GUILFORD, Conn. - Doug Nygren, the new commissioner of Microsoccer for 6- and 7-year-olds in this prosperous New Haven suburb, may be precisely what the sport has been crying out for: He is a child therapist.
A soccer dad three times over, Nygren thinks children's soccer has become a wholly owned subsidiary of competitive adults. For years, he has seen parents screaming, "Score! Score!" at children barely old enough to chase butterflies, parents pressuring coaches to play only the biggest, fastest players in pursuit of trophies, parents and children forever dragging to faraway tournaments. "Children are living like politicians. Soccer is like the permanent campaign," he said.
Nygren resolved to take children's soccer back from grown-ups, to redirect all those competitive, adult juices into something healthier for children -- developing soccer skills. Last season he began giving parents a grid to fill out at games, with names of "micro" players on one axis and, on the other, basic skills -- traps, dribbles, passes, steals, contacts with the ball. It worked like magic: Parents were so focused on their grids they left the game to the children.
"Microleague had gotten so competitive it was absurd," Nygren said. "For the parents, kids are some form of themselves out there, doing things they wanted to do but were never able to do. It's called projection and it's human nature. And it's gotten worse."
While not every soccer club has a staff therapist, many could use one. More and more of the grown-ups who run children's soccer are concluding that the sport has become too competitive, too young, and that they have only themselves to blame.
Increasingly, they are trying to rein in competition by reining in themselves -- with rules. Some clubs now have rules against posting game scores or team standings in younger age groups, and have banned end-of-season trophies, in the belief that only then will parents stop pressuring children to win and simply help them learn to play. Some clubs have instructed parents not to yell from sidelines, except to say something supportive related to skills, as in, "Nice save!" Some have created parent-free zones, requiring soccer moms and dads to stand a prescribed distance from sidelines.
"If they could lock parents in the parking lot and let the kids play, I think everything would be fine," Rhode Island soccer dad and coach Rick Jarret said -- quite seriously -- during a popular New England girls tournament here known as Soccerfest.
These efforts seem comically modest compared to the force of nature they are trying to contain -- a generation of parents that keeps starting children off younger and younger, pushing them harder and harder, not just in soccer but in music, competitive-admissions preschools, ballet, foreign languages. Even golf: As soon as television carried home movies of 1997 Masters champion Tiger Woods swinging a club as a tyke, parents inundated golf pros everywhere with pleas for lessons for their 3-year-olds.
Soccer was perhaps an inevitable arena for parents to play out their anxieties. Unlike baseball, basketball and football, it remains in its formative stages in the United States -- something parents can mold and influence, like a child. And it came of age here just as Baby Boomers were embarking en masse on parenthood, bringing along their storied tendencies toward perfectionism, child-indulgence and competitiveness.
More than 18 million children play soccer at least occasionally, according to American Sports Data Inc., making it second only to basketball in popularity and, with 40 percent of the players being girls, the most co-ed of mass participation sports. Roughly 100,000 children play on Washington area teams.
The phenomenon is disproportionately suburban. Michigan State University psychologist Martha Ewing of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sport said her research shows that 80 percent of children ages 6 to 14 in the suburbs of Detroit participate in some form of organized sports; in Detroit itself, the figure is only 5 percent. Inner-city parents see parks and playing fields as gang recruiting grounds, she said, while suburban parents see sports as safe, healthy and valuable training for adult life.
"Middle-class parents see their children's future as increasingly complex and hard to control," said University of Colorado sociologist Jay Coakley, an authority on sports. "They're asking, 'Where can I give my child a head start?' You can't do it through private school without spending $10,000 or more a year, so they've turned to trying to control their [children's] leisure time."
Soccer competitiveness took its fiercest upturn in the 1990s -- perhaps not coincidentally mimicking what grown-ups were experiencing in the workplace. Throughout the '90s, parents have organized elite "traveling" teams at increasingly young ages; they now are proliferating at age 7, which soccer professionals decry as absurd. (In a counterthrust, Montgomery Soccer Inc. in Maryland has raised the starting age to 10.) "Premier" teams, an elite of the elite, which pros say should begin at about age 14, are now forming among 10-year-olds. Tournaments also keep multiplying, in part to raise money for parent-led youth soccer programs.
"Parents say they want their kids to have the absolute best opportunity -- whether it's a camp, a private school or an elite soccer team," said Joe Provey, a varsity soccer player in the 1960s, a soccer parent for 14 years and editor of Soccer Jr., a magazine for youth players. "The emphasis shifts from fitting children into a community as peers of others to giving them an edge or an advantage. To explain why would be a sociological question. It's just something our generation has been guilty of."
