Youth Sports and Gell-Mann Amnesia
In which I pass a tipping point...
We had a very nice weekend in NYC, spoiled only by my phone developing an issue where it intermittently refuses to recognize that it has a SIM card. It works fine with wi-fi, though, but the lack of mobile data is a pretty significant constraint in ways that 20-years-ago me would find hilariously weak, but whatever.
Anyway, the lack of connectivity makes it most useful as a vehicle for listening to podcasts, so I’ve been burning through bits of episodes that came in while we were away. I say “bits of,” because this is a rough time of year, sports-wise, so I’m skipping past huge swathes of pre-season football talk (none of which means anything) and worse yet, pre-season fantasy football talk (most of which means less than nothing).
Which is part of my excuse for having a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment and listening to the latter half of this Bill Simmons podcast, where his guest is Malcolm Gladwell and the topic is youth sports. The other part, of course, is that The Pip is massively involved in youth baseball at the moment— I started the episode while walking the dog, and when I got back from that, I had to soft-toss him a bunch of balls in the back yard, despite his travel team having had a practice earlier in the day.
Given that, the topic of youth sports is one that has a lot of intrinsic interest to me. I’ve also spent a lot of time listening to Bill Simmons talk about his kids (who are a bit older than mine) and their various sports activities, so it seemed like something worth skipping past the fantasy football part for. I cite this as an example of Gell-Mann Amnesia, though, because of the Malcolm Gladwell of it all.
Gladwell is, of course, a massively popular writer and podcaster who serves the role of a general-interest Smart Person for a lot of media. He’s undeniably very talented at writing and speaking about moderately complicated ideas from the social sciences in ways that seem very clear to a non-expert audience. Which in a lot of ways makes him a great podcast guest.
The problem is, though, he’s also a bit of a bullshit artist, in the Harry Frankfurt sense of being primarily interested in telling a compelling story and only secondarily concerned with the accuracy of what he’s saying. When he talks about science, he’s constantly smoothing down rough edges and glossing over important caveats. (To say nothing of mis-hearing technical terms…) Which is bad enough in the physical sciences, but his real stock in trade is talking about stuff from the intersection of economics and psychology, with an emphasis on results that seem a little counterintuitive. You know, the kind of stuff at the center of the replication crisis…
To be fair, it wasn’t complete amnesia on my part, because I went in more or less fully conscious of his history. That dramatically changed the listening experience, though, in that I spent most of the time when he was talking looking for places where he might be overselling research or oversimplifying research to the point of misrepresenting the conclusions. There wasn’t that much science in this conversation, so there weren’t many places where he seemed to be being slippery— the main thing he was harping on was a study of the birth months of elite hockey players, and there was one moment where it seemed like he admitted the result didn’t replicate as dramatically in other sports, but I’m not that familiar with the research in question, so don’t know if that’s an absence of evidence or evidence of absence. I was definitely a little more conscious of what seemed like overly sweeping assertions, though— there’s a lengthy bit about how golf and three-point shooting are perfectly complementary that struck me as really weird. This seems to be spinning way too much out of Steph Curry being a really good golfer, but, you know, that’s kind of the Malcom Gladwell Experience.
His other bullshit-artist tendency, which is really obvious when you’re paying close attention, is to present fairly idiosyncratic views as if they’re so obviously common sense that there couldn’t possibly be an objection to them. But, of course, if you spend a few seconds thinking about them, it’s not that hard to come up with obvious problems. Sometimes this is logistical— one of his big suggestions is that schools and sports teams should organize children into cohorts by birth month, which would probably fly in big cities but is likely to run into trouble where the population is more sparse. Sometimes it’s just a failure to consider a topic in a bit more detail— Gladwell asks rhetorically what possible reason there could be for counting sports as a positive factor in college admissions, when in fact it’s not hard to come up with an argument for it, which may or may not be convincing, but does exist and ought to be acknowledged1. And some of it is just him coming off like a space alien— he throws out “Ban all parents from attending youth sports practices and games” as a solution to adult misbehavior, which got a bit of a “I’m sorry, have you met human parents?” from me.
(I should probably note, though, that our experience with youth sports has, to this point at least, been largely positive. The town rec leagues that our kids have played in have generally been good in terms of keeping the emphasis more on teaching than competition, and the adult misbehavior has been minimal. The Pip’s travel baseball team isn’t cheap and is a huge time sink, but again, has generally been pretty good in terms of the adults involved. We’ve run into a couple of coaches who were a little too intense for the 11U circuit, but I haven’t seen any of the real horror stories that get trotted out when this subject comes up.)
This ended up making the whole conversation a bit disappointing to me— enough to make me want to procrastinate on actual work by writing about it here. There are some genuine problems with youth sports teams and youth sports culture, but I’m not sure this really got at them in a meaningful way. The single best suggestion out of the whole thing was an aside by Simmons about how there ought to be more multi-sport clubs— an organization that fields a soccer team in the fall and a basketball team in the winter, or the like. This has the same logistical problem of being hard to implement in smaller communities, but it has some attractive elements.
His space-alien moments aside, though, Gladwell is a really good talker, and I probably would’ve enjoyed this more had I had just a little more Gell-Mann Amnesia.
That’s more than I intended to write about this, but that’s pretty much par for the course for me. If you enjoyed this, here’s a button to get more:
And if you want to take issue with any of it, the comments will be open:
Briefly: There’s a case to be made that performing in, say, the next-to-the-top tier of academics while also putting in the time needed to excel in a sport demonstrates a level of self-discipline that arguably ought to factor into a comparison with a student who gets top-tier grades but doesn’t do anything else. It’s essentially the same argument as for treating any other extra-curricular activity (playing an instrument or performing in theater, doing extensive community service, holding down a job to help support the family, etc.) as a positive factor in “holistic” admissions.
Not having seriously played sports in my own youth, one thing I hadn't realized at all with my 11th grader's baseball is how, at an age where he doesn't really want to hang around with his parents, and probably finds us embarrassing, that his baseball games are a shared experience in which he doesn't at all resent my presence, the way a typical teenager might resent his parents at, say, the mall or a movie or a community fair or some such. With the travel teams, and to a lesser extent the high school team (whose games are at less convenient times for working parents), It's more or less expected that at least one parent will usually be there for each player, and the players don't find it embarrassing even when the parents cheer for the team. We're there near the players but they're in the dugout, separate from us, and we all experience the same ups and downs of the game. I'm usually my son's team's scorekeeper; it's an added bonus when his teammates ask me what the score is, or when a pitcher asks his pitch count, hoping to convince the coach he can go another inning; they know who I am but not in a way my son finds cringeworthy.
I suppose we're lucky in that none of the other parents on any of his teams have been the overbearing sports-parent type. We're on the periphery of the super-serious-baseball world, and will occasionally in tournaments play teams that seem closer to the super-serious baseball world, but even then it's been rare to run into problematic parents or coaches.
The most salient criticism of youth sports brought up by Gladwell and others is the immense cost. Combine this fact with the admissions bump sports can give kids during college applications and the wtf of youth sports and college is clear even if we Americans consistently look past it. The issue is not limited to the traditionally elite sports like golf, tennis, and crew either. Soccer is about the cheapest youth sport imaginable, but even there the money and time needed to access the more competitive leagues and better coaching are significant (e.g. Simmons's experience with his daughter). Giving any sort of admission consideration for sports is damn dubious and it should be pointed out more frequently. If kids want to play sports they should play sports. But let's stop the practice of the coaches getting to send lists of applicants to the admissions office for further consideration.