By Amanda Tonkin
For as long as I can remember, my life has – in part or sometimes fully – revolved around a 12-inch yellow ball. That’s nearly 30 years of a sport, starting when I was eight or nine and culminating to my present role now as a pitching instructor and coach.
I think back to how it began, practicing at the city fields with my grandpa and my cousins, playing rec ball with my friends, eating popsicles in the parking lot with my teammates – whether we won or lost. And over the years, some of us did get better and some of us didn’t, but we would come back every spring and keep playing, because it was fun. And then, just when there was still enough summer left to play at the pool and plan our annual amusement park trip, we would hang up our cleats and put our helmets away until next season. We wouldn’t be softball or baseball players, we wouldn’t be youth athletes, we would just be YOUTH.
And then some of us got a little too good
And then, seventh grade hit, and after years of rec ball I was somehow getting a little too good for it. And people noticed – enough to put me on their select team. And suddenly, I wasn’t eating popsicles anymore or going to the diamond with my family to get extra work in; no, now, I was pitching in the backyard with a custom-backstop my grandpa built for me; I was attending weekly pitching and hitting lessons; and I was playing in tournaments – sometimes states away – for the long, long weekend all summer long.
And that’s exactly how I spent my next five years. Training, practicing and competing, over and over and over again. Fall leagues that started mere months after summer season ended, regular pitching and hitting lessons for the bulk of the year, two-hour team practices and conditioning and then back to all those tournaments in the hot, sticky summer sun.
And then I got hurt
I remember the first time I dealt with an injury that actually took me out of the game – tendonitis in my elbow – and the exact feeling that crept in when my doctor told me I would need to take at least three months off and not touch a ball – RELIEF.
I wasn’t mad, I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t frustrated, I wasn’t worried about falling behind, I was RELIEVED. I was so thankful to have a few months to just be me again. Not a pitcher, not an athlete, just a girl. And I spent those months working a job like a lot of high schoolers do, spending time with my boyfriend and going to the movies with my friends. It was fun. It was carefree. It was easy.
And when my three months were up, I picked that yellow ball back up and I started it all over again. The training, the practicing, the competing, over and over and over again, until one day, I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. I hated the way the dust settled on my clothes, the feel of the laces and the callouses they left on my fingertips, the dirt that made its way through my cleats and socks and in between my toes, the red clay from southern tournaments that never came out of my clothes, the long car rides to far away games, the constant struggle to be better when it felt like I was already good enough – just not for anyone else.
The burnout is real and it’s really hard
I fell out of love with the sport I was enamored with since the age of eight. And it wasn’t because my parents forced me to play – my mom told me to quit all the time if I didn’t want to be there. And it wasn’t because my select coaches weren’t good – they were female college coaches and a collection of dads who treated the entire team like their daughters. And it wasn’t because my team wasn’t good – we had more trophies than I can count (rings weren’t a thing back then), more placements at Nationals than I can remember (back when those were rare and you still needed berths) and most importantly, every single one of us had a college offer, (and 75% of those were division one).
That didn’t matter, though. I was barely 16 and I was burnt out on the sport I once loved. And so were a lot of my teammates. But after spending half of our lives throwing this ball around a field and hitting buckets and buckets and buckets of balls, what were we supposed to do? Just give up on our dreams because it wasn’t fun anymore?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The truth about today’s youth sports
I can’t begin to imagine what youth sports looks like across the United States where winter isn’t a thing, but here, in the little ole’ Midwest, most of us end tournaments the last weekend of July and schedule tryouts just a week later – heck, some don’t even wait for the current season to be OVER before holding tryouts. I’ve got pitchers whose teams are playing on average, 100-plus games in the fall, winter and summer (let alone what they play for their school team). Plus team practice. Plus private lessons. Plus conditioning. Plus working on their own. And Heaven forbid they play a sport outside of baseball or softball, even just at the school level.
Our kids, aren’t getting a chance to be kids anymore. They’re not getting popsicles after games and running around the diamond and laughing with their cousins or neighborhood friends until their stomachs hurt. We ship them off into the select world at nine and 10 to begin their paths to college baseball and softball stardom. We sign them up for weekly lessons, where once they begin to plateau or waiver, we then sign them up for speed and agility because surely that has to get them through this bump and help them pitch faster, hit more homeruns and run the bases like a professional, right?
