Fairness Is Overrated

A meditation on winning, losing, and kids’ sports.

I know the Republic is falling and we have more pressing concerns. I know this isn’t important, in the grand scheme of things. At all. But I want to take a minute to talk about kids’ sports. I hope you’ll indulge me.

(Shutterstock)

1. Competition

Last week on the Secret pod, Sarah and I had a great conversation about trans athletes in women’s sports. Her view is that post-puberty, the participation of trans women in women’s athletics is inherently unfair to biological women. My view is that this certainly can be true, but that ideas about fairness in athletics shouldn’t really matter until money is on the line. (Either in the form of actual money or scholarship money.)

Many people in the comments disagreed with me. I want to talk about it some more because at root I think our differing perspectives don’t have anything to do with trans people. I think we have divergent views about the nature of sport itself.

So for now let’s put the trans stuff aside and just talk about youth sports in general.

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Some background: I love sports. I lettered in three sports in high school and was a rower in college.¹ I’ve coached a bunch of different sports, both boys and girls. My oldest son, Flash, is an elite baseball player. He will play in college. Depending on how things work out, he may have a chance to play professionally someday.²

By comparison, my oldest daughter, Red (not her real name), is a not-great distance runner. She discovered running as a freshman in high school and came to love it. Her cross country team has average athletes who are great kids, and in just a year she’s gotten an immense amount out of the sport. I have coached both Red and Flash and found both experiences absolutely wonderful.³

All of which is to say: I come at this with a fairly 360-degree view of youth sports. I’ve been a player, a coach, and a parent. One of my kids is an elite athlete doing it because he wants to be a pro; another is a middling athlete for whom sport is just part of her larger personal journey.

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Here are three things I have noticed in my time around youth sports:

(1) The most competitive behaviors tend to show up at the lower athletic levels. I have seen parents scream at a 14-year-old umpire during a Little League game. I have seen coaches berating their teams for poor performance during middle school girls’ CYO basketball while they were winning by 30 points.⁴

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(2) The more elite the level, the less competitive people seem to be. Example:

A couple years ago Flash went to his first Perfect Game tournament. This is an elite showcase. Just about every American MLB player played Perfect Game in high school. Flash was in ninth grade for his first Perfect Game and pretty much every kid at this event was going on to play DIII ball, at least.⁵ We saw a few kids who had already committed to DI programs and a few others who were likely to forgo college and be early draft picks.

And let me tell you: It was way more laid back than the middle-school girls’ CYO basketball league I coached. The atmosphere was calm and professional. Everyone was focused on executing their stuff. No one—anywhere—gave a crap about the outcome of the games. Or even the outcome of individual at-bats. Which showcase team “won” the tournament was entirely beside the point.

Last summer Flash went to a showcase camp for upperclassmen; there were about fifty college coaches there scouting. Same thing. They played simulated innings. Didn’t even keep score. All of the emphasis was on fundamentals and how they conducted themselves as people.⁶

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(3) This isn’t to say that no one in high-level youth sports is competitive. Many kids care about winning. Flash, for his part, is crazy competitive.⁷ But in general, the most competitive people (players, coaches, and parents) seem to be the ones who are at the final stop of their sports journey and won’t be moving up to the next level.

Again: This isn’t universally true. But in my limited experience it’s been generally true. Your mileage may vary.

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2. Sport Is Its Own Reward

Sport gives two kinds of rewards: internal and external.

The internal rewards are omnipresent, at whatever level you play. From pee-wee soccer to the World Cup final, the things sport teaches us are always there to be learned.

The external rewards, on the other hand, don’t meaningfully exist until there’s money on the line. At the level of getting a scholarship, or getting drafted, or getting a signing bonus. Or making the Olympics.

What’s odd to me is that in youth sports we try to create external rewards incredibly early. There are tournaments and leagues. We give out trophies and medals. We try to simulate external rewards when the kids are 6 years old and 15 years old. And to be honest, I don’t know why. I’m not sure that these fake external rewards help the kids in any way.

I suspect the people it helps most are the adults—both the parents living vicariously through their kids and the grownups who make a living running the youth sports industrial complex.

But if you want to make the best case for creating early external rewards it might be this: By aping the rewards of high-level sports, we teach kids to be competitive, to try their hardest, and be their best.

Does that sound about right to you? Is that the best argument?

But here’s the thing about America: We do not have a shortage of competitiveness.

We have mothers hiring hitmen so their daughters can make the cheer squad. We have rich people spending gobs of money to cheat their kids into the “best” colleges. We have turned cooking into a competitive enterprise.

We have competitive dance and cheerleading, math olympics for third graders, a televised national spelling bee, professional videogame leagues, and a cottage industry that builds loaded bats to help young baseball players (and even middle-aged softball players) cheat. We have turned Magic the Gathering, Ultimate Frisbee, and Scrabble into professional enterprises.

We put prepubescent boys playing baseball into a gimmick called the “Little League World Series” and broadcast it on ESPN.

Right now America might be the most competitive society since Sparta.

I do not think our problem is that we’re not competitive enough.

Do you?

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Instead, I think our problem is that we have not taken to heart some of those internal lessons that sports teaches us. About hard work. About leadership. About camaraderie. About perseverance. About humility. About sportsmanship.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we have set up a system that worships the external rewards to the near-exclusion of the internal rewards. And so perhaps we should not be surprised that a guy like Donald Trump got elected president. After all: He does so much #winning and that’s all that matters, right?

