On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, host Julie Gunlock interviews Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters. Julie asks Linda about her book, why sports are so important to children in an age where kids spend so much time online, how youth sports became a serious business, and the consequences of putting pressure on kids and parents alike to excel in competitive sports.


TRANSCRIPT

Julie Gunlock:

Hey everyone, I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to this program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves and of course, and most importantly their kids.

So today I’m really excited to be talking to Linda Flanagan. She is the mother of three and a freelance journalist, author, researcher, former cross country and track coach and a lifelong athlete. Flanagan holds a master’s degree from Oxford University and the Fletcher School of Law Diplomacy and was an analyst for the National Security Program at Harvard University. She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of Positive Coaching Alliance and a 2021 advisory group member for the Aspen Institute’s Reimagining School Sports Initiative. And her writing on sports has appeared in the Atlantic, Runners World and on NPR’s education site MindShift, where she’s a regular contributor.

She is also the author of a book, and I can’t recommend this highly enough, “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why it Matters,” which uncovers how youth sports became a serious business, the consequences of raising the stakes for kids and parents alike and the changes we need now. Thank you so much for coming on, Linda.

Linda Flanagan:

Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here to talk about all this.

Julie Gunlock:

Well it is an important issue. I have to say, I am the mother of three children, one of which is very interested in sports and we are constantly balancing those issues. So I’m actually very personally excited to talk about this issue. But before I do, I always ask my guests if they employ a specific parenting style. This is a podcast about parenting styles and of course this podcast, it’s called Bespoke and I mentioned tailoring your parenting to your children, and there are a bunch of different styles. Sometimes people say, I don’t really have a style in my case I sort of have a couple different styles that I bring together. Is there one parenting style that you employ that sort of defines how you parent your kids?

Linda Flanagan:

That is interesting. I was watching the screen credits about your podcast as I’m sitting here waiting to talk, and I really like the idea of one size does not fit all with raising kids and that we have to figure it out on our own. And it is dependent on your particular family and the personalities of your kids. And so to that end, I would say, I can say what I’m not. I’m not a tiger mother, that kind of hard driving parent. But at the same time I wouldn’t classify myself one particular way. It’s more, I would say eclectic pulling from different camps. And maybe even occasionally tiger mother-ish in terms of certain non-negotiables like going to school, that sort of thing.

Julie Gunlock:

Taking a shower.

Linda Flanagan:

Exactly.

Julie Gunlock:

Brushing your teeth.

Linda Flanagan:

Basic hygiene and school attendance.

Julie Gunlock:

Well, I mean if we’re talking about sporty kids, boy. Trying to convince your son who is literally sweating all the time that he might actually have to take a shower every night. That’s a reason to be a tiger mom in my opinion.

Linda Flanagan:

Well there can be a BO situation otherwise.

Julie Gunlock:

Explaining that to them. Tell me. In the intro, I want to talk about your book and there’s so much I want to talk to you about, but tell us what is Positive Coaching Alliance?

Linda Flanagan:

Positive Coaching Alliance is a nonprofit organization that was started, I should know this, 20, 25 years ago in California. And the idea behind it was to the worry or the concern that coaches were falling back on screaming and yelling and kind of old school approaches to educating their athletes. Educating, I’m using that term loosely. And that one of the ways we could fix this is to train coaches how to be positive. If they understand some of the tools and the science behind positive coaching, that they’ll adopt this. So anyway, that original chapter has then spread out across the country and its purpose is to educate coaches in how to be positive with their athletes.

Julie Gunlock:

That’s really needed. I think all of us are aware of the stories of not just coaches, but parents themselves. And I know we can get into that of being so intense parents on the sidelines, coaches during the game. There is a story recently of a coach even being shot on the field while the kids were watching.

Linda Flanagan:

I mean, that’s insane.

Julie Gunlock:

I mean that’s obviously, that’s not the norm, but it does make you go sort of say, wait, what’s happening here? So let’s talk a little bit about that. I first do want to talk about your book, but tell me what encouraged you? Was there a thing that happened or maybe just because you are a lifelong athlete and you’re involved in athletics, maybe that you’ve just seen this trend, but was there something that happened or what really motivated you to write this book?