We spend tens of THOUSANDS of dollars – likely enough to cover a year or two of that college tuition we so badly want – training them to achieve a dream that they’re not even sure they want (or are good enough for) once they’re old enough.
But, what about the kids that DO want to play in college?
Here’s the tricky thing about playing in college. Almost every nine or 10 year old that falls in love with a sport will want to play in college (or professionally) when they start it. It’s fun, we get to do it with our friends, we seem pretty decent at it, what 10 year old wouldn’t want to make that their life? And I truly believe that all those kids really, really, really DO want to play at the next level.
Until they don’t.
Until they’re seniors in high school (some with real, legitimate college offers rolling in), and they realize they’re adults now, they’re the ones in charge of their futures, and they don’t want that future to include a sport that has taken over their lives. All those years of work, all those weekends away, all those lessons and games, all those trophies and rings – don’t matter enough.
But, relief from all those tears, injuries, frustrations from a bad practice, lesson, game, workout, feelings of inferiority, fears of disappointing your coaches and families – DOES matter. And it matters a lot more.
Good players quit when they realize all of the things they have missed out on by becoming these high-level athletes all these years. The family dinners, the vacations, the wasted weekends with friends, graduation parties, dances, boyfriends, girlfriends, being normal kids and teenagers. Athletes quit when the relief from all bad feelings and strict schedules, outweighs any of the possible positives – all those tournament wins, those conference awards and yes, sometimes, even those college scholarships they worked so, so hard to get.
Athletes walk away from their dreams – after just reaching them – because they finally feel like they can. They don’t care what it might be like to play in college or professionally, they care what it will be like to JUST be a student. Just be a worker. Just BE.
And some athletes, won’t walk away from their dreams even though they want to, because of all those strings attached to the sport they used to love, playing because their parents have already invested so much money in lessons and teams, playing because they don’t feel like they have any other options to get them to college and playing simply because they don’t know who they are without the sport, because since the age of 10 their identities have been wrapped into how well they can throw or hit a round piece of leather.
Keeping up with the Joneses
I think it’s a really important thing to note that not EVERY single athlete is experiencing this. I still have a handful of pitchers that can play volleyball or basketball, work at their city grocery store and ride rollercoasters in the summer. I know coaches who break for an entire month at the end of the summer season or right before winter starts to let their players recoup and be kids again.
I’ve also had some incredibly dedicated players that I’ve had to remind over and over again to take a break here and there because their drive and their work ethic and their dreams are so big and so real, that they don’t want to be kids. All they can think about is getting to that next level.
And that next level, if you choose to chase it, can be SO awesome and can be SO worth the sacrifices – if it really is your dream.
But should our youth athletes have to sacrifice so much to achieve their dreams? Nowadays, everywhere you turn there are three or four new, up-and-coming “A” level, elite teams popping up in one city alone. Every year, there is one more showcase, national-level team promising to get your child to division one. And every year, at the end of the season, we see 75% of those premier, platinum, elite, gold, national teams, sending their players to JUCO, NAIA, D3 and D2 colleges.
And there is NOTHING wrong with any of those options. Playing at the college level is so rare that you should very proudly and loudly celebrate your athlete’s commitment – no matter where they go and what level they play. But, at the end of the day, if your athlete ends up at a small, D2 school two hours from home, did you really have travel out of state every weekend and sacrifice all those summers, to get them there?
The short answer is no. The long answer is, playing select ball is of course an important factor in getting to college, coaches like to see you compete and they like to see you grow and develop and push yourself. But contacting coaches yourself, going to camps, sending videos and updating recruiting apps you have WILL get you to those D2, D3, NAIA and JUCO levels.
What about the two percent of ALL baseball and softball players that WILL make it to the division one level? Do they need to be playing out of state every weekend? The short answer is, possibly. The long answer is, these athletes are very few and far between. This is the most elite division in college sports you can get to, and you have to have a very long set of skills, determination, work ethic, stats and just God-given talent to make it to this level. And because of how rare this level of talent is, that does mean you will likely be traveling to play against other athletes of that competition level. But that is the minority. Whether we like it or not, the chances of our youth athletes playing division one sports is RARE.
