Free Play, Organized Sports, and the Death of Joy

I took my son to an outdoor ice rink a couple of nights ago and we played some pick-up hockey with a couple of his teammates and their older brother.  It was magnificent. We had the rink to ourselves for 90 minutes.  I had a great time, but watching the kids play was even better.  Later that night, I thought about the seeming diminution in free play that kids engage in today.  I know, I am nostalgic crank.  Now get off my lawn, etc.  But seriously, the loss of free play seems less nostalgic than an observable phenomenon.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in youth sports.

In many ways, youth sports have become routinized to the point that playing can seem more like a job than an enjoyable diversion.  This is shameful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the primary purpose of sport is play, which is generally supposed to be fun.  As youth sports have become more routinized and formal, kids spend less time engaging in free play.  Historically, free play is where kids learned to love the games they played and where they taught themselves the individual skills necessary to participate in particular sports.  Athletes were born on the pond or the playground or the schoolyard.  It is there that they developed love for the game and self-reliance.  If a kid wanted to learn a move, they essentially had to teach themselves.  Free play was essential both to learning the game and learning to love it.

Now, many kids spend little or no time playing sports outside the organized setting.  If they cannot pick up the game in formal practices or official games, they are not likely to pick up the game.  The exception is the kid with the driven parent who sees that his daughter could use more time and pays for her to have private lessons.  Rather than finding time for her to play, the driven parent finds more time for formal instruction.  Certainly all this time will lead to improvement and produces many exceptional athletes, but it also sends the messages that athletics are about something other than fun and that the player is incapable of self-improvement.  I think this is a mistake that first and foremost hurts kids, but also damages sport in general.

I am partial to hockey because it caused me to think about this and I love it, but all active free play is glorious:  no coaches, no instructions; just happiness, creativity, and passion.  This is the genius of free play:  doing something because you alone are moved to do it.  The experience is both greatly satisfying and enormously valuable.  As a purely athletic endeavor, free play spurs creativity like nothing else.  The whole point of free play is to have fun and the way you have fun is trying to beat your opponent, which gives you an incentive to do something clever.  It breeds experimentation.  It also breeds self-reliance because the only one who can figure it out is the player him or herself.

Free play is also satisfying in ways that formal games are not.  Nobody wants to lose, but in true free play the stakes are essentially personal so the consequences of games are much less stressful.  Free play is one of the few venues in sport where what in fact matters is simply playing the game.  Stepping off the ice after an impromptu pick up game feels good.  There is no worry about how you defended or played offense.  The only thing that matters is that you played.

This is the nation that gave the world jazz.  We are improvisational specialists.  We are at our best not when we are carefully following a script, but when we are allowed the freedom to react and think for ourselves in whatever situation are in.  I for one will continue to find opportunities for us to just play and I suspect that in the end my son will be better for it.  I know he will be happier.