I have encountered some parents at my office who seem less like parents of their teenagers, and more like fans of them.  These parents aren’t simply accepting of their kids, they almost seem impressed by them — even when the behavior they are admiring isn’t particularly admirable.  Is it cool to be in awe of your kids as though you are on their level, or should parents be clear with family roles and who’s in charge — specifically with the parent-child dynamic?

What some parents tell me…

I have heard many stories at my practice over the years, including some parents who marvel at the trouble their kids find.  One parent casually mentioned to me knowing that his teenage son and friends were drinking in the basement, but he thought it was kind of cool so he decided not to bother them.  Another parent laughed while describing how his teenager snuck out of the house, only to be caught by police sneaking back in during the wee hours of the night.  And several parents have shared with me that underage drinking is out in the open at their graduation parties, with the assumption kids won’t drive after drinking.  I have been told many stories about parties, drinking, breaking rules, or getting away with something told with an unmistakable hint of pride.  Some parents have even told me they have bought alcohol for their kid and his/her friends!

The message for parents who only casually parent almost becomes: My kid is really cool.

But why do some parents feel this way?  One possibility is that parents sometimes experience their children’s social lives vicariously.  If my teenager is popular, invited to parties, dating, socially confident, and accepted by the “cool kids,” perhaps some of that status psychologically rubs off on me.

Psychologists have long recognized our tendency to derive satisfaction from association with successful or popular people and groups.  We readily understand the parent proudly announcing that his daughter made varsity, or his son was accepted into an elite university.  But perhaps reflected status can operate socially as well.

Everybody knows my kid.  Everybody likes my kid.  My kid gets invited everywhere.

There may also be an element of identification and nostalgia.  Hearing about a teenager’s adventures can take parents back to their own adolescence.  “We did the same thing at that age” becomes an amusing justification for behavior that should deserve a considerably different response from a parent.

None of this means parents need to become authoritarian or react hysterically every time a teenager makes a poor decision.  Adolescence involves experimentation, mistakes, boundary testing, peer influence, and increasing independence.  Simply put, teenagers are going to screw up.  But that’s precisely why they still need parents.

With brains still not fully developed, teenagers aren’t supposed to possess mature adult judgment.  Part of adolescence involves testing boundaries, and parents are supposed to model and provide some of the boundaries being tested.  In doing so, it requires accepting one of the least enjoyable parts of parenting: sometimes your child isn’t going to like you very much.

A friend might laugh about the drinking story.  A fan might admire the rebelliousness.  A parent occasionally needs to say, No, that’s not acceptable.

There’s an important distinction between being in your child’s corner and being in your child’s fan club.

Being in your teenager’s corner means loving him whether he succeeds spectacularly or screws up badly.  It also means defending him when appropriate, encouraging him when he’s struggling, and making certain he knows that one bad decision doesn’t define him.  But loving the person doesn’t require celebrating the behavior.  In fact, sometimes the most loving response is accountability by means of disappointment, correction, consequences, or simply saying no.

Teenagers will eventually have plenty of friends, fans, followers, and people willing to laugh along with their bad decisions.  What they have far fewer of are adults who love them enough to occasionally disappoint them, challenge them, and establish boundaries. Your teenager absolutely needs you in his corner.  But sometimes the best thing you can do for him is step out of the fan club and be his parent.

Final thoughts

Being your child’s biggest supporter doesn’t mean being a fan of everything your child does.  In fact, some of the most important moments in parenting occur when support looks nothing like cheering — when it means setting a boundary, expressing disappointment, imposing a consequence, or simply saying no.  Teenagers will have plenty of friends willing to laugh at their bad decisions and plenty of peers impressed by their rebelliousness.  What they need from their parents is something different: someone who loves them enough to risk being temporarily unpopular.  Sometimes being your child’s biggest supporter means refusing to be their biggest fan.

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The reasons why so many kids specialize in one sport today

Sports are no longer confined to the traditional 3-4 months when they are “in season.”  Today, the baseball player may have fall workouts, winter lifting, indoor hitting, pitching programs, camps and summer baseball.  Basketball has open gyms, off-season workouts and AAU.  Football has weight training, seven-on-seven, camps and summer practices.  Soccer and volleyball have extensive club seasons.

While nobody necessarily tells the athlete, “You can’t play another sport,” they don’t have to. Why?  Because kids aren’t choosing among three sports, they are choosing among three year-round programs.

Perhaps one of the most interesting words in modern high school athletics is optional.  An off-season workout may technically be optional, but when your teammates are attending, your coach is watching and someone else wants your position, the word “optional” no longer sounds like a voluntary decision devoid of potential negative consequences.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite that kids pick up on — if you don’t attend “optional” workouts, you will pay a price for that decision.  When kids feel this way, it creates anxiety and leaves them in impossible situations trying to find ways to play multiple sports throughout the year.

There is an important psychological distinction between truly having a choice and feeling like you have a choice.  The problem isn’t necessarily created by bad coaches with unreasonable intentions.  In many cases, coaches are responding rationally to the competitive environment around them, as well as some parent expectations.  If a neighboring soccer program is training throughout the winter, your program feels pressure to do the same.  If basketball players are competing in AAU throughout the spring and summer, taking several months off may feel like falling behind.  As other schools and leagues do more, everyone else does the same.

Eventually, we have something resembling an athletic arms race.  And the casualty may be the multi-sport athlete.

Different sports require different skills, movements and ways of thinking.  Baseball demands patience and the ability to handle a lot of individual failure.  Basketball requires constant movement, immediate decision-making and continuous interaction with teammates on the floor.  Football requires athletes to accept highly specialized roles while functioning within a larger coordinated system.

There are mental health benefits to playing different sports as well.  Playing multiple sports exposes kids to different teammates, coaches, leadership styles and social environments.  Perhaps most importantly, it allows kids to occupy different roles.  The star midfielder in soccer might come off the bench in basketball.  The starting quarterback might simply be another player on the baseball team.  There is something developmentally valuable about sometimes being the best player in the room — and sometimes clearly not being the best player in the room.

Multiple sports can also broaden an athlete’s personal identity.  When a teenager’s entire world becomes I am a football player, struggles in football can threaten something much larger than athletic performance.  Playing other sports provides additional friendships, experiences and opportunities to feel competent.  These broadened experiences and relationships also contribute to better mental health, too.

