Youth sports has an attrition problem.
‘We do a tremendous job at getting kids involved,’ exercise scientist Amanda Visek says. ‘We do a terrible job at keeping them.’
The absence of ‘fun’ is often cited in connection with the staggering statistic that 7 out of 10 kids quit sports before age 13.
But what is fun, exactly, as it pertains to kids sports?
About 10 years ago, Visek, an associate professor at George Washington University, and her associates set out on an extensive study to distill the precise meaning of the short yet significant word.
They learned that misunderstanding can lead to misperception. Fun is not ‘goofing off or laughing or playing around,’ Visek tells USA TODAY Sports, ‘or only to be had if you work really hard during practice and the coach says, ‘I’ll let you have fun in the last 10 minutes.’ ‘
Visek’s ‘Fun Maps’ uncovered the opposite: Fun is not something that shows up on our face as much as something that creates our sports experience.
The groundbreaking study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, worked with male and female youth soccer players of varying ages and skill levels in the Washington, D.C., area.
Fun, the researchers learned, has dozens of determinants that are actionable, such as putting forward a strong effort, getting better at a sport and working together as a team. Fun drives confidence, the study shows, and it is at the heart of athletic development.
‘It seems to be relevant at every age and stage, even Olympic athletes,’ Visek says.
And with one particular world class tennis player, whose father forced him to play a sport he never truly learned to enjoy. Andre Agassi’s narrative underscores the crucial role fun plays in sports both from a young age and throughout a career.
‘The idea that a parent would attach a child’s right to be loved in this world based on their performance is a tragedy,’ Agassi told USA TODAY Sports. ‘What somebody needs to do to be pro at 16 years old is crazy, right? I mean, think about how you have to spend those years in order to do it. So the question now becomes, is that self-motivated, or is fear the driver? Is somehow somebody else’s agenda the driver?
‘And once you put an agenda ahead of that child, once something, anything besides that child, is most important, let’s just call it like it is. That’s abuse.’
We spoke with Visek, and with Agassi, about what constitutes fun and ways we can empower our kids to truly have fun with their sports.
Fun is not a frivolous reward for being good. It is a state athletes feel that helps them get most out of their ability.
As youth coaches, we tend to let our kids scrimmage five-on-five, or run around the bases in a relay race, after they have ‘worked hard.’ We consider such activities the ‘fun’ part of practice.
Fun, though, Visek has found, comes in the work itself. It’s a feeling the players derive from competing with and for their teammates and coach in effortful, deliberate practices and games.
The athletes she’s surveyed over the years indicate the fun is more in that process than the outcome. When The Washington Post wrote an article about Visek’s initial study, the reporter asked one high-school soccer player to recount the most fun he had in one particular season. The player, Devon Mann, brought up an experience that ultimately ended in a loss.
‘He talked how incredibly challenging and hard that game was, and how they really fought for it,’ Visek says.
Fun centers around 3 main factors that promote growth and development as athletes, but not necessarily winning
In that study, Visek asked each of the 142 soccer players aged 8 to 19 to brainstorm about all the things that made sports fun for them. They came up with 81 fun determinants, which the researchers listed on cards they gave to the players to sort and rate. Based on those rankings, the determinants were grouped into 11 dimensions of fun (fun factors) and graphically presented on a map.
The top three fun factors, which have held as Visek has continued her work, are trying hard, positive team dynamics and positive coaching. You can see the rest here:
Notice that winning is not a fun factor. In Visek’s studies, which have expanded to one in Sweden where kids had 84 fun determinants, winning tends to rank in the middle, well behind being challenged to improve, getting a compliment from a coach, playing well and using a skill you learned in practice in a game.
‘If you can create the experience for athletes of having fun, then you can achieve these other types of outcomes that sports programs or coaches are looking for, whether it’s motivation or it’s performance outcomes, or it’s retention in sport,’ Visek says. ‘But in order to achieve those things, we have to focus on that moment to-moment-experience: the experience of having fun playing sport.’
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Fun has remarkably similar meaning to all athletes
We say our kids play in a recreational league ‘for fun.’ But when they play for a travel or club team, we say they are more intent on learning and developing to ‘get to the next level.’
Similarly, as Visek co-wrote in a chapter for the 2021 book ‘Myths of Sport Coaching,’ you might see stereotypical images if you Google ‘girls’ or ‘women’ or ‘female’ with ‘sport’ and ‘fun.’