Linda Flanagan:

Well it was a combination of factors. Part of it was that my own experience of having kids and seeing this new sports environment, the intensity, the early age at which they were expected to begin. And seeing that versus how I grew up and how this organized stuff didn’t happen until much later. And also I was troubled by my own reactions to how my son played. It mattered too much. I could tell that it mattered too much for me and I didn’t like that.

But the real triggering impetus for writing the book was my experience as a coach where I felt like why I was coaching, which was to encourage another generation of young women to embrace athletics and to embrace running and for all its wonderful benefits that that had been kind of swept under the rug or forgotten in this race towards achievement, towards getting into a better college. And it just troubled me because I feel like there’s so many advantages to being active and for girls in particular to be comfortable in their own bodies, which running can really do for you. And I saw that it was just being pushed aside for other purposes. So that’s kind of was the real impetus because I didn’t like what I was seeing, especially in high school sports.

Julie Gunlock:

You talk about how money and kid sports we think of it, you know of, I’m trying to think of a, I can’t believe I can’t remember it, like a famous kid sports movie.

Linda Flanagan:

Oh, “Bad News Bears.”

Julie Gunlock:

“Bad News Bears,” right? The clumsiness is part of… My favorite memory of my child. When he first started in baseball, I think it was coach pitch, it might have been T-Ball where the ball would go out and the kids did not stay in their, like, no one stayed at first base and they would all go and they would pile on the ball. We were laughing so hard, we thought it was so great. And so you think about the original reason for getting kids, it’s partly to have fun. It really is. But you talk about this corporatizing of it and money being involved and that also ramps up the stakes and the intensity. So tell us a little bit about that. Because to be honest with you, I wasn’t really aware of this. And I’m a sports mom.

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah, yeah. Well I mean the youth sports industry is now worth 19 billion dollars. That’s the estimate that is thrown around. And it has grown dramatically in the last 15 years. It’s essentially the equipment companies, travel sports are a big part of it. Apps and technology have kind of honed in. And we’re a capitalist country and people have a right to start businesses. And what they have tapped into is the business owners, the coaches, the strength and conditioning training, all the extras that are everywhere in kids sports, they’ve tapped into parent, parental anxiety about their kids’ performances and about their kids’ futures. And is this one way they can set themselves apart, distinguish themselves, maybe be recruited, get some kind of advantage in college. So the business inside of it has collided with parental worries and then as a result, we’ve just seen this dramatic increase in the amount of money parents spend and just the size of the industry itself.

Julie Gunlock:

So let’s talk a little bit about how to shake parents loose of this obsession and intensity. I keep saying intensity, there might be a better word, but this fear, I think is a lot of it. And honestly I write a lot about fear in the parenting community. And how advertisers, food advertisers, particularly in the health food area, I’ll never forget an article talking about how you should never feed your child Goldfish crackers because there’s ingredient that-

Linda Flanagan:

Oh God.

Julie Gunlock:

A truck trailer full of this ingredient, yes it’ll harm you. But I don’t know how I would’ve survived parenting without Goldfish crackers and yet, and so I kind of was like, oh that’s such a stupid article. But there are parents that’ll be like, “Okay, that is off the list.”

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah, yes.

Julie Gunlock:

So fear is a really powerful marketing tool.

Linda Flanagan:

I agree. Absolutely. Yep. It’s like fear of missing out, fear of doing the wrong thing, which I totally understand, by the way. As a parent, when you have young kids and you’re just in the trenches and trying to get through, it’s very hard to say, well I don’t think soccer at age six is necessary or club lacrosse at seven. Is this something we need to do? Fear has a way of motivating you to do things you might not otherwise do. Your common sense would tell you, well I don’t think that’s really necessary or a little Goldfish won’t hurt.

Julie Gunlock:

Well it also motivates parents and I think today we are obsessed with safety. And the safety of our children is to do quite unsafe things with their kids. I’m always amazed that about that. I will talk to a mom who’s terrified of Goldfish crackers because that ingredient, yet she has her child signed up for every single thing the child has no free time. Child does not know what the word boredom means. And I don’t think that’s good for the kids. So it’s kind of interesting to me.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes, yes, I agree. Well and it’s short term versus long term thinking honestly. If you can fill up their days, it’s with going from Kumon to tennis to then piano lessons, it feels like you’re doing the right thing.

