10 misconceptions about kids sports: How parents can push against them

NEWPORT, R.I. – We sat two miles away from the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where artifacts from Andre Agassi are on display. You can push a button and watch him beat Roger Federer, his fist pumping and his smile soaking up the raucous crowd after match point.

But when I spoke with a collection of parents at St. Michael’s Country Day, a toddler-eighth grade independent school, I shared how Agassi really felt.

He hated tennis.

It’s a theme he repeats throughout his autobiography, “Open,” as his father made him hit ball after ball as a young boy in the Las Vegas desert sun. Tennis was force-fed to him. He became a professional tennis player because the sport is really all he felt he could do.

We want our kids to love what they play, but often we also want them to win, and to get to the highest notch on the “sports ladder.” We dig in if they’re especially good. But are we underestimating them?

"What somebody needs to do to be pro at 16 years old is crazy, right?” Agassi told USA TODAY Sports in 2024. “I mean, think about how you have to spend those years in order to do it. So the question now becomes, is that self-motivated, or is fear the driver? Is somehow somebody else's agenda the driver?”

Andre Agassi shows boy how to hold a racket during a friendly match against Jim Courier in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2012.

Maybe it’s not what our kids want to do. As we got into our discussion about “Surviving Youth Sports,” I focused on 10 misconceptions we can have about their sports journeys. They are likely familiar to you.

Consider them as you go about your season, and your summer and into coming years. Understanding what’s behind them could be the key to unlocking a happy sports journey.

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1. There is a direct correlation between winning and advancement

“Does anybody feel that way?” I asked the audience to begin our discussion.

A number of people shook their heads. If you go to a kids' sports complex or high school gym on a regular basis, you get the impression that most sports parents think otherwise.

Winning matters, but not to the degree we think it does. Across multiple studies of kids who play sports – whether they are boys or girls, are teenagers or younger kids, or travel or recreational players – winning generally falls far down the list of factors about their sport that they find most fun.

In her groundbreaking study about youth soccer players, sports scientist Amanda Visek found that kids’ top three fun determinants were trying hard, positive team dynamics and positive coaching. She has had similar findings in studies of kids who play other sports, including basketball and tennis.

UCLA women’s basketball coach Cori Close just won the national championship. When I interviewed her two years ago, when UCLA was still a top-ranked team, Close recalled a conversation with a coach who had just won one.

"How do you feel?" Close asked.

"A little empty," the coach replied.

The fun part for many teams is getting to the top of the mountain. Working hard, being with your teammates and going after your goal is what makes sports most fun. Winning is a byproduct of those factors, and we can feel them even if we don’t win all the time.

2. It's bad to fail

We send our kids out to the field or court to succeed or fail, and we need to be OK with whatever happens. We often aren’t.

Duke University professor Aaron Dinin has taught a class called “Learning to Fail.”

He gives students activities in which they’re destined to fall short, or he even intentionally gives them a poor mid-semester grade, to see how they react.

In the process, they gain information they can use to put themselves in a better position to be more successful in the future. If your son or daughter has a bad game, find a few things they did right, but also what they could improve upon. They might even tell you themselves.

“The most important thing is actually losing,” says Dan Soviero, who founded Signature Athletics, a youth sports platform that supports recreational and travel sports programs. “When you lose, you learn, when you win, you celebrate.”

3. It's always worth it to be on the 'best' team

In Newport, a longtime home of the America’s Cup located on an island at the Atlantic Coast, kids are taught to sail in fourth grade as part of a school program.

It’s a safe, non-competitive way to introduce a sport that everyone does together for enjoyment. It reminds me of how kids' sports are handled in Norway.

Norwegian kids aren’t sorted by ability until they are 13. They are allowed to learn to enjoy sports and play them as much or as little as they like. Think of the opposite of your local Little League draft, which can resemble an NFL war room.

Norway’s format fosters an embedded enjoyment of sports. Kids are eventually identified as the most promising ones, but the decision doesn’t seem to matter for the ones who aren’t.

“For the rest, that’s OK,” NBC commentator Mary Carillo says in her documentary on the country that ran during the Winter Olympics, “because most will look back fondly on their active childhoods and go on to live fit, healthy lives as adults.”

4. Kids play youth sports because they want to go pro or get a college scholarship

Most everyone in the audience laughed when I mentioned this one.

“Is it the parents that want to get a college scholarship?” I said.

Often, kids’ sports itineraries are driven by parents with an eye on the future. Kids tend to play firmly in the present.

A number of surveys, including a recent one by the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program on youth soccer players in New York City and North Jersey, have registered that having fun and playing with friends are top priorities for kids with sports.

In short, they want to play for social reasons. Even in competitive travel situations, friendship ranks higher than winning or scholarships. Working together and competing hard are part of the Amanda Visek “fun” model I mentioned earlier, so competition and winning can be bred organically.

5. The best athletes are that way from an early age

“I’m a late bloomer,” Laura Wheeler, a mom in the crowd who coaches her 12-year-old son in Little League, said when I read No. 5, drawing laughs.

So are some of the most elite athletes.

Did you know that Tom Brady started his freshman football career 0-7, or that he only started on junior varsity because the kid ahead of him quit?

He learned football, and even how to put on his pads, on the go. But he loved it.