None of this means young athletes should be prohibited from specializing in a chosen sport if they so desire. Some kids genuinely love one sport and want to pursue it year-round.  But we should also ask whether we’re making that choice for others without realizing it.  It’s easy for coaches and athletic programs to say they support multi-sport athletes.  The more meaningful question is whether their expectations, schedules and off-season demands actually make multi-sport participation possible.

Perhaps the multi-sport athlete isn’t disappearing because kids suddenly stopped wanting to play multiple sports.  Maybe we’ve simply built a sports culture in which every sport increasingly wants to be the athlete’s only sport.

Final thoughts

Perhaps the real issue isn’t whether the three-sport athlete is actually disappearing, but whether we’re making it unnecessarily difficult for that athlete to exist.  We continue to praise the benefits of playing multiple sports while simultaneously creating year-round (“optional”) expectations that make doing so increasingly challenging.  If we truly value multi-sport athletes, then coaches, schools, parents, and sports organizations may need to do more than simply encourage them — we need to create an environment that actually allows them to play.

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Developmental changes related to smart phone usage

Before smartphones filled every empty moment, kids spent considerably more time observing and interacting with the world around them.  Kids watched other people, noticed facial expressions, and made eye contact.  Kids also initiated conversations, learned how to enter groups, handle silence, read a room, deal with boredom and entertain themselves.  None of these experiences appear to be very important individually, but collectively, they help us grow and develop important social skills and improve our mental health.

The reality is that kids don’t learn sophisticated interpersonal skills from an instruction manual — they develop them through thousands of authentic, in-person repetitions.  When should I speak?  Is that person serious or joking?  Did I offend someone?  Does she seem interested in what I’m saying?  How do I politely join this conversation?  What does that facial expression mean?  What do I do after saying something awkward?

The reality is that kids don’t learn sophisticated interpersonal skills from an instruction manual — they develop them through thousands of authentic, in-person repetitions. 

Face-to-face interaction provides an extraordinary amount of information through facial expressions, eye contact, posture, tone of voice and timing.  Phones provide social interaction, but it’s a very different kind of interaction, one that is far more limiting than what can be developed communicating in-person.

Think of this another way — we wouldn’t expect a child to become a great soccer player without repetitions.  Why would we expect kids to develop sophisticated face-to-face social skills while potentially removing thousands of their social repetitions?  Reading or watching videos how to communicate with others isn’t anything close to actually communicating in-person.

There may be emotional consequences as well to smart phone overload.  Previous generations had considerably more unavoidable time alone with their thoughts.  Waiting meant waiting.  Boredom meant figuring out what to do with time on your hands.  An awkward moment sometimes meant sitting with the awkwardness and and developing problem-solving solutions.

Today, uncomfortable feelings can often be interrupted instantly.  If you are bored, anxious, lonely, or embarrassed, just pick up your phone and divert your attention somewhere else.  That doesn’t mean smartphones cause mental health problems, but emotional regulation develops partly through real life experience.  Kids need opportunities to tolerate boredom, frustration, uncertainty, disappointment and social discomfort — and discover that those feelings eventually pass.  But if distraction is always immediately available (smart phone), are some of those developmental repetitions disappearing?

Human attention presents another interesting question.  The truth is the real world doesn’t operate like a smartphone.  Books don’t change subjects every 15 seconds.  Coaches sometimes give mundane instructions.  Conversations occasionally drag on far longer than needed.  Friends tell stories that take five minutes instead of 10 seconds.  Learning to remain engaged when something isn’t immediately stimulating is itself an important developmental skill.

We may not understand the full consequences of these developmental changes for years.  Smartphones haven’t existed across enough generations for us to know exactly what happens when screens occupy so much time and so many of childhood’s previously empty spaces.  It is possible the effects won’t be dramatic, but instead appear in subtler ways: less comfort with boredom, difficulty sustaining attention, fewer spontaneous conversations, greater dependence on external stimulation or less confidence navigating face-to-face interactions.

For generations, growing up involved looking around — at other kids, adults, classrooms, neighborhoods, sports fields, dinner tables and eventually the larger world.  Today’s kids have access to more information about that world than any generation before them.  Perhaps we should spend less time asking kids what they’re seeing on their phones and more time asking what they aren’t seeing, practicing, experiencing and learning while they’re looking at them.

Final thoughts

Maybe the greatest developmental cost of smartphones won’t ultimately be traced to any single app, post, or hour of screen time, but instead be found in the thousands of ordinary moments that quietly disappeared — the conversations that never started, the faces that weren’t studied, the boredom that wasn’t tolerated, the surroundings that weren’t noticed, and the uncomfortable feelings that weren’t worked through.  Childhood development has always occurred partly through these seemingly insignificant experiences.  Kids today may have unprecedented access to the entire world in the palms of their hands, but growing up still requires occasionally putting that world down, looking up, and experiencing the one directly in front of them.

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• “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!”
• “Scientists Issue SHOCKING Warning!”
• “This Changes EVERYTHING!”
• “Nobody Saw This Coming: New Research Reveals a Disturbing Trend That Could Affect Millions of Americans”

Clickbait formula is pretty simple — make something sound frightening, crazy, outrageous, surprising, controversial or unbelievable, and people are more likely to click.  Next, the creator of clickbait is positively reinforced for the clickbait, gets paid for the volume of traffic that clicked, and is encouraged to go back and — you guessed it — create more clickbait!

But instead of wondering why so much online content has become sensationalized to be clicked on, maybe we should ask something considerably more important: Where does all of this eventually lead us?

Are we better informed, or more prone to misleading information that can have a direct effect on our mental health and overall well-being?

The impact of clickbait

The internet created an economy in which attracting human attention has enormous value.  Websites, social-media platforms, influencers, and news organizations need readers.  Algorithms then learn what attracts us and provide more of it.  Unfortunately, human beings aren’t naturally attracted to thoughtful, nuanced or important information, but we are drawn to novelty, danger, conflict, outrage, scandal and surprise.

And therein lies the problem.  The information most likely to capture our attention isn’t necessarily the information most deserving of it.

Perhaps the most concerning of our attraction to scandalous clickbait is the illusion that all this information makes us better informed.  Someone can spend hours scrolling through news headlines, TikTok videos, X posts, Facebook stories, YouTube clips and other online content and feel extraordinarily knowledgeable about what’s happening in the world.  But exposure to information isn’t the same thing as understanding it, or validating it as authentic and truthful.