And obviously it’s good for kids to learn new things and wonderful for them to develop their skills across a variety of domains. It’s just that the big picture is kind of can be lost in that. And I think it stands to reason, and that kids being able to figure things out on their own, having time to be bored and pursue their own interests without mom and dad hovering and directing is, I think we all know that that is actually what’s better for kids then micromanaging it.

And in sports especially, this is like you say about the excessive fear about safety, which I agree, it’s overwhelming at times. But what has been lost in the, you call it intensity, I would call it obsessiveness over sports, is that doing so much of it increases serious risks for kids in terms of catastrophic injuries like ACL tears. And these kinds of injuries have become normalized and they shouldn’t have become normalized.

Julie Gunlock:

Not in a young body, no.

Linda Flanagan:

And not even if you’re 20 years old, tear your ACL, you can be hobbling around in 10 years, it’s a very good chance you’ll have arthritis in that knee in 10 years. And so many kids around in my neighborhood or my community, they tear their ACLs in seventh grade playing lacrosse because they’ve been playing too much, not enough rest, but in their early twenties they’re going to have arthritis. So it’s those kinds of longer term risks down the road or longer term impacts that it would be helpful I think for parents to think about where are we going to be in 10 years, 15 years? And what’s this going to look like then?

Julie Gunlock:

I still want to go back to that because I have some questions about how parents can really try to counsel themselves, really talk themselves off these ledges. And I’d love your advice, but I also want to talk a little bit about the intensity, the obsessiveness that parents have is very often passed down to the child.

So the child might have a normal of concept of their own talent, their own abilities, but then the parent is constantly saying, “But you can do better.” We know of a family and their child was a very average athlete. I mean I wasn’t as good an athlete when I was young as this child, but he probably wasn’t going to be looking at a full scholarship to a school or for goodness sake a career. And yet when we met this family, we met them at a sports event and they said very, very seriously, I don’t even remember how we started the conversation, but they said very matter of factly that their child is going to be in the major leagues, Major League Baseball. And my husband and I laughed. We laughed, hysterically, we were like, and then we realized they were serious.

Linda Flanagan:

They were serious.

Julie Gunlock:

It got really awkward. And this particular family, they must spend thousands a month on coaching. Different coaches and their child just doesn’t improve. And you can tell there’s tension. And over the years we saw more tension and it was rough. And I felt so bad for that child. So you’ve got those kinds of parents.

Then on the flip side you have kids that might not have a great natural ability but they find it fun. But then they get on these teams and it’s so intense that they suddenly feel like, okay, I can’t play this because I’m not as intense or my parents aren’t as intense. So I always feel bad for kids who might not be that great at sports but want to kind of play just because it’s fun.

And this is something that I’ve dealt with with my son. He’s not as naturally capable as his brother. And I’ve said, “You can still go out for fun.” But then he goes out and again, the intensity of the parents, the intensity of the coach, the intensity of the other players makes him feel bad. So I feel like there are two victims of this cultural movement. You’ve got kids who are then stuck at home on screen time, which is another thing I’d like to talk to you about.

Is there some recognition from coaches that they could also be dissuading kids that aren’t naturally good at sports from joining? And this starts young. I mean even at a young age I saw some intensity from coaches.

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah, well that’s what Positive Coaching Alliance is trying to address by training the volunteer youth sports coaches about, let’s not go crazy here. You can still emphasize skills and standards and low grade discipline like showing up on time without making it insane and over the top. I do think there is a realization on many people’s part, many parents like you who think we don’t want this high intensity experience. And my child doesn’t want this. And there are various groups who are trying to, the Aspen Institute Sports and Society program has been advocating for a long time to improve options for kids, improve access for kids. Because they’re also, the really low income kids have very few options. They don’t even have a choice of being on a crappy team with a obsessive coach. They can’t afford it or the parents can’t drive them or whatever.

Julie Gunlock:

And the equipment, the shoes alone. My son. I get him new cleats, I feel like I get them every six months. He grows out of them so fast. And we donate. But it’s painful.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes, it’s prohibitive for many families. And I do think there’s an awareness that this is a problem and that so many kids are quitting because it’s too intense or it’s just not fun anymore. Everyone’s going nuts on the sidelines so they’d just rather stay home and there is an awareness of that. But turning it around is going to take some work.