Boomer Angst
On the recent day when teams from Guilford and rural Burrillville-Glocester, R.I., dueled for the under-10 championship, there was no parent-free zone and the assorted mothers and fathers were literally in their daughters' faces.
With minutes to go and Guilford up by one goal, Burrillville's Ashley Tait was moving in for the steal when a primal scream erupted from her mother Debbie's lungs: "GOOOO ASHLEY!" Nearby, an otherwise soft-spoken Diane Monast belted out, "GOTTA PLAY LIKE YOU WANT IT, NICK!" at her ponytailed Nicole.
Guilford mom Sue Nygren, wife of the therapist/commissioner, collapsed into her lawn chair, stressed to the max. "I have to sit down. I have to get through another of these," she said of another game, another daughter.
How so much adult angst lands on a soccer field is a question the parents from Burrillville-Glocester consider often -- most recently during Soccerfest, for which they elaborately rejiggered work schedules to drive daughters across Rhode Island and half of Connecticut three days in a row. It is not as easy for them as for upscale professionals; they are mostly two-income couples with blue- and white-collar jobs -- nurses, a toolmaker, a lab technician, a corporate middle-manager, a respiratory therapist.
Questions about youth soccer invariably trigger conversations among these Baby Boomers about childhood in general, and how unnervingly it has changed in a generation. Although overbearing parents arguing strikes with Little League umpires or screaming at opposing high school quarterbacks are not something totally unfamiliar from these parents' childhoods, they remember sports as primarily kids-only pick-up games, without adults organizing them into teams, driving them to practices, telling them how important it is -- or isn't -- to win.
Few of their mothers worked, so while children roved freely, adult eyes watched from most kitchens. Now, with most mothers working, the idle time they celebrated seems a breeding ground for trouble. Their own children's time is highly scheduled -- after-school programs, music lessons, play dates.
Sports is just one piece of this picture. Asked the value of soccer to them, almost all made two points: "It's better than sitting home watching TV," in the words of Diane Duquette, a nurse and Christmas tree farmer with three daughters on traveling soccer teams. And, as Ray Rabitaille, a corporate team leader and father of Meghan, put it: "It keeps them off the streets."
He then laughed at his words. "Our streets are safe. It's boondocks!" he said. "It's the same idea: Keep them out of trouble."
"You want to talk about teen pregnancies? The latchkey hours are when they're conceived," said Ginny Tierney, a co-chair of Soccerfest whose three college-age children played soccer from early ages. "Sports helps build structure into the time you're not with your children. It keeps them in the presence of adults. That's how we replaced those adult eyes we grew up with."
None of the parents thought it wise that girls so young travel regularly to tournaments, but they said the momentum seemed irreversible. "When we started out nine years ago with my 18-year-old, there were four towns in all of Rhode Island with under-8-year-old traveling teams," said Jarret, the team coach. "Now every town has two. It's a vicious cycle. It gets back to parents. Parents are putting more and more pressure on kids, and soccer just keeps getting more and more competitive."
"I do worry about burnout," Debbie Tait said of Ashley and a son. "But I wonder if I don't get them in now, they won't be able to get in later because other kids' skills will be so developed my kids will be left in the dust."
"It's like trying to turn a battle ship around," Ray Monast said. "Our generation has created a monster."
Whose Soccer Goals?
Rerouting the battleship involves parents taking on other parents and what they want for their children -- rarely a G-rated scene. "Parents debating youth soccer is getting as sensitive as prayer in the schools and sex education," said Dick Wilson of the American Youth Soccer Organization.
So it was in Massachusetts, where the state Youth Soccer Association two years ago became the only one in the country to bar children under 10 from playing for trophies in its elimination-style tournaments. Grown-ups were the main problem, the group said. Coaches were sending little children in for the kill without developing their skills. Potential top players were burning out young or being cut from teams before their soccer skills had matured.
But instead of sending 9-year-olds home to play with pals, the soccer association went regulatory, mandating what it termed "non-results-oriented competition": Scores are kept, but winners and losers under 10 all go on to the next round and everyone gets the same prize, a "participation award."
Inexorably, the debate moved far beyond soccer fields.
"There, in a nutshell, is the ethos of the left," thundered Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. "No one must be allowed to win, lest anyone be allowed to lose."
In interviews, several local club leaders raised a specter of trophy-starved 9-year-olds defecting to Little League. Others said critics were projecting their competitive neuroses onto defenseless children.