Knowing that 50 supposedly outrageous things happened today doesn’t necessarily mean all of it is true, or that we understand any of the stories we read.  We may be consuming more information than any generation in human history while vetting less of it, and understanding increasingly less about what we consume.

That doesn’t necessarily mean clickbait is making us less intelligent.  The greater concern may be that it encourages shallower thinking: reading headlines instead of articles, reacting before investigating, forming conclusions without context, and allowing emotional responses to substitute for careful thought.

There is another potential consequence.  When people repeatedly discover that sensational headlines exaggerate what actually happened, healthy skepticism can gradually become cynicism.  Eventually, instead of questioning questionable information, people may simply conclude that nothing can be trusted.

Assuming all information is the same, or that no information is credible, leaves us in a very dangerous spot.  When credible journalism, scientific research, political propaganda, influencer speculation, satire, misinformation and outright fabrication now compete for our attention on many of the same screens are all jumbled together it requires us to distinguish what is legitimate, and what isn’t.  This requires patience and critical thinking, but none of that is needed when we just click away on sensational headlines.

With clickbait, it’s rather easy: Don’t investigate. Just react.

Final thoughts

There may be a psychological cost to living in an information environment constantly telling us that something is wrong, dangerous, outrageous, or urgently deserving of our attention.  Even when individual stories are relatively insignificant, the cumulative effect can leave us feeling more anxious, angry, overwhelmed, and pessimistic about the world around us — hardly a recipe for good mental health and well-being.  Perhaps the most uncomfortable part is that we’re not merely victims of clickbait culture — we’re helping create it.

Every click teaches an algorithm something about what captures our attention.  We click sensational content, platforms give us more of it, creators become increasingly sensational, and thoughtful information struggles even harder to compete.  Clickbait began as a strategy for getting people to open a story, but its ultimate consequences may prove considerably larger.

Maybe we aren’t becoming a less informed society, but instead becoming something equally troubling: a society with unprecedented access to information and a diminishing ability to determine which information actually matters.

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While it’s easy to blame Lane Kiffin for trying to expand what “amateur” means in this moment, it might be more appropriate to blame us.  Human beings have an interesting relationship with success.  We say we want it, but once we achieve it, we rarely seem capable of simply enjoying it.  Success quickly establishes a new baseline, and before long we begin asking the inevitable question:  What else can we do?  The success we enjoyed with college football apparently wasn’t enough, so here we are today exploring ways to tweak the game yet again — this time, with pro players coming back to college.

Why can’t we leave a good thing alone?

College football offers a fascinating case study — for generations, Saturday afternoons gave us packed stadiums, marching bands, historic rivalries, regional traditions, exciting bowl games, and athletes representing universities they actually attended. As college football grew, players certainly deserved a greater share of the enormous revenue they helped generate, and some longstanding rules clearly needed modernization.  Unfortunately, modernization became complete transformation.

In just the last 10-15 years we have witnessed massive change in college football, including NIL, the transfer portal, non-geographical conferences sometimes stretching across the country, expanded playoffs teetering on absurdity, and transactional rosters.  In fact, college football today looks like pro football, with a burdensome university attached.

And still we keep tinkering.

Today’s debate started by Lane Kiffin is whether athletes who signed NFL contracts should be able to return to college.  LSU’s controversy became so significant that the SEC adopted a rule against adding such players, and the dispute has escalated into litigation and an extraordinary confrontation between LSU and its own conference.

The guess here is that former players will be allowed to return, and before too long it will seem normal to see a carousel from college to pro back to college football again.  The bigger question is what comes next?  Could eligibility eventually become unlimited?  Could the academic component become increasingly irrelevant — and possibly removed entirely?  Could college athletes eventually become university employees who barely resemble traditional students?  With gambling already surrounding sports culture, what other boundaries that once seemed obvious will eventually be reconsidered?  Is there anything that college football wont consider that could add to their revenue?

The fan experience, while important to a degree, really pales in comparison to the money to be gained thorough more television revenue, more playoff games, more NIL opportunities, more roster flexibility, and more content.  Today’s college football decision-makers seem to hardly care about tradition, and they appear quite determined to not leave a single nickle on the table of potential future revenue.  Is this type of leadership good for the game?  Is it good for fans?

Hedonic adaptation describes our tendency to adjust to improvements in our circumstances.  What initially feels extraordinary eventually feels normal — then we want something more.  Perhaps college football is experiencing this right now.  Instead of enjoying what had been created, everyone began searching for the next opportunity to make it bigger, richer and supposedly better.

Final thoughts

Not every change in college football has been bad, as some were long overdue (i.e. paying student athletes in addition to scholarship money).  But change often produces unintended consequences, and when you fundamentally restructure an institution in a remarkably short period, you shouldn’t be surprised when previously unimaginable ideas suddenly become imaginable.

Lane Kiffin didn’t create this new world of college football, but instead looked at the new college football landscape we’ve created and asked how far he could go.  Is the current controversy around pro players coming back to college a Lane Kiffin issue, or instead a reflection of a much bigger picture of greed, instability, shortsightedness, and an inability to ever be fully satisfied if there is another dollar to be made?

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The post College Football Wasn’t Broken — So Why Did We Fix It? appeared first on The Sports Doc Chalk Talk with Dr. Chris Stankovich.

Most people who have spent time around youth leagues have experienced seasons where everyone seems to know which teams will dominate before the first game is played.  One team is loaded with experienced players, while another is filled primarily with beginners.  The predictable result is a steady diet of run-ruled blowout baseball games, basketball games over before halftime, or soccer matches where one team can barely get the ball across midfield.  Some might simply shrug and say, “That’s sports.”  But is that really the best way to develop young athletes?

Parity isn’t about guaranteeing equal outcomes — it’s about creating meaningful competition.

To begin, there should absolutely be winning and losing in youth sports.  A healthy youth sport league should include good teams, struggling teams, upsets, winning streaks, and disappointing losses.  The goal isn’t for every team to finish with the same record, but leagues should instead strive to create enough competitive balance that most teams enter most games believing they have a legitimate chance to win.

Consider what athletes learn from competitive games. They experience:

• Performing under pressure when the outcome is uncertain.
• Playing from behind and protecting a small lead.
• Responding to mistakes when those mistakes actually matter.
• Learning how to win appropriately by remaining humble and respectful — and how to lose gracefully with sportsmanship and learning from the experience.

The lessons above are much harder to learn and appreciate when the game is over within minutes of starting.