Julie Gunlock:

I think there’s also intensity and probably fewer umpires now.

Linda Flanagan:

There are.

Julie Gunlock:

I think about these guys. These guys, they can be as old as my dad and they go out there and they’re spending a Sunday on a doubleheader and they’re often standing and these for four hours.

Linda Flanagan:

Or crouching behind home plate.

Julie Gunlock:

And getting hit with baseball or whatever. But goodness basketball running back and forth. I know these guys love it. And I say guys all the time because I’ve got three boys. I know there are female umpires and female, I need to be careful about that. But I’m such a boy mom. But I think about all they do taking time out of their day and they get yelled at by parents. I’ve seen it happen. And I immediately schooled the parent who yells out because it’s so inappropriate. But there must be a shortage. Is there a shortage?

Linda Flanagan:

There is actually, especially since the pandemic and there’s a shortage of referees, officials, and bus drivers.

Julie Gunlock:

Of course.

Linda Flanagan:

Interestingly. And maybe this is what we need to shake it up because if you just assume that there’s going to be someone out there who’s willing to take abuse for $5 an hour, maybe there’s no incentive to stop. But there is absolutely a shortage at the moment.

Julie Gunlock:

Yeah, I figured that was true. I want to also talk about screen time. I’m just going to read this cause I think this is so compelling. Average daily screen time went up among tweens aged 8 to 12 to five hours and 33 minutes.

Linda Flanagan:

Oh my gosh.

Julie Gunlock:

From 4 hours and 44 minutes it wasn’t that much better. And to 8 hours and 39 minutes from 7 hours to 22 minutes for teens, so age 13 to 18, they’re on there for eight hours. Frankly I don’t understand that. My kids are in school for eight hours and then we have heavy restrictions, very heavy restrictions. I mean my 15 year old claims, he is the only boy on earth who doesn’t have a phone. And this isn’t breaking news. Every 15 year old without a phone claims, they’re in some sort of work camp. And we are really careful about limiting. But that number just astonishes me.

I don’t know how. Are they staying up late? Are they getting up? They’re certainly not getting up early to be on their tablets. So partly sports helps with this, right?

Linda Flanagan:

Yes.

Julie Gunlock:

If my child is, and my middle son is on a travel team, he’s traveling and doing a double header, he’s certainly not on screen time. So this is another reason while why the initiative that you’re working on is so important because this is one of the ways we get kids outside and off their screens.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes.

Julie Gunlock:

Talk a little bit about how your alliance works on that issue.

Linda Flanagan:

Well if I could just before we do that.

Julie Gunlock:

Sure.

Linda Flanagan:

There’s another study I wanted to call your attention to and I thought you were going to maybe know of this, but just recently Jean Twenge, the researcher, I think she’s at Stanford, came out with the results of a study of a million, it was 1.1 million high schoolers, grades 9 through 12, and they found that psychological wellbeing suddenly decreased after 2012. Adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens and less time on non-screen activities had lower psychological wellbeing. Adolescents spending a small amount of time on electronic communication were the happiest. And it’s also kind of like, well glad we needed to have a study for that because it’s so obvious but you need the data. And that is again, this is why sports are important.

Julie Gunlock:

2012.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes. And that’s when phones became ubiquitous, when all kids started getting phones. And that’s what she attributes it to, the screen time. And she’s not ignoring other factors like the pandemic and economic downturns, but this is why we need sports. This is one compelling reason for involving kids in sports, encouraging them to play sports, inviting them to try a variety of activities and to keep it fun. Because the alternative is, it’s a challenge because the phone is intoxicating and I’m a phone addict myself, and if you’re 12 years old, the phone is very compelling.

Julie Gunlock:

And the thing is, it’s funny because you say I’m a phone addict too and I struggle with it, I do too. But there’s always, I’m sure you deal with this too, there’s always something in the back of your mind. I will scroll and there’s something in the back of mind saying, this is not healthy. Get off the couch. And I’ll be like, what am I doing? So I’ll take the dog for a walk. It’s stupid.

