There's Only One Game on List of Top Youth Sports

Take away soccer and there's not a team sport that really does for the very young player what organized athletics claim to do to benefit children.

It takes hours and hours and hours of practice for a 6-year-old even to learn to hit a baseball off a tee. Basketball is a pointless exercise until a kid can dribble the ball and has the strength to shoot the ball anywhere near the basket.

Soccer allows even beginners to play by standard rules and still get the benefits of exercise, teamwork while learning whether or not they enjoy competition.

There are loads of room for failure in activities like tee ball, mini-hoops basketball and other similar miniaturized team sports. Having coached both sports for kids who often hadn't played even in their own yards showed me the angst involved in a 6-year-old swinging a bat at a stationary ball, three times, and missing it each time.

Kids who are willing to run can't really fail on a soccer field. How hard is it for a pint-sized player to understand that they just need to keep the soccer ball from getting near their team's goal? My daughter and her teammates ran themselves ragged and had a blast when, really,

The other day I watched home video of my then 5-year-old son playing quarterback on touch football team for boys so young that they really didn't know the point of the game. I coached the tiny team with the idea that my son would distribute the ball to make sure every player got a chance to touch and run with the ball.

Small problem, though, because I trained my son to throw the ball short distances or to hand it to his teammates ... but, there was no way to teach the other children to hold on to the ball. The league didn't set aside practice time, not that practice would've helped a great deal.

The video shows my son throwing a pass to a little teammate that hit the tiny fellow right in the hands. The boy dropped the ball. The video shows my son drop his head into his hands, just devastated that the pass had fallen incomplete. It showed the little would-be receiver watch the ball bounce away, crestfallen.

There isn't a second of home video that shows anything but my daughter having a blast chasing the ball around the too-big field, laughing with her teammates and loving the orange slices at halftime.

Kid sports have to be fun and be fun all the time when kids are only out there because we send them out there. That makes youth soccer the only sport on a short list of team sports that really little kids should be playing.

(Contact Ted Sillanpaa at tsillanpaa1956@gmail.com.)