Interestingly, parity benefits the stronger teams as well.  Constantly overwhelming weaker opponents may feel good temporarily, but how much development actually occurs in blowouts?  The best athletes need adversity too — they need situations where the opponent pushes back, where failure is possible, and where their physical and psychological skills are tested.

Psychologically, children also tend to remain engaged when challenges feel difficult but achievable.  If winning feels impossible, frustration and helplessness can develop.  If winning becomes virtually automatic, boredom and complacency can follow.  Somewhere between those extremes exists the competitive “sweet spot” where athletes are challenged, engaged, and motivated to improve.

Youth leagues themselves play an important role in creating that environment.  Stacked teams, poorly constructed drafts, excessive teammate requests, travel players clustering together, and strong rosters remaining intact year after year can unintentionally destroy competitive balance.  Individually, each decision may seem harmless, but collectively they canquickly result in a league of haves and have-nots.

Another threat to parity can occur when youth programs intentionally divide children into “A” and “B” teams based on talent.  While there may be legitimate developmental reasons for occasionally grouping athletes by ability, problems arise when those teams compete in the same league or against similar competition.  The strongest players become concentrated on one roster while the remaining players are left to compete with an obvious disadvantage.  The “A” team may enjoy winning, but often against opponents that cannot realistically compete, while the “B” team can experience repeated losses that quickly become discouraging.  Worse yet, the labels themselves can send an unnecessary message to young athletes about who is considered good and who isn’t — often at ages when physical development, confidence, and athletic ability are still changing dramatically.

Ironically, professional sports understand the importance of competitive balance remarkably well.  Draft systems, scheduling procedures, salary structures, and other mechanisms exist partly because leagues recognize a basic truth: the product becomes less interesting when everyone already knows who’s going to win.

Final thoughts

Youth sports should recognize the same principles pro sports leagues have discovered, but for an even more important reason.  The goal for youth sport leagues should not be to manufacture equal results, but instead to provide a reasonable opportunity to compete.  Kids don’t need guarantees that they’ll win — they need reason to believe they can.

When youth leagues create that possibility, games become more competitive, victories become more meaningful, losses become more instructive, athletes develop more fully, and — perhaps most importantly — kids are more likely to keep coming back to play.  Parity isn’t the enemy of competition. It’s what allows genuine competition to exist.

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What does winning & success really mean?

Consider the case of college football today.  Imagine being a fan of a program with financial resources so substantial that it can essentially assemble a roster of many of the best 5 star players available.  If your team dramatically outspends its competition and eventually wins a national championship, celebrating is certainly understandable — but what exactly has the championship demonstrated?  To be clear, winning still required coaching, preparation, execution, and plenty of hard work.  But if you’ve stacked the deck so heavily that losing becomes increasingly unlikely, shouldn’t that context influence how we interpret the accomplishment?

The same question increasingly applies in education.  A student receives an A on a paper and feels the satisfaction that traditionally accompanies academic achievement.  But suppose the student “wrote” the entire paper using AI — the A grade is real, but is the accomplishment represented by that A grade equally real?

Psychology offers some insight into why we may not spend much time contemplating such questions.  Human beings have a tendency toward self-serving attribution.  When things go well, we readily attribute success to our natural dispositions including intelligence, talent, preparation, or hard work.  When things go poorly, surrounding circumstances suddenly become why we failed (ironically, when outside factors work substantially in our favor, we’re often remarkably good at minimizing them).

Other examples include the successful businessperson who describes himself as “self-made” while barely mentioning family inheritance money or important insider networking connections.  A youth baseball team celebrates another tournament championship without acknowledging that it recruited many of the area’s best players specifically to dominate weaker competition.  Someone celebrates winning a competition while conveniently overlooking that the strongest competitors weren’t there.

None of these outcomes are necessarily fraudulent.  What’s distorted is the story we tell ourselves about what produced them.  That’s because people don’t simply want favorable outcomes, we want those outcomes to mean something favorable about us.  Winning demonstrates ability.  Good grades demonstrate intelligence.  Financial success demonstrates industriousness. Athletic success demonstrates talent.  Simply put, these things make us feel good about ourselves.

Perhaps this is why difficulty is such an important and underappreciated component of genuine accomplishment.  Part of what makes running a marathon meaningful is that traveling 26.2 miles on foot is incredibly difficult.  If we drove 25 miles and ran the final 1.2, we could still cross the same finish line, but few people would consider it the same accomplishment.  That’s an exaggerated example, but it illustrates an important distinction:  When we remove too much difficulty from achievement, we may preserve the outcome while quietly removing much of the accomplishment.

Final thoughts

The truth is that nobody succeeds entirely on their own.  Athletes have coaches, students use technology, and successful people benefit from mentors and inside connections.  Taking advantage of opportunities isn’t inherently wrong, in fact, it’s generally a wise life move.  The more important issue may be whether we’re intellectually honest about how much those advantages contributed, and if the success we enjoy is actually earned, or experienced directly due to outside advantages that the competition doesn’t have.

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Sports culture is saturated with rankings.  Who is the #1 recruit?  What is the best travel team?  Who has the highest rating? Which program sends the most athletes to college?  What are the odds of making varsity, earning a scholarship, or playing professionally?  We even nationally rank athletes who haven’t reached puberty.  When kids regularly experience mental health concerns around anxiety and depression as a result of constant pressure to be the best, is it time to re-calibrate the youth sport experience?

Competition & growth

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be the best.  Competition can motivate people to work harder, prepare more effectively, and discover abilities they didn’t know they possessed.  Winning definitely matters.  And striving for excellence can be tremendously rewarding.  But has our obsession with identifying who is best begun to overshadow everything else competition is supposed to provide?

For generations, sports have taught lessons that have very little to do with finishing first.  Athletes learn to work with teammates, accept coaching, manage frustration, fulfill commitments, respect opponents, and persevere when things aren’t going well.  They also learn something increasingly difficult to accept in our success-obsessed culture: Sometimes someone else is better than you.  That’s not a flaw in competition, but instead one of its greatest lessons.

The problem with constantly ranking and evaluating young athletes is that social comparison can gradually replace personal growth as the definition of success.

• Instead of asking, Am I getting better? we ask, Am I better than him?
• Instead of, Did our team improve? it becomes, Where are we ranked?
• Instead of, Does my child love playing soccer? we wonder, Is he playing on the best team where he will get the most looks from college coaches?