But if you start doing that at age, I mean it is astonishing how young people are when they’re walking around, I mean literally with their phone in their face. Or you see families who go out to eat and the kids are instantly, instantly getting, and I feel like that’s a whole other podcast, talking about this stuff. But if you are forming habits, I think part of the reason we’re uncomfortable when we scroll and we kind of get ourselves out of that is because it was later in life, at least it for us, we were what? We were full grown adults when social media became so ubiquitous and so our habits had been formed to not be on the phone constantly.

So you got to get this sense of I’m not behaving normally. This is normal behavior for a lot of these people. And the other thing is that the alternative, so in my view why sports is so important is I have two other boys. One is just insanely genetically skeletal. Okay. The boy. And he puts away a ton of food. It’s interesting how he eats. He gets really hungry and then he won’t eat for hours and hours and hours. And then I have a snacker. I have a snacker, and he’s also not as interested, although he’s interested in a few sports. But the point is that what’s the alternative? I tell them to go run a mile? Or get on a treadmill? Sports is a way to get kids exercise when they think they’re having fun.

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

Julie Gunlock:

And we all know that that’s the best way to get exercise. As adults, we all get on our treadmill and maybe we put a podcast in or we try to distract ourselves from the boredom of walking on this track. But you’ve ever been to a bounce house, one of those trampoline parks, it’s so fun and it turns out you just got an hour of exercise with the kids. So that’s another reason to me why it’s so critical is physical health. We’re talking a lot about-

Linda Flanagan:

Yes. To get it right. Yes. That’s right.

Julie Gunlock:

And there’s other things teaching teamwork, teaching partnership, how to get along with others. These are such important things that I think are kind of missed sometimes in these conversations. So what advice do you give to parents who are on this intense track?

Linda Flanagan:

Well I think first of all, it depends on how old your kids are. And like we said, every family’s different, every child is different. So there isn’t one set answer for everyone obviously. But I think the first thing in my book I identify four big things which can help as provide some guidance. The first is to look at your child and follow their lead. This is the first principle of all youth sports reform organizations. The interest in a sport has to come from the kid. It can’t be, I played lacrosse, so you’re going to play lacrosse. Maybe they’ll love it. Maybe that’s what they’ll choose. It wouldn’t be surprising. Many kids do what their parents did, but we have to follow their lead. And if they’re not enthusiastic about doing some sport that you think they should, well offer them a variety. There’s all kinds of different sports and there’s Tae Kwon Do and there there’s more than just the conventional.

Julie Gunlock:

And there’s also team sports and there’s individual.

Linda Flanagan:

Individual.

Julie Gunlock:

And I always think that’s really important. If they don’t really like being with a bunch of kids, there’s golf, there’s Tae Kwon Do, there’s a bunch of other things that they can learn to be a healthy person and get those concepts, but they’re more by themselves.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes. But it really has to come from them. And I want to add, that I also have kids, I’m not oblivious to the fact that they resist a lot of times and that sometimes we have to nudge them, but it’s so much healthier to provide a lot of options. Then they’re more apt to, you could say even you have to pick a sport, I don’t care what it is, but you have to do one sport three days a week or whatever it is and depending on the age of the child. But that first is to look at them and let them take the lead.

The second is to keep your family close. Because many of these, as you get more involved in competitive youth sports as your kids age, if they start club travel teams in second grade, you’ve just signed on for many, many years of indentured servitude.

Julie Gunlock:

That’s such a funny way to put it.

Linda Flanagan:

And not only for your child, for you. And I think it’s really important to recognize that there are these forces at work that are going to separate your family. They’re going to put one kid somewhere, another kid somewhere else, split up the couple if there is a married couple. They’re just very disruptive to families.

So I think it’s very important to remember what’s important to you and for most families I think it’s about having a close strong family that’s more important than winning the tournament wherever. So look at your kid, keep your family close. A good part of this is trying to keep perspective, striving to keep perspective and it’s really, really hard. I appreciate how hard that is when you have kids because we live our lives forward but we understand them backwards.

Julie Gunlock:

Oh gosh.

Linda Flanagan:

Well that’s not mine, that’s Kierkegaard. But in order to do that, there are various things I have suggestions in the book about how to keep perspective and to try to understand if you’ve lost perspective or not because it’s incredibly easy. For example, ask yourself this question if you’re at a cocktail party. If it takes you five minutes or less to bring up that your son’s a baseball player, you might have lost perspective because it shows how top of mind it is. And I get it, if you’re all wrapped up in it and you’re spending 15 hours a week on your child’s sport, it is going to be top of mind. But that tells you that you’ve lost a little perspective.