I tend to believe that America would be a better, healthier place if we tempered some of our competitiveness with virtue. With character.

But again, your mileage may vary.

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3. No Fair

Let me tell you a couple stories about Flash.

As a pitcher, he was always different from his peers. Everyone could see it. The kid’s arm was forged by Zeus.⁸ Anyway, at one travel tournament he had a rough game. The umpire seemed to be calling a different strike zone for him than the other pitchers. Flash walked in a bunch of runs. Got frustrated with himself.

After the game the ump came over to talk to me. He asked if I was #2’s dad. I told him I was. He explained to me that he had called a much tighter zone for Flash because he felt my son needed a tighter zone to help his development. The ump said it was obvious that Flash could overpower batters at will, but that to get to the next level he’d have to work on command. The ump explained that he didn’t want me to think he was discriminating against Flash; just trying to help him. I thanked the guy for caring so much about the kids and making their game possible.

On the drive home Flash complained about how unfair the ump had been to him. (They lost the game.) I told him that this umpire had given him a gift and he should be grateful for it. From there on out we had an “Ump Jar” in the house. Anytime Flash complained about “unfairness,” he put $1 in the jar.

It’s been years since Flash complained about an ump.

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In general, fairness is overrated. The world is not fair. As a villain once sang, life does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints.

One of the reasons we try to create fairness in society is precisely because we recognize that the world is unfair. We’re trying to make up for it. And that’s good. I’m into that. We should strive to make the world more fair; or at least to support those who get the short end of the stick.

But the point of sports is to teach us about life.

Which means learning to understand unfairness. To absorb it. To grow from it. To be resilient. And maybe most importantly:

To feel empathy for others when life is unfair to them.

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One last Flash story, though it’s not really about him. It’s about Coach Anthony.

Flash has been blessed with fantastic coaches and Anthony was one of them.⁹

Anthony’s team was at a travel tournament and Flash hit a home run. He's rounding second when the ump holds him up. The ump makes the ground-rule double sign. He thinks the ball bounced in the outfield before going over the fence. (It actually bounced off the roof of the snack shack.) Anthony calls time and walks slowly out of the dugout to talk to the ump. They have a quick and quiet conversation; coach walks back to the dugout. The ump makes the ground-rule double sign again.

And Flash? He trotted back to second and got ready to play. No hysterics. No pouting. He didn’t roll his eyes or gesture to the parents. He didn’t show up the ump.

Why? Because Coach Anthony modeled for him exactly how to manage unfairness. He had a respectful conversation with the ump. The ump was sure he made the right call. Anthony accepted that and moved on. So Flash did, too.

Unfair things happen. Flash’s team wound up losing that game by one run and getting bounced out of the tourney. But he was chill about it. He took a big step to becoming a man that day. He learned that this is baseball; this is life.

And at the end of the day, Anthony understood that the $2 trophy for winning the tournament didn’t matter. What mattered was showing the kids how to handle their business.

What a gift he gave them. Thanks, coach.

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The most important lessons sports teach center around loss.

Winning is great. Don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times it masks the internal rewards. Kids get so high on the thrill of victory that they miss the important stuff, or even learn the wrong lessons.

But defeat? Failure? Injury? Adversity? Unfairness? That’s where the important stuff lives. That’s where we learn compassion, charity, determination, honor.

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At some point in sports, real external rewards manifest. The stakes change.

I think we can agree that concerns about fairness are tied to these stakes? Worrying about what’s fair to a 15-year-old pitcher on a high school baseball team is different from worrying about what’s fair to a 22-year-old woman hoping to get drafted into the WNBA and make a career. At some point external rewards become heavy enough that they force us to look at sports differently.

And that’s where I want to leave our conversation for the day; I trust that, agree or not, you’re picking what I’m putting down.

Thanks for indulging me, fam. I appreciate it more than you can know.

1. Rowing is less a sport than a masochistic compulsion. 1 star. Do not recommend.

2. A small chance. The odds of Flash making the pros are not great; the odds of him making the big leagues are crazy small. But he’s in the position where, if his development continues, if he stays healthy and his passion for the game doesn’t dim, it’s possible he could be a late draft pick after college.

3. I think they would say the same? But who knows. I also coached my younger daughter, Little E, but she did not love Coach JVL and preferred to have her coaching done by other coaches on the team.

4. I have seen grown men get into fights at beer-league softball games. It’s like the old line about faculty lounge politics: The fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small.

5. The level of play from these ninth graders was insane. Flash was playing high school varsity baseball that year and every ninth-grade team we saw at Perfect Game would have destroyed every varsity team we saw over the course of the season.

It was almost like watching short-season single-A ball.

6. Character seems to be a big part of what college coaches are looking for because the kids are pretty tightly grouped in terms of ability at Flash’s level. You want to impress a college coach? Throw 90, but don’t act like you’re throwing 90. Hit the ball a mile, but understand that the game will humble you. Respect everyone. When you’re not active, hang on the fence and talk the other guys up. Make eye contact when you talk to adults.

The win-loss record of your high school varsity team? No one cares. At all.

7. For Flash, his competitiveness doesn’t manifest in games; it shows up in workouts, particularly the off-season. His approach is to work harder and learn more about the game than everyone else. In games he tries to maintain an even keel.

I take some credit for this outlook. But only some.

8. True story: Flash no-hit Little League. Like, for three seasons. He didn’t give up a hit in a baseball game until his age 13 travel season.

9. I’m so grateful to these coaches for how they helped my kid grow. 🙏 Thanks, guys.