There is also a psychological price to living under constant evaluation.  For young athletes, every game, tryout, ranking, statistic, social-media post, and recruiting list can become another opportunity to measure their worth against someone else’s. When success becomes synonymous with being exceptional, simply being good can begin to feel like failure.  Herein is where many mental health issues begin, specifically with anxiety that often accompanies efforts to not just be good — but be the best.

A child who once worried about striking out may now worry about falling behind, losing a starting position, dropping in a ranking, disappointing parents, or jeopardizing some imagined future opportunity.  Sports, which can be an extraordinary outlet for stress, can instead become another source of it.

Final thoughts

Healthy competition teaches perseverance precisely because sometimes we lose.  It teaches humility because someone may be better.  It teaches resilience because things don’t always go our way.  And it teaches respect because our opponent isn’t an obstacle to the experience — the opponent makes the experience possible.  When kids are taught these things, competition generally improves their mental health rather than creates mental health problems.

None of this means we should stop keeping score, eliminate rankings, or discourage kids from dreaming about being the best.  Competition without the desire to win isn’t really competition.  But winning should be part of the experience, not the only thing that validates it.  Maybe the lesson young athletes need isn’t that being #1 doesn’t matter, it’s that they don’t have to be the best for competition to bring out the best in them.

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Today, here’s a reasonable question: Does anyone actually know who’s eligible anymore?

Major changes in amateur sports

College athletics has undergone such dramatic change that athletes seemingly appear for fifth, sixth and occasionally even longer years.  Transfers are commonplace, and COVID eligibility extensions have lingered for years.  Court decisions have challenged traditional NCAA restrictions, and athletes can now make substantial money through NIL, work with agents under certain circumstances, explore professional opportunities and, depending on the sport and situation, and return to college afterward.

And now the NCAA is changing eligibility itself.  Beginning with athletes entering college in fall 2027, Division I is moving away from the familiar four-seasons-within-five-years model.  Under its newly adopted age-based system, student athletes who enroll on the traditional timeline can potentially compete throughout a five-year eligibility period. For current student athletes and those entering during 2026-27, schools may apply either the previous rules or the new model, whichever is more favorable to the athlete.

Think about that for a moment.  For generations, four seasons was one of the fundamental assumptions of college athletics.  Now even that is changing.

Professional opportunities have become more complicated as well.  Division I men’s basketball players, for example, can receive advice from NCAA-certified agents while evaluating NBA opportunities without necessarily sacrificing their remaining college eligibility.  And beginning in 2026, certain prospective athletes can enter an opt-in professional draft once, withdraw by the required deadline and still retain college eligibility.

None of this means student athletes are doing anything wrong, it’s the entire system that has dramatically changed.  For student athletes, if the rules provide another year of eligibility, why wouldn’t an athlete use it?  If transferring creates a better opportunity, why wouldn’t someone transfer?  If athletes can make money or explore professional opportunities without forfeiting college eligibility, they would be foolish not to consider those options.

The problem isn’t the athletes — it’s the system trying to define what college athletics is anymore.

And there is considerable irony in watching the NCAA struggle to come to terms with the new landscape.  The NCAA is an organization that historically became synonymous with rules — sometimes absurdly specific ones.  For decades, schools worried about improper benefits, contact with agents, recruiting violations and whether relatively trivial advantages might jeopardize an athlete’s eligibility.  The NCAA seemingly had a rule for everything.  Today, however, NCAA rules are inconsistent, change regularly, and when implemented lack consistency.  We now regularly watch court decisions, settlements and challenges force changes to many of the boundaries the NCAA once controlled.  Even transfer-related restrictions have resulted in additional eligibility relief for some athletes.

Final thoughts

While college athletics seem to be quite the mess today, the NCAA appears to recognize the problem.  In announcing its new eligibility system, it specifically described the goal as creating standards that are simpler, clearer and more predictable.  Many would argue college athletics desperately needed modernization, and that student athletes deserved greater freedom, mobility and the opportunity to benefit financially from the enormous industry they help create.  For decades, the NCAA was criticized for having too many rules, but today we may now have the opposite problem.

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Doctors wear white coats.  Judges wear robes.  Police officers wear badges.  Obviously, these people aren’t pretending to be something they aren’t.  But the clothing, titles, symbols, and accessories associated with their roles communicate something important to everyone around them — and perhaps just as importantly, to themselves.  Psychologists have even studied something called “enclothed cognition,” the idea that what we wear can influence how we think, feel, and behave.  Clothing can reinforce identity, confidence, belonging, and expectations — and nowhere is this more obvious than sports.

To look good, or play good?

There was a time when joining a youth baseball team might have meant receiving a T-shirt and a hat.  Today, particularly in competitive youth sports, joining a team can mean multiple uniforms, custom helmets, batting gloves, arm sleeves, team backpacks, warm-up gear, personalized water bottles, and perhaps even a professionally designed social-media announcement.  Before playing a single game, a 10-year-old can look remarkably like a professional athlete.

Kids competing in youth sports get excited about the swag they receive, and that’s perfectly normal.  Uniforms create belonging, and wearing team colors strengthen team and individual identity.  Getting that first great-looking jersey can make a kid feel really great about himself.  Simply looking like an athlete may even help a young person begin thinking and behaving like one.

But there’s also an interesting psychological question worth asking:  At what point does looking the part become more important than actually doing the part?

Because the real work of being an athlete usually isn’t nearly as exciting as a colorful sports bag.  It’s practicing fundamentals over and over.  It’s showing up when you don’t feel like it and sitting on the bench sometimes.  It’s losing games, working on weaknesses, and practicing when nobody is watching.  There’s no swag bag for any of that.

Perhaps this is where our modern version of cosplay becomes problematic — not when we enjoy the symbols associated with an identity, but when those symbols begin substituting for the behaviors that supposedly define it.

Final thoughts

Maybe all of us engage in a little identity cosplay.  We surround ourselves with clothing, titles, credentials, possessions, and symbols that tell the world something about who we are.  Most of the time, there’s nothing wrong with that.  These things can strengthen confidence, create community, and remind us of roles that genuinely matter.  The problem comes when displaying the identity becomes more rewarding than living it.  With youth sports today, would as many kids still play if there were no swag bags, social media posts, and expensive gear?  Does an empty court/field, ball, and opportunity to play still outweigh all the fancy apparel kids receive today?