“I was nowhere in the realm physically or emotionally or mentally where a lot of these other kids were when they arrived at Michigan,” he told Youth Inc.’s Greg Olsen in a 2025 interview.

Annika Sorenstam, who became a Hall of Fame golfer, told me in an interview last year that she used to “tank” the end of her junior golf tournaments so she would finish second and not have to speak publicly as the winner.

It made her angry to lose, though. Her dad coached her on a few things to say – “I do the talking with my clubs,” was one of them – and she gained confidence in front of crowds, learning from the experience.

Focus on fun when they’re young. The self-motivation will come from them.

6. If your son or daughter is excelling at a sport, it means they are enjoying themselves

This is a tricky one that goes back to the recent Aspen kids survey, where they emphasized cost as a major barrier to them playing.

Children are smarter than you think. They know if you’re forking out a lot of money, and they don’t want to let you down. There might be a certain amount of pressure that they feel to do well for you.

It makes us happy when they do, and we want them to be good at whatever they’re doing, in sports or otherwise. But if they’re playing a sport, make sure to have conversations with them before encouraging them to keep playing.

If they’re getting on a competitive track and playing every weekend, maybe they’re getting burned out.

Make sure, even if they’re really good, it’s what they want to be doing.

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7. If you don't start travel sports at an early age, you will be 'left behind'

This is one that even former pro athletes worry about. I have struggled with the feeling, too. I think my kids would have been fine with their sports careers if I had waited a few years rather than starting them in travel baseball at 8 or 9.

Just because everyone else is doing a travel sport or other activity, it doesn’t mean it’s the right situation for your kid and your family.

Ask yourself: What are you trying to get out of travel sports? They have a purpose for college recruitment, but if that’s what you’re interested in, they don’t really ramp up until eighth or ninth grade.

"You're not getting scouted at 8-, 9-, 10-, 11-,12-years old," says Todd Frazier, once a Little League World Series hero who became a major leaguer.

His best memories of the Little League World Series, he says, are becoming good friends with kids from Saudi Arabia and Japan.

Find a situation that fits your family. If you’re not taking family vacations because of sports, ask yourself why? It may not be worth it.

8. When you take your kid to practice, it's a good idea to stay and watch

When I coached my two sons, who are now in high school, there was almost always a contingent of parents who watched practice. Some said things to their sons or daughters as we were going along. One mom even ran out and wiped her son’s nose at second base.

There is a balance. We really want to be there and to watch them, but let’s remember this is their time to be with their friends, to engage in something they love (or might grow to love), to learn to problem solve on their own and to find peace of mind.

Do you really want them thinking during practice, “Oh gosh, mom and dad are watching me, I had better do well.” They’ll be looking for your approval. You can give it to them by talking to them about what happened at practice afterward, but also by letting it be their time.

U.S. women’s soccer icon Abby Wambach is adamant about this point. Julie Foudy, one of her former teammates and now a soccer mom like Wambach, says her parents rarely even came to her games. It’s not because they didn’t love her. It’s just that they had other things they were doing.

9. In order to get on a college team, or a high school team, you need to specialize in a sport early

In this day of parents investing loads of money and time to make their kids better, you might need to focus on one sport when your son or daughter gets close to high school age.

Focusing on a sport, though, is not the same as only playing one sport. We can focus on one sport, for example, for two or three seasons, and play another in the fourth. Specialization can be a very personal decision, but if you do it before early or mid-high school, you risk injuries, and girls are at a higher risk than boys.

College coaches love multisport athletes, but if you feel you need to specialize, here are two good rules of thumb, backed up by medical data:

• Don’t exceed a child’s age in the number of hours per week they play a particular sport.
• The rate of organized to unorganized play should not be greater than 2 to 1.

10. We play an active role in our kids' sports development

Think of yourself as someone who puts your child in a situation to learn and to grow to find something they really like. Those discoveries need to come from your child, and they don’t have to be about sports. They can be about instruments or theater or academic clubs.

We can play an active role in facilitating without forcing things upon them. We don’t want them to get stuck on one track that they truly don’t enjoy. Give them options and watch them thrive when they find something they really want to dig into.

Take time to do things as a family away from sports. When there is too much focus on them, everybody gets burned out, not just the kids.

“I agree with a lot of what you have to say but, chances are, you’re gonna have a coach or you’re gonna be involved with other parents who believe in all 10 of these things,” Carolyn Hanigan, a mom whose 12-year-old son attends St. Michael’s, said to me at the end of my talk. “You have to learn to live with these people, too, and navigate like, ‘Can my kid come in and learn and play when you’ve got these full-on parents, and sometimes even spouses disagree.

“It’s too bad because it will eventually cause a shift of parents. My husband will be like, ‘I don’t care if he plays any sports. We have plenty of things we can do and we’re spending all this time together.’

“(Their son) just plays. He’d rather play with a group of younger kids and have a good time. I have to accept that. My husband said, ‘Those are your tapes. That’s the tapes in your head. That’s what you wanted from your childhood onto this child.’ ”

We don’t have to get sucked into the frenzied state of youth sports. It’s our job to push against the grain and find our kids’ passions.

Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him atsborelli@usatoday.com

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 10 delusions about youth sports and how we can push against them