Julie Gunlock:

I want to wrap up soon here, but I do have some questions about, we touched on the expense involved in getting into some of the, and that is, to be honest with you, one of the limiting factors for us. We also knew that certain sports are intense on a child’s body. So we worried about that. About doing the same motion.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes. You should be.

Julie Gunlock:

And so we told our son he is in travel baseball, but we said then you’re not going to do little league. And it astonishes me because we still are giving so much to the travel baseball team in terms of time and practices. It just amazes me that some families do both. They do two teams and then they actually have other sports like a karate or something like that. And I won’t go too far into this, but I really cannot believe how much some kids are involved in. So we really limited that for my one son because of the injuries.

But again, on the financial thing, I mean it’s just fees and I mean two days of a hotel in New York. That was a burden for us. And so what effort is there? You touched on this and I’d like you to expand on this just a little bit about what efforts there are out there to maybe help defray some of these costs, and I mean for at need people, not just everyone. Because this kind of frustrates me sometimes. Because I remember we had a child on a baseball team and there was some donations, but it was very open that it was going to this one child and I feel bad for that kid. Although I think it was given to the mother and everybody was quiet about it. But what efforts are there to make it more accessible as we become more intense? So I’ll let you answer. You answer. It’s a long question. I’m sorry about that.

Linda Flanagan:

No, no, no. Well see there’s a lot of challenges with youth sports, but one is that there’s no, it’s not like there’s anyone on top kind of pulling the strings who can just say, well let’s do this and we’ll fix it. Youth sports are so decentralized that there’s really kind of no one in charge of what’s going on in your town with your kids team except it’s all very, very hyper local generally. So there’s not some fix where some organization can say, well here’s 10 billion dollars to make youth sports affordable.

But I mean individual clubs and leagues are, like the one you described, are offering aid. That’s not a great solution for the reasons you said. I mean it can be humiliating and it also doesn’t really solve the problem because part of the problem is also time, parents’ availability. And many families, they’re working whatever, they can’t disappear for two nights for some tournament.

So there are some collective kind of attempts to rectify this. One example is in New York State, the estate assembly member Monica Wallace was able to secure 5 million dollars of annual funding to give to organizations that provide sports to low income areas in New York State to fill in the gap where the wealthier or middle income kids have opportunities, these kids don’t. And she did that by attaching essentially a tax on the proceeds from mobile sports betting. So that’s like a new thing. Getting money.

Julie Gunlock:

Yes. It just got legalized in Maryland where I’m living.

Linda Flanagan:

Well and what she did was earmarked, was able to earmark certain amount of money for youth sports. Provide sports opportunities to kids who don’t have them. I mean that’s one sort of effort. I think many schools are, there’s an awareness that high schools need to adapt so that they’re not just providing varsity athletics for varsity athletes after school. That there are many kids who would like to play. They may not be good enough to make the varsity team or the junior varsity team, especially big schools. You think about a basketball team, they’re small and tons of kids play basketball. So some high schools are trying to offer intramurals and club programs after school. So these are some of the little movements that are happening to try to expand access to sports for a broader population and to keep it cheap.

Julie Gunlock:

There’s another side of this, the other side is the sponsor, we’re talking a lot about school sports, but I think I’d like to close this by going back to that kid who really wants to play sports but isn’t that great at it, but just likes to have fun and to be with friends and girls and boys, just wanting to get outside but then feeling a little nervous.

One of my sons is involved in the Catholic Youth Organization League. It’s CYO, they call it CYO, and there’s a lot less intensity in that.

Linda Flanagan:

That’s interesting.

Julie Gunlock:

And not that there’s no intensity, but first of all the parents, it’s kind of this sense of, okay, you’re at a school or you’re at a church. Be polite. I’m not saying that you necessarily, but I feel like there’s a little bit of that, and then the coaches are always really gentle with the kids.

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah, that’s good.