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Today’s major college sports have many of the characteristics we traditionally associated with professional sports.  Athletes can make money through endorsements, appearances, social media and other name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities.  College athletes can use agents and marketing professionals to help manage those opportunities.  And following the House v. NCAA settlement, participating Division I schools can now provide substantial financial benefits directly to athletes.  At some point, we have to ask an obvious question: When does college sports simply become professional sports?

Are college and pro sports the same?

Consider how the college “amateur” system now operates.  Universities compete vigorously for talented athletes.  Players consider financial opportunities when deciding where to attend school.  The transfer portal allows athletes greater freedom to move between programs, sometimes multiple times during their college careers.  Schools can assist athletes with NIL opportunities, and athletes who satisfy academic requirements generally have much greater freedom to transfer and compete immediately.  The similarities to professional free agency are difficult to ignore.

If an athlete chooses one university partly because the financial opportunity is substantially better, how different is that from an NFL or NBA free agent player choosing another franchise?  If schools compete for talent by promoting the financial opportunities (i.e. NIL) surrounding their programs, is that still traditional recruiting—or has it become professional free agency?  And if athletes are increasingly encouraged to make decisions based upon their own economic interests, should fans continue expecting the old-fashioned concept of loyalty to a particular school — even if the college athlete has more lucrative deals from other schools?

None of this necessarily means paying college athletes is wrong.  In fact, there was always something contradictory about the old system.  Universities, conferences, television networks and coaches could participate in an enormous commercial enterprise while the student athletes responsible for the on-field product faced significant restrictions on their ability to profit from their own popularity.  Coaches could leave for better opportunities and enormous contracts.  Universities could sign lucrative television and sponsorship agreements.  Athletes, however, were expected to view their participation primarily through the lens of amateurism, and gladly accept their partial/full-academic scholarship as more than enough in exchange for helping the university make millions of dollars directly from their on-field contributions.

Perhaps what we are witnessing isn’t the destruction of amateur college sports as much as the inevitable conclusion of what college sports had already become:  A second professional sport league.

Final thoughts

Universities wanted the television contracts, corporate sponsorships, luxury facilities, enormous coaching salaries, merchandising and massive audiences associated with professional sports.  Eventually, it became increasingly difficult to justify maintaining that enormous commercial enterprise while insisting that the people actually playing the games remain amateurs.  In other words, continue to work for free.

Perhaps college sports have not changed dramatically on the field, but the college economic model has fundamentally changed.  Maybe that’s neither good nor bad, but simply reality.  But if college sports look like professional sports, generate money like professional sports, recruit like professional sports, compensate athletes like professional sports and increasingly operate according to the same market principles as professional sports, perhaps the more interesting question isn’t whether college sports are becoming professional.  Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that they already are.

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There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this. Team gear creates excitement, travel tournaments produce lasting memories, and wearing matching apparel helps athletes feel connected to something larger than themselves.  The question is whether those things have quietly become the main reason why some kids choose to play.

Gear, or the game?

Would your child still want to play if there were no custom hoodie?  No personalized backpack?  No flashy uniforms?  No out-of-state tournaments?  No social media photos showing off the latest team apparel?

If the answer is yes, wonderful.  If the answer is no, perhaps it’s worth asking what exactly the child is signing up for.

Psychologists have long understood that people naturally seek belonging, identity, and status.  Uniforms, logos, and team apparel help satisfy those needs and tell the world, “I’m part of something.”  Travel sports organizations understand this as well, and have adopted marketing strategies similar to premium consumer brands.  The uniforms become more stylish, the gear more exclusive, and the overall experience more attractive.  Increasingly, some organizations appear to be selling not just baseball, softball, soccer, or volleyball — but a lifestyle.

Somewhere along the way, youth sports became an experience to wear rather than simply a game to play.

Think about what often appears on social media after a tournament weekend.  More often than not, the photos highlight the airport, the hotel, the team hoodie, the championship ring, or the new backpack.  Rarely do we see posts celebrating the countless practices, the slow improvement of skills, or the quiet satisfaction that comes from simply becoming a better athlete.

None of this suggests that team gear is the problem — the concern may be one of priority.

Imagine two travel programs with two very different offerings:

Program A:  offers outstanding coaching, strong player development, and experienced instructors—but older uniforms and fewer extras.

Program B:  offers average coaching but incredible uniforms, endless team gear, destination tournaments, and a strong social media presence.

Which program would most families choose?  Are fancy uniforms and hype social media posts more important than great coaching and instruction?

Final thoughts

The irony is that the things young athletes tend to remember most years later rarely involve the backpack or the hoodie.  They remember the friendships they built, the coach who believed in them, the lessons they learned after losing, the excitement of improving, and the joy of competing with teammates they cared about.  The gear eventually wears out.  The memories don’t.

Perhaps the best youth sports experiences are the ones where the uniforms, travel, and swag simply enhance the experience rather than define it.  After all, the greatest reward from youth sports shouldn’t be what’s hanging in the closet after the season ends, but instead the love of the game, life skills learned, and amazing memories that remains long after the jersey no longer fits.

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Understanding sports & racism

One explanation for how people can cheer an athlete on the field, yet still discriminate against that group of people off the field, involves cognitive dissonance — the discomfort created when we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs. People are surprisingly good at reducing that discomfort without actually changing their broader attitudes.  Rather than reconsidering a stereotype, someone can simply make an exception: He’s different. He’s one of the good ones.

Psychologists sometimes describe this process of selectively differentiating people as subtyping.  When we encounter someone who contradicts a stereotype, we don’t necessarily abandon the stereotype.  Instead, we mentally place that individual into a special category.  The beloved athlete therefore doesn’t disprove the prejudice; he becomes an exception that allows it to remain intact.

In addition to cognitive dissonance and subtyping, sports introduce another powerful psychological force: social identity.  Human beings naturally categorize people into groups—particularly us and them.  Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, geography and countless other characteristics often create those boundaries— but sports can rearrange them remarkably quickly.  Put an athlete in the uniform of our favorite team and suddenly another identity becomes more important.

He’s a Tiger.  He’s a Yankee.  He’s a Patriot.  He’s a Knick.

Most importantly, he’s one of us.

His touchdown becomes our touchdown.  His home run becomes our home run. His success becomes connected to our identity, our community and even our happiness.

Take for example the symbolism of the sports jersey.  A person who ordinarily expresses prejudice toward a particular racial or ethnic group may happily spend $150 to walk around with the last name of someone from that very group written across his back.  For several hours on game day, race seemingly becomes irrelevant.