"The perfect youth sports issue," concluded the Boston Herald, "an argument of grown-ups, by grown-ups and for grown-ups."
In explaining its policy, the soccer board made clear it was trying to reform soccer by reforming parents. The trophy ban, it wrote, promised "a higher likelihood that parents will cheer for ALL the kids at a game, applaud ALL good plays, worry less about the outcome. Kids will see adults as positive and supportive and not as contentious and narrow-minded." Parents also could now "show trust and faith in and commitment to allowing kids to be kids."
Monitoring the debate from Somerville, an urban melting pot of new and old immigrants, blue-collar workers and professionals, George Saroupoulos, a Greek immigrant and youth coach, scarcely recognizes the sport he grew up with.
"A lot of South Americans and Europeans, we feel it's a sport run by people without knowledge, a white-collar sport played more in suburbs than in cities," said Saroupoulos, a contractor. "Where's the passion, the love of the sport? Those of us who grew up with it, we emphasize techniques, fundamentals, strategy. We don't concern ourselves with social engineering."
The debate went regional when Massachusetts extended the under-10 trophy ban to out-of-state tournaments. Now neighboring states must offer non-results-oriented play or do without large numbers of under-10 Massachusetts teams -- and their hefty tournament fees. Most of them have done the former. Asked how he felt about this, John Motta, president of New Hampshire Youth Soccer Association, erupted with a frustrated critique of childhood in general.
"Instead of getting kids ready for the real world, we're giving them pacifiers, we're saying we have to protect them," he said, speaking from one of five Dunkin Donut shops he runs. "I see it in the kids working for me. No commitment. They come in late, they don't come in at all. Life is survival. If we don't plant the seeds at 9 or 10, how are these kids going to make it?"
Two Trophy Views
The under-10 girls from Burrillville-Glocester didn't know it, but they were guinea pigs. Soccerfest hasn't junked under-10 trophies, but co-chairs Ginny and Gary Tierney are thinking about it. This year, besides giving trophies to winners, runners-up and best sports, they gave under-10 players participation awards -- golden soccer medallions. They plan to survey coaches to see if medallions alone would have made the teams want to come.
Moments after losing the last game to Guilford, the Burrillville girls got their medallions, and ogled them, in between hugging parents and each other for what all agreed was a fine effort. "It felt really good," exulted Amy Duquette, a sweat-soaked slip of an 8-year-old nicknamed Pocket Rocket. "It always feels really good competing."
Music then began blaring from the team boom box, a signal to start line dancing. In no time, the girls began grooving in unison to the Macarena, the Electric Slide, the Village People's "YMCA." They looked so fabulously fit, so high on life and togetherness that no one would have guessed they lost a Big Game.
Jarret, the coach, soon arrived with news of the official standings. "We're at least tied for second. We might get it by ourselves," he said. "And you'll get trophies!" The girls leapt to their feet, cheered, hugged, jumped up and down -- and then resumed dancing when the music started again.
During lunch at a nearby Friendly's, the girls and the parents sat in separate booths, divided by a partition. On the grown-up side, the parents were asked how their girls began playing organized soccer. They all said it was the girls' idea, a natural extension of their love for the game.
Across the partition, the girls were asked how it all began. "My parents," came the answers, without exception. Still, they said theirs are the kindest, gentlest parents they've seen on soccer fields. "We've played teams where moms were using swears," said Amy Duquette. "They'll point at me and yell, 'Stay on that little short girl.' It makes me feel really bad."
Back on the grown-up side, the parents were asked about the trophy debate. "I think they'd feel cheated," Diane Duquette said of her daughters, if trophies were banned. "What's wrong with trophies? They aren't under too much pressure," said Michelle Lee, mother of Kayla. "These girls definitely like trophies," said Jarret. "Before the game, they asked if they'd still get a trophy if they lost."
Across the partition, the question was put to the girls, who pondered it as they studied their menus, weighing pizza versus grilled cheese, trophies versus participation awards. As it turned out, the parents -- even these low-key parents -- had it wrong. Going one by one around the table, the girls all said in their own ways that playing for a trophy, even winning one, had taken something out of them. Medallions it was -- unanimously.
"We've lost before, so we know how it feels," Amy said. "It would mean nobody felt bad if they lost. Parents want kids to win, win, win. Kids just want to have fun."
Told this afterward, Soccerfest's Ginny Tierney had an epiphany: "We've been surveying coaches about the trophy issue. We should ask the kids!"

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