So, why then, are we labeling all of these teams “A” and “elite” status, when the numbers simply don’t add up. There simply are not enough of these truly division one, elite-level players in our state to make up even 25% of these “national” level teams we have. And so, 98% of these kids on these “showcase” teams spend summer after summer playing their “platinum” schedules, giving up their time to be young and dumb, to end up in the same place they could have if they played for a regional team and had a few weekends here and there to hang out with their friends.
All because we have to keep up with the Joneses. Coaches and organizations now feel the pressure to create those schedules and label themselves “A” because that’s what everyone thinks they want. After all their hard work, we think our young athletes are going to make it to the biggest show possible, so they have to play at that level. Is it worth everything we’re sacrificing as players, parents and coaches? Are we doing justice to our youth athletes by constantly raising the standard of what “good enough” is? Are we doing justice to their futures by telling them all that they can play at any level they put their minds too if they work hard enough? When in fact, 93% of them won’t be “good enough” to play any level of college ball at all?
I don’t know. But I do think that’s a big part of the burnout all these players are feeling.
Falling in love again
If circumstances were different, if I didn’t feel like softball was my big ticket to affording college, I would have quit. And it would have been one of the biggest mistakes I would have made in life, whether I realized it or not. When I got to college, I fell back in love, slowly, with the game, for a number of reasons, but mainly, because it became fun again, because I was surrounded by young women who understood what it took to get to where we were and because the unrelenting pressure wasn’t the same.
Yes, there was pressure, of course I wanted to be the best and I wanted to make a name for myself and my team, but I had made it. We all did. And we celebrated and sometimes commiserated in that – particularly after a three-and-a-half mile run at 5 a.m. for winter conditioning. Or on a six-hour bus trip that left us pulling in at midnight and leaving again at 7 a.m. the next day. But we made it. And all those years of work, all those sacrifices, were worth it, to most of us.
And every new season, between the recruits that came in and the returners that saw their spots filled with new blood, we lost a few of our teammates. We saw a few of them walk away from the game, hang up their cleats for the last time and call it quits. Because at that time in their lives, the sacrifices just weren’t worth it anymore. And that was OK too.
Every player is different. And even when it feels like the sport is going in the wrong direction in so many ways, it’s important to recognize that we can play an active role in changing that. As parents, coaches and instructors, we need to be comfortable with saying “no” when things begin to spiral down an unhealthy path. We need to be comfortable with saying “yes” when our kids need a break, because they REALLY do sometimes.
In the end, the sacrifices were worth it for me. I sacrificed vacations with my friends for vacations at the softball diamonds in Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, California and even Hawaii. I sacrificed the “typical” high school and college experience for three-a-days, A LOT of running and very little sleep, which led to conference championships, All-American honors and being inducted into my college’s Athletic Hall of Fame. But that almost didn’t happen. I almost walked away. And all those amazing experiences I had, all the amazing work I get to do now as an instructor and a coach, all the journeys I get to be a part of and all the young ladies and families that are a part of mine, that wouldn’t be a thing, because I couldn’t see the light anymore when I was a young, dumb kid.
And sometimes, our youth athletes can’t see the light at the tunnel anymore either, because it’s been so long and grueling, that they don’t care about the light anymore. They just want it to be over with. They just want to be normal. And, I guess, that’s why it’s just important to acknowledge and talk about those feelings with your athletes. And to justify them. And to listen to them. And to make them feel heard. And to DO something about it and find a solution. Find a balance.
That doesn’t mean just let them all quit.
But it does mean to know when to push them and when to let them take a pause, because it just might be the difference in that 10-year-old who once loved the game walking away from their dreams, or achieving them.
Amanda Tonkin is the senior pitching instructor at Elevate Sports Training. She is blessed to work with a host of amazing instructors that understand what youth athletes are going through these days. You can learn more about our team here or by calling (937) 848-1990. And yes, she really is so old that she wore shorts when she played softball – even in college.
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