Bob Cook

Despite the angry emails and calls she has received from around the country saying otherwise, Karen Carmen is not everything that’s wrong with America. She is not a socialistic kiddie-coddler contributing to the wussification of the country. She is not a bleeding heart who resents achievement.

Carmen is merely a suburban Cleveland parks director who, in cooperation with her staff, mayor and city council over a number of months, eliminated the annual Independence Day all-star game for 9- to 12-year-olds in the local baseball rec league, in the name of protecting children’s egos.

“We wanted to make sure that we're not doing anything wrong,” Carmen said June 27, a day after local TV and radio reports of her decision started spreading across Internet message boards by frothing-at-the-mouth competitive types who believe kids need to learn about winning and losing, and learn it good, hard and early.

Despite the protestations that they inexorably will lead America to Communism, there is a place for no-score, everybody-gets-a-trophy leagues in youth sports. There most certainly is a necessity for positive coaching and a nurturing environment that emphasizes learning a sport over winning at all costs.

But there also is a middle ground between hardcore competitors who figure kids to learn athletic Darwinism, and hardcore noncompetitors who figure kids will be damaged for life if they aren’t equipped with a full foam suit around their fragile bodies and psyches.

I say this as a parent and a coach who has seen how children — and parents and coaches — can learn from triumph and loss in youth sports, and how an all-star game for 7- and 8-year-old girls can be an inspiring lesson in perseverance for all parties involved.

Certainly, I don’t mean to pick on Carmen, even though I think she made the wrong decision. She’s hardly the first, and won’t be the last, youth sports authority to be assailed from both sides of the debate for a decision she’s made.

Then again, the well-intentioned, ham-handed attempts to, please, think of the children! make for easy pickings for anyone who wants to roll their eyes at kids these days.

Around the time Beachwood, Ohio, became a focus of the War For (or Against) Childhood, it shared the debate with other international kiddie-coddling incidents, such as a Swedish school’s confiscation of an 8-year-old’s birthday party invitations because he failed to invite every child in his class, and a British soccer association’s recommendation that no score be kept for games involving players younger than 8. I can hear the competitive types now — at least in Britain they waited for the empire to fall before becoming so sensitive.

The well-documented cases of sports parents and coaches going completely bonkers end up leading to the opposite extreme, over-the-top statements made by the likes of Fred Engh of the National Alliance of Youth Sports, whose anti-all-star article in Parks & Rec Business magazine inspired Carmen to consider scotching her league’s game.

“There’s nothing like sticking a dagger into a youngster’s self-esteem the first season he plays the sport by letting him know that he’s not good enough or considered worthy to be part of this elite group of teammates,” Engh wrote.

Really? In my experience, the daggers to the self-esteem from losses tend to hit the parents more than the kids — and oh, by the way, Carmen for years has heard from angry parents about how league politics and coaches’ nepotism denied their precocious athlete an all-star berth.

I would agree with the likes of Engh that when it comes to young children, the emphasis should be on positive coaching and experiences over scores and standings. When I coach, I consider it a privilege to be entrusted with other people’s children, and I’m conscious that what I do can affect their personalities and their love of the sport in question, though in ways I and they probably won’t know until years later, when they’re on Dr. Phil blaming me for their life going wrong.

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