But is that really colorblindness?  Perhaps sometimes it is.  Sports unquestionably provide opportunities for people to admire individuals from backgrounds different from their own.  That exposure can challenge stereotypes and potentially change attitudes, though admiration for an athlete doesn’t necessarily translate into greater acceptance of everyone who looks like that athlete.  The player may instead become valued primarily because of what he provides—touchdowns, points, victories, championships and entertainment.

But what happens when the uniform comes off?  The Black quarterback adored on Sunday becomes an ordinary Black man on Monday.  The Latino baseball star whose jersey someone proudly wears becomes an unknown Latino man standing beside that same fan at the grocery store.  The admiration for a minority athlete on the field will occasionally transfer off the field, but often things stay the same — cheer for the player on the field, but see him a different, less positive way off the field.

Final thoughts

Sports can teach us a lot, including some fascinating lessons about prejudice.  Team identity demonstrates that people are capable of looking beyond racial and ethnic differences remarkably quickly when another shared identity becomes more important.  Unfortunately, we have also learned that those feelings don’t always transfer beyond the field.  For a few hours, sports can bring people together in ways that everyday life often cannot — even the most ardent racist may enthusiastically cheer for, admire, and proudly wear the jersey of an athlete from a racial or ethnic group he otherwise despises.  But when the game ends and that shared team identity disappears, old prejudices can quickly return. Perhaps the real challenge isn’t learning how to see beyond our differences; sports have already shown us that we can.  The challenge is learning to do it after the game ends and the players come off the field.

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The importance of accepting defeat

When people don’t like an outcome today, there is a growing temptation to declare that something must have been unfair, biased, corrupt, or “rigged.”  Certainly, legitimate cheating and injustice occur and should be challenged, but there is an enormous difference between questioning an outcome because there is credible evidence something went wrong and questioning it simply because we don’t like the result.  In other words, we need to retain the ability to distinguish between “I don’t like this outcome” and “this outcome wasn’t legitimate.”

Psychologically, our difficulty doing this isn’t surprising.  Losing hurts because it threatens the ego and conflicts with what we want to believe about ourselves and the groups with which we identify.  If I believe my team is better than your team and your team wins, I can acknowledge that perhaps you were better that day — or find another explanation that feels a lot better, like the officials cheated us, the coach played favorites, or the game was rigged.

Psychologists call this self-serving bias — our tendency to take credit for positive outcomes while blaming outside forces for negative ones.  There is also a locus-of-control component.  Instead of asking what could have been done differently, it’s much easier to ask, Who did this to me?

This cultural shift becomes particularly concerning when it reaches youth sports.  Consider a 12-year-old baseball player who strikes out to end a championship game.  A parent can say, “I know that hurts. You played hard.  Sometimes you lose.  Let’s learn from it and get better.”

Or the parent can say, “That umpire screwed you. You guys should have won.”

The second response probably feels better walking to the parking lot.  The first may serve that child considerably better for the rest of his life.

Final thoughts

It is very possible — in fact, likely — that at some point in the future your child won’t make a team, isn’t selected as an All-Star, loses a starting position, or doesn’t receive an award.  Sometimes politics, favoritism, poor officiating, and genuinely unfair decisions occur.  But if unfairness becomes our default explanation whenever we don’t get what we wanted, what incentive does a young person have to examine shortcomings, work harder, and improve?  One of the most important lessons sports can teach young people isn’t how to win, but how to lose, accept the result, shake someone’s hand, learn something — and come back even stronger tomorrow.

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Are we surprised by any of this?  Should we be surprised?  Some argue that modern college athletics have spent decades creating exactly this environment, even if they act surprised by it today.

University recruitment methods & attracting star players

Look at what happens when an elite high school athlete is recruited today.  Universities don’t simply offer a scholarship, they roll out the red carpet.  Universities produce cinematic recruiting videos, and coaches tell recruits they are transformational talents who will change the future of the program.  Fans help by celebrating 5 star  commitments like championships.  NIL opportunities are quickly set up (sometimes in the millions of dollars), and social media followers explode.  The athlete is elevated from teenager to celebrity before ever taking a college snap.

Then, after years of telling these athletes they are extraordinary, we suddenly become shocked when some of them begin believing it.

This isn’t really about Jayden Daniels, but about the culture college sports has intentionally created.  Universities have become remarkably sophisticated marketers that don’t merely recruit athletes—they build brands.  They tell young players they are special, indispensable, and the future face of the program.  Those messages aren’t accidental, they’re designed to persuade the nation’s best recruits to choose one school over another.

The irony is that the very behaviors rewarded by universities during recruiting are often criticized later by the very fans who built the recruit up to feel invincible.

• We praise the athlete’s confidence until it becomes perceived as arrogance.
• We celebrate the athlete’s personal branding until the athlete protects that brand.
• We encourage athletes to think of themselves as businesses, then criticize them when they begin making business decisions.

To be clear, none of this means Daniels was necessarily right in how he handled the dispute.  Adults remain responsible for their own choices, and there can be healthy debate over his decision to involve attorneys over the jersey issue.  But saying Daniels is wrong after LSU did everything in their power to recruit him is ironic, to say the least.

How we got here

Psychologists have long recognized that people adapt to the environments that reward them.  When special treatment, constant praise, exclusive access, and celebrity status become everyday experiences, they begin shaping expectations.  If universities spend years reinforcing the message that a player is unlike everyone else, should we really be surprised when that player expects to continue being treated differently after leaving campus?

Perhaps the real issue isn’t athlete entitlement, but institutional inconsistency.

College athletics increasingly asks elite recruits to view themselves as brands while simultaneously expecting them to behave like traditional student-athletes when doing so becomes inconvenient.  Schools eagerly benefit from the publicity these stars generate, but when conflicts arise, many are quick to distance themselves from the very culture they helped create.

Final thoughts

Maybe Jayden Daniels deserves criticism, but maybe LSU deserves criticism, too.  Or maybe both are simply behaving exactly as modern college athletics has taught them to behave — universities today promise the sky, and top athletes learn that they can have just about anything they want.  When that paradigm shifts (as is what is happening with Daniels right now), feathers get ruffled and fingers get pointed.  Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with Jayden Daniels?” perhaps the better question is, “What kind of system have we created?”  If we continue treating 17-year-old recruits like celebrities, marketing them as brands, and telling them they’re bigger than the program, we shouldn’t act surprised when some eventually begin believing exactly what they’ve been told.

