Time to let youth get back on the playing field
Here’s what it has come to for youth sports in Southern California:
Soccer clubs are renting fields in Arizona to host league games later this month. The lucky ones got a “home” field in Yuma, 2 1⁄2 hours from San Diego on the state line. Some got Phoenix. Some got Tucson.
The San Diego Surf and Del Mar-Carmel Valley Sharks practice three miles apart. There’s a chance in the coming weeks that they’ll drive 400 miles to play each other in a game.
Most of the summer and fall AAU basketball tournaments usually held in Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been moved to St. George, Utah, just across the Nevada border on Interstate 15.
The county’s top lacrosse players were in Salt Lake City last weekend. The Freak Show, a youth wrestling event with 3,500 entrants usually in Las Vegas, is going to Idaho instead.
Noticing a trend? Arizona, Utah and Idaho: red states. California and Nevada: blue states.
Red: open.
Blue: closed.
Or take high school football, the most iconic of youth sports, Friday night lights twinkling beneath a harvest moon backed by the soundtrack of marching bands and crunching pads. California is one of 15 states not playing this fall. Thirteen have Democratic governors, and the two that don’t — Massachusetts and
Vermont — favored the blue candidate in the last seven presidential elections. Coincidence?
The saddest part is not that partisan politics have replaced baseball as our national pastime; it’s that the pawns being moved across the red and blue chessboard are children.
The overriding message from this summer of social unrest is to trust the democratic process, to defer to the powers guaranteed by the Constitution, to invoke change at the ballot box. To vote, vote, vote.
Except they can’t. They’re kids. They have no political muscle, no voice.
So they dutifully stand in 10- by 10-foot quadrants wearing masks and juggle soccer balls for 90 minutes in stif ling California summer heat, while kids in other states freely scrimmage in practice and play games on weekends without fear of a visit from the county health office. Their only option to do what they love, to express themselves competitively, is to drive three, four, five, six hours across state lines.
The great irony: The statistical chance of dying in an auto accident on a 500mile road trip is many times greater than a healthy child under 18 catching and dying from COVID-19.
Part of it is the obsessive youth sports culture, where the epicenter of a $19 billion industry is in sunny Southern California. Part of it is educationally motivated, with college scholarships at stake for top high school prospects.
Most of it, though, is the unseen, unheard collateral damage of COVID-19.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine
and Public Health conducted a survey in May of more than 13,000 youth athletes nationwide and compared that to data from before the March lockdowns. The results, in the words of one researcher, were “striking and concerning.”
Physical activity levels were 50 percent lower than pre-pandemic and qualityof-life scores were lower than researchers had ever recorded. Sixty-eight percent reported feelings of anxiety and depression at levels that typically require medical intervention, an increase of nearly 40 percent from past studies.
In the most dangerous categories of moderate to severe depression, the numbers more than tripled, from 9.7 to 33.4 percent of athletes surveyed.
More recently, Wisconsin researchers partnered with the Elite Club National League, a network of the top
U.S. youth soccer clubs, to study the other half of the equation: how frequently the virus is transmitted among players and coaches.
The study encompassed 90,000 players over 10 weeks from 124 clubs in 34 states, some of which held socially distanced practices, many of which were open for scrimmaging and games. The results were equally striking: only a single case of documented transmission from soccer and an overall infection rate of 263 per 100,000, compared to 477 per 100,000 nationally among children in the same age group.
“It’s not apples to apples to compare those,” Dr. Drew Watson, a UW physician and the chief medical advisor to the ECNL, said in a phone interview, “but it certainly doesn’t make you think that participation in soccer incorporates an increased risk of catching COVID-19. Considering the
dramatic health impacts of restriction and isolation, on balance you’d consider this is a relatively safe activity to keep kids active.”
The key phrase: on balance.
The problem is quantification. Every day we see COVID-19 metrics: tests, cases, hospitalizations, deaths. We don’t see what dangers lurk downstream.
Pediatricians do, and anecdotally more and more are speaking up about the spike in depression and anxiety they are detecting at routine checkups.
Teen suicides have been rising over the past decade, to where it is now the second leading cause of death among high school students, and the fear is the mental health consequences from coronavirus restrictions will push it even higher. In August, one of San Diego County’s top high school athletes killed himself. (The Union-Tribune
does not typically disclose the names of suicide victims.)
Michelle Carlson, the executive director of Teen Line, reports a “multitude” of calls from young athletes in recent months to their mental health and suicide prevention hotline that operates out of CedarsSinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“Not only do sports play a critical component in their socialization, but many find sports are an outlet that helps them cope with their difficult times,” Carlson said via email. “Without it, youth are struggling more than anticipated, as many aren’t even aware of what an important role it plays in their lives and mental health.”
Watson put it like this: “Adolescence is an extremely vulnerable time. It’s when a majority of mental health issues first surface. We have to be particularly mindful of the kind of impact this has on youth athletes. They are starting to form their identity, and for many of them, a huge part of that identity is sports. We have to be careful not to be dismissive of the risks of sports interruptions and take that into account when we’re making decisions.” Such as?
“Sadly,” Watson continued, “there’s obviously a tremendous political element to all these decisions and sometimes youth sports get swept up in decisions that are made for other political reasons that aren’t specific to sports and don’t necessarily always abide by all the available evidence.”
Listening, Gov. Newsom?
Sports leaders across California began asking for state guidance on return to play protocols back in April; the California Department
of Public Health finally issued one in August, strictly prohibiting contact in practice and all competitions. Fall high school sports have been postponed until winter and spring.
Six weeks ago, citing a survey by six local soccer clubs that found no virus transmission among players or coaches, the San Diego Surf proposed a pilot program of controlled scrimmages with weekly virus testing. Crickets. The only entity that reached out to help was Rady Children’s Hospital, concerned about the mental and physical impacts of the lockdowns.
In recent weeks, Oregon issued new guidance that allows for some sports to return. Nevada announced it will open some as well in late October. Colorado, after initially postponing fall football, offered high schools the option of playing the same length season in late fall or the spring; 79 percent chose to play now.
Flustered, frustrated, f lummoxed by California’s inaction, many youth sports clubs in San Diego have taken matters into their own hands (or feet) and are quietly scrimmaging, operating under the pretense it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. The next step: road tripping across the desert for league games with uniforms and referees.
At 10 a.m. today, the kids in cleats will issue a final, desperate plea at simultaneous rallies across Southern California, including one in front of the County Administration Building on Pacific Highway. They’ll make signs with colorful markers. They’ll march in solidarity. They’ll chant “Let us play” in the loudest voice they can.
Will anyone hear them?