness, most goldfish had better eye-hand coordination than his father.
Max could really play hockey. He has the size and skill to play in college. Maybe not a Michigan, Boston University or University of Denver, but somewhere.
He was 16 when he was basically done. He quit because he was sick of hockey. Sick of the schedule. Sick of the injuries. His life was school, hockey, sleep.
“I am happy to be done with it,” he said.
What about playing for a college club team?
“Absolutely not,” he said in a conversation from his home in Indianapolis shortly after his high school graduation.
His life. His call. There is also something wrong not with the decision but the reasons why he was forced to make it.
As evidenced by winning the most medals in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, America can produce the “best” athletes in almost anything. The pursuit, and price, is steep to the point where there are needless consequences.
Max is another case of a system that has too many games, and too much pressure. Playing a sport in college has always been a job, and the same can be said for youth sports now, too.
This year, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a study that said, “70 percent of kids drop out of organized sports by age 13, and the so-called ‘professionalization of youth sports’ can’t be understated as a significant factor why.”
If you want to call this part an evolved “weed out process” in sports’ selection, fine. Max is a consequence. We do not need to give a young person another reason to sit down and look at a screen.
“It is probably one of the most disappointing situations I was in as a parent,” his mother, Kim, said. “The way they handle all of these kids’ sports is too much. It was my life. Parents have all of these expectations they’re kids are going to the next level, and they’re just not.
“Playing that much all the time wrecks their bodies. It’s survival of the fittest. It’s, ‘Who can get through without seriously getting hurt?’ And still love it.”
Max was 13 when he suffered a torn labrum in his right shoulder during a game. The next year, he tore his left labrum. Also, during a game.
“Maybe at a point I could have (played in college); I was good when I was younger,” he said. “The thing that changed for me was I kept getting hurt. I don’t know if I was playing too much. It was unlucky, I think.
“To your point, I was playing a lot. ... When you come back, you have missed a lot. You’re not as good as you were. My confidence was gone. I was scared I was going to get hit, and it affected how I played. But you have to keep playing. You can’t stop.”
Unintentionally, Kim became no different than thousands of well meaning parents whose life was built around her child’s sport schedule. Shelling out money to sit in a rink on a Saturday morning to watch her son play in a random far away city, with other moms and dads.
That is the audience for most of these games: parents, family and friends. The same can be said for nearly all Olympic sports in college. Some in the Olympics themselves, too.
Before he graduated, Max did return to play hockey for his high school team as a senior. He was better than everyone else on the ice, so the level of competition was lacking.
He did enjoy playing again. The schedule was reasonable. His friends were in the stands. He had a varied life.
Like all of us, it is a trade he made to participate, or not, in a system that he did not build.
“I don’t think there is a way to change it; if everyone at the same time stopped playing, but that’s not going to happen,” he said. “There are kids who want it really bad and there will be kids who set that standard, and there is no way to change it. There are kids who get burned out in every sport.”
This is the system, and there are consequences.
Max Engel is one of them.
This story was originally published August 15, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