Julie Gunlock:

And so we’ve had some really good luck there. You’re a sports writer, you’ve been published in all these places. Are there particular, like CYO, that’s a Catholic organization, are there any private, and again, I know these costs, but sometimes it’s minimum or it’s not much or there is aid available. Are there any private clubs that are not school-based, that are not as intense that you sometimes suggest parents check out?

Linda Flanagan:

I don’t have an answer for that. I have to be honest.

Julie Gunlock:

Don’t you love it when someone throws out a totally random question.

Linda Flanagan:

No, no, no. It’s fine. It’s a fair question. It’s just that I think, again, it is so local in my area, CYO basketball is very intense.

Julie Gunlock:

Oh interesting.

Linda Flanagan:

It depends. Generally the rec programs, the YMCA programs, they can also be intense, but they tend to be less ultra-competitive and just fixated on winning than the club programs.

Julie Gunlock:

They’re also not as connected to colleges, scholarships, that kind of stuff. So as much as you can get out of that track, maybe that’s an answer is looking for those things that aren’t connected to college.

Linda Flanagan:

It’s the recreational programs. If you have a Y in your town, they generally often have some kind of sports basketball, they have soccer, at least in my area, there’s swimming. The Boys and Girls Clubs.

Julie Gunlock:

That’s right.

Linda Flanagan:

We have a recreation center in our town that also offers, so depending on where you live, again, it’s about where you live. There can be low cost, low intensity.

Julie Gunlock:

Certainly, check out, wherever you live, check out the city’s community center or rec center and see what they offer. This last question I have is much more directed at parents. And this is something I struggle with is how important it is as an adult and as a parent to show healthy habits. To have healthy habits yourself. The cheapest way is to go outside and toss a ball to your kid. Now I know people have time commitments, but talk a little bit about that. Maybe your experience raising your kids and how sports was a part of it or any advice you can give to parents on the importance of showing good and healthy habits.

Linda Flanagan:

Yeah. Well in fact my fourth suggestion, big suggestion, is to model what you want your kids to learn. So part of that is being fit yourself. Going outside, not just sitting on the couch with your phone and telling them to get outside but going outside with them sometimes and maybe trying a new sport. I think that’s so important. I know my kids, two out of the three run, because my husband and I are runners and they kind of absorb that from us.

But the other important, what I think is so important about modeling with kids, is also modeling an appealing adulthood. I think that’s one thing that is also lost in the intensity and obsessiveness of youth sports is that what parents are modeling for their kids is kind of a boring adulthood. It’s like, boy, don’t grow up because it’s no fun. Once you do, all you’re going to be doing is driving and buying Gatorade and standing in signup lines. Or maybe it’s all done electronically now, but.

Julie Gunlock:

Or working.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes. But if we can part of modeling an attractive adulthood is making it appealing so it’s something that they actually want to do when they get older and not like dread becoming an independent adult.

Julie Gunlock:

Well my children are looking forward to adulthood because they’ll get a phone.

Linda Flanagan:

Well that’s good. Good for them.

Julie Gunlock:

I can’t thank you enough for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. I think this is a intense issue that parents deal with. I think parents have a little trouble with self-control in this area and with setting limits. And I think the tension between keeping your kid healthy with good limits and then robbing your child of their future of a professional sports future, that is something that we really need to tackle. And I really can’t recommend your book enough. If you could just mention your book. Do you have it with you? I should have it with me. I have it in some bag.

Linda Flanagan:

Yes.

Julie Gunlock:

I couldn’t find it, but yes. Here we go.

Linda Flanagan:

Here it is.

Julie Gunlock:

“Take Back the Game.” It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all of those.

Linda Flanagan:

Yep.

Julie Gunlock:

Are you on any social media platforms?

Linda Flanagan:

I am. First of all, I have a website, lindaflanaganauthor.com. I am @LindaFlanagan2 is my Twitter and LindaFlanagan_Author is my Instagram. I think I got that right. But yeah, I’m out there. You can find me.

Julie Gunlock:

We’ll put your links up on the website so people can find your social media platforms. I think your book is critical. I’m going to start giving it out as gifts.

Linda Flanagan:

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Julie Gunlock:

I really, really appreciate you coming on. And let us know if you do any more writing in this subject. We’d love to post it on our social media network.

Linda Flanagan:

Sure. I will.

Julie Gunlock:

So thanks again for coming on, Linda.

Linda Flanagan:

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.