Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pretty much the same, probably, if yours is among the growing number of American families that have succumbed to the mania of kids' athletics as they are conceived in the late 1990s: hyperorganized, hypercompetitive, all consuming and often expensive. Never before have America's soccer fields, baseball diamonds, hockey rinks and basketball courts been so aswarm with children kicking, swinging, checking and pick-and-rolling...
Some estimates put the number of American youths participating in various organized sports at 40 million. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the number of kids playing basketball now tops 12 million. Not to mention the nearly 7 million playing soccer. Or the 5 million playing baseball. Hockey, originally played on frozen ponds, is now a year-round sport involving more than half a million kids from Maine down through the Sunbelt. The Turcotte Stickhandling Hockey School, based in Ormond Beach, Fla., of all places, expects 6,400 kids to take part in its clinics this summer, up from...
...sure, plenty of kids still participate in sports through lower-intensity recreational leagues. But kids' sports, like other American institutions circa 1999, have succumbed to a cycle of rising expectations. More and more parents and kids want better coaching, more of a challenge and the prestige that comes from playing with the best. All of which fuels the growth in travel teams. Says Judy Young, executive director of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (a professional coaches' association) in Reston, Va.: "Nobody seems to want to play on a little neighborhood team for more than one season." Kids...
...importance of fun--of sport pursued for sheer exhilaration--is a credo repeated, and often honored, by coaches, kids and parents. At the same time, though, the pushy parent, red-faced and screaming from the sidelines or bleachers at a hapless preteen fumbling on the field, has become an American archetype and a symbol of the unmeasured costs of kids' sports...
...Americans are a competitive bunch. It was probably inevitable that the striving impulse would sooner or later reshape kids' sports. But the trend has been abetted by other, less predictable changes in American life: the ascendancy of the automobile, the shrinking of open spaces, the ubiquity of the two-earner family and the pervasive fear of crime. Baby-boomer parents may look back wistfully at their own childhood, when playing sports was a matter of heading to the corner sandlot or the neighborhood park after school for a pick-up game. But the sandlot's been filled...