Females, she wrote, are ‘huddled together, giggling, hugging one another, sitting arm-in-arm on the bench smiling, or celebrating together jumping up and down in unison.’ Males are ‘seen racing to the ball, battling for the puck, colliding, kicking hard, and challenging their opponents.’
Visek’s studies, as they have been conducted across a number of sports, continue to indicate we are more similar than we are different, whether we are male or female, younger or older, or play rec or travel.
All types of kid athletes crave from an early age what Visek calls the physical, kinesthetic component of sports: the high-fives, the fist bumps and other connections of touch we have with teammates.
And we crave all of this into much later stages of our athletic careers and up to the highest levels because it is fun. A study of Olympians who competed from 2000 to 2012 indicates fun was a consistent factor in what got them involved in sport early in their development, as well as what drove them to pursue the pinnacle of their sport.
Fun is not forced upon kids through sports. It comes from their personal connection to them.
No one even asked Agassi if he wanted to play tennis. ‘I hate tennis,’ he writes repeatedly in his autobiography, ‘Open.’
His career had nothing to do with fun. It was about his father, an autocratic tennis dad, forcing a sport upon him and cashing in on his investment.
‘We can discuss the different layers of abuse but it’s still not healthy for the development of a child,’ Agassi says. ‘And sports can teach so much. Sports can be so good for a child’s development, but only if it’s in a healthy dynamic of them pushing themselves for their own cause and reason. Because we’re so young coming into the sport, it’s just hard for me to believe that most of the time it isn’t coming out of a fear-based sort of upbringing or practice.’
Coach Steve: How to talk to your kid after a bad game. Hint: Don’t be like Andre Agassi’s dad.
When he and wife Steffi Graf, a tennis legend herself, started their own family, they were careful not to push their son and daughter into the hard-driving tennis culture.
‘The important word is choice, right?’ Agassi says. ‘So it’s their life, their choice, but our sort of, let’s say, methodology as parents is you better live what you claim is important to you. That’s what I’m gonna hold you accountable to. I’m not gonna hold you accountable to your worth based on any performance, but I’m going to make sure that you hold yourself accountable to the things you claim you value.’
Their son Jaden, 22, was a pitcher at USC and is pursuing a career as a professional.
‘He loves it, and he wants to do it,’ Agassi says. ‘And he lives that every day. So I love it. Our daughter (Jaz, 20) and her choices, same thing. She’s really connected to her life. And that’s the greatest thing a parent could ever want or feel for their kids. You’re only as happy as your saddest child. And when you see your child engaged in life, and you see them connected to it, it’s a powerful feeling, and it’s one that I cherish greatly.’
As Visek writes, having fun in sports is not happenstance or coincidental. Instead, it must be fostered, with intent, to evoke a fun experience.
Fun is an athlete-centered experience but we can help them shape and create it
The original Fun Maps identified how children thrive on autonomy, not regulation, when it comes to sports. Experiences they found to be ‘not fun’ were controlling, while nearly 84% of the 81 fun determinants within the Fun Maps are based on fostering children’s autonomy, competence and social connections to the sport.
These three qualities can be instilled in our young athletes from positive coaches who treat players with respect, consider their opinions and allow mistakes.
Our parenting can work the same way. We can ask them, Visek says, what they want and what is fun for them.
‘The Fun Maps would suggest that having parents and family there to cheer you on is fun,’ she says, ‘but a sort of subtle nuance would be like asking your kid, ‘How do you want me to show up at your game? Do you want me to be quiet because that’s easier for you to concentrate on the field? Or do you want me to call your name and cheer you on?’ And then deliver on what they tell you.’
Ask them afterward, she suggests, if they had fun, but also what wasn’t fun about the game.
‘If it wasn’t, that is important information,’ she says. ‘As a parent, then I can think, ‘Is that something that I don’t know is a natural part of sport or the game, or is that something that requires me to intervene?’ But I think we just have to do a better job of communicating with the athletes and checking in with them. When asked to articulate, that requires more effortful thinking, and in the process of doing that, they learn something, either about themselves or about the experience that wasn’t so obvious.’
I learn something critical about the day’s practice when one of my sons gets in the car and immediately starts giving me an animated and detailed review before I even ask about it. When the discussion starts with him, it reveals more than what the coaches said or how he and his teammates played.
Most of the time, it means he had fun.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.