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That perception may deserve another look.

Changes in D3 athletics

Over the past two decades, D3 athletics have quietly undergone one of the most significant transformations in college sports. Many small colleges have invested millions of dollars into athletic facilities, hired full-time coaching staffs, expanded recruiting efforts, and added new varsity sports.  Walk onto many D3 campuses today and you’ll find state-of-the-art weight rooms, artificial turf fields, beautiful stadiums, sports performance centers, and facilities that rival those found at some Division II—and even lower-level Division I—institutions.

Why the dramatic investment?

Many colleges have discovered that athletics are far more than an extracurricular activity—athletics have become an important enrollment strategy.  Student-athletes often remain on campus, become actively involved in college life, graduate at high rates, and contribute to a vibrant campus culture.  As competition among colleges for students has intensified, athletics has become an increasingly attractive way to recruit talented young people.

The athletes themselves have changed as well.  Today’s D3 athletes arrive on campus with years of travel sports experience, private instruction, strength training, and specialized coaching.  Simply put, many are far more skilled than D3 athletes of a generation ago.  The result is a level of competition that surprises many people who still picture D3 through the lens of the 1990s or early 2000s.

Some of the biggest changes in Division III athletics include:

• Major facility upgrades. This including modern stadiums, turf fields, weight rooms, and athletic performance centers.
• Professionalized coaching staffs. D3 schools now have more full-time coaches dedicated to recruiting and player development.
• Higher-quality athletes.  Many D3 athletes arrive after years of travel sports, private instruction, and year-round training.  The D3 competition today is far superior than just 10-15 years ago.
• A stronger emphasis on the total college experience.  D3 schools often place great emphasis on balancing competitive athletics with academics, internships, leadership, and campus involvement.

Perhaps the biggest change, however, isn’t found in the facilities, or even in the quality of play — it’s found in the mindset of families.  Years ago, the question many parents asked was, “Can my child play college sports?”   Today, increasingly more families ask a different question: “Where will my child have the best overall college experience?”  Those are very different conversations that often lead to two very different future paths.

For many student athletes, Division III provides an outstanding balance of competitive athletics, excellent academics, leadership opportunities, internships, study abroad experiences, and campus involvement.  Student-athletes can continue competing at a high level while still enjoying many of the opportunities that make college such an important period of personal growth.  For some families, that combination is becoming more appealing than the increasingly business-like atmosphere surrounding major college athletics.

None of this is meant to suggest that Division I or Division II athletics are inferior.  Each NCAA division offers unique opportunities and challenges depending on the athlete and his or her goals.  The point is that Division III has evolved dramatically, yet many families continue making college decisions based on outdated assumptions.

Final thoughts

Perhaps it’s time to stop viewing D3 as a consolation prize and instead recognize it for what it has quietly become: a destination of choice for thousands of talented student-athletes seeking an exceptional college experience.  Sometimes the best fit isn’t determined by the biggest stadium, the most recognizable logo, or the highest NCAA division.  Sometimes it’s determined by finding the place where a young person can grow, compete, and thrive for the next four years.

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AI vs. human coaching

At first glance, the possibilities of having AI coach kids sounds exciting.  Imagine every young athlete having access to personalized feedback that was once available only to professionals.  AI can identify mechanical flaws, track improvement over time, monitor workloads, and provide objective performance data.  There is no doubt that AI has the potential to make quality coaching more accessible than ever before — especially for kids.

While those are remarkable advances, there is another side to the conversation that needs to be discussed.  The greatest coaches have never simply taught mechanics, they teach confidence, leadership, and resilience.  Great coaches teach sportsmanship, how to respond after failure, and how to communicate with teammates.  They also teach kids how to focus, set personal goals, and how to keep nerves in check during game situations.  All of these kinds of lessons are difficult to reduce to an AI algorithm.

The danger isn’t that AI will replace great coaches overnight, but that we begin believing coaching is simply the transfer of technical information.  Coaching is fundamentally a human relationship, one that is built on trust and belief.  Young athletes rarely remember a coach’s practice plan twenty years later, but what they do remember is the coach who believed in them when nobody else did, challenged them to become better people, or inspired them to persevere after disappointment.

AI might be great at developing a workout schedule or creating a highlight video, but AI lacks the human touch that coaches provide to kids by means of role modeling, inspiration, and self-belief.  In fact, many adults immediately point back to a particular coach who gave them the strength and courage to do great things — it’s doubtful AI can generate those same feelings the way a great coach can.

Final thoughts

Perhaps the coach model for the future won’t rely on AI exclusively, but instead a hybrid model that includes advanced technology, but also human coaches who can teach and reinforce important concepts and data provided by AI.  Imagine coaches using AI to analyze performance, organize information, and identify trends while continuing to provide the encouragement, accountability, wisdom, and relationships that technology cannot duplicate.  When AI is used that way, it becomes an extraordinary tool rather than a replacement.

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Youth sports and building your brand

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with athletes promoting themselves.  Social media allows young people to share accomplishments, celebrate teammates, connect with recruiters, and build relationships that simply weren’t possible a generation ago.  The ability to communicate directly with coaches and showcase athletic ability has opened legitimate opportunities for many student-athletes.  The question is whether we’ve unintentionally changed the focus for kids participating in youth sports.  Instead of simply becoming better athletes, increasingly more young people experience mental health issues due to feeling pressure to become their own sport marketers.

Today’s youth sport athletes are often encouraged to:

• Build a social media following.
• Create highlight videos.
• Develop a recognizable personal image.
• Post consistently to increase visibility.
• Think about future NIL opportunities.
• Do anything and everything to get noticed, get clicks, go viral, and stand out from other kids also trying to get noticed by college coaches.

None of these activities directly improve an athlete’s ability to throw a baseball, shoot a basketball, or hit a tennis ball, yet they consume a lot of time and emotional energy.

Adolescence is already a mental health period when young people are trying to answer one of life’s most important questions: “Who am I?”  Sports can be a wonderful place to discover confidence, resilience, teamwork, and purpose. But when an athlete begins measuring success through followers, likes, and online engagement, identity can quietly shift from performance to popularity.

Instead of asking, “Am I becoming a better athlete?” the question becomes, “Am I becoming more visible?”

Ironically, the athletes who ultimately build the strongest reputations often do so by focusing relentlessly on their performance rather than their image.  Their brand becomes a byproduct of excellence—not the other way around.  Today, however, we have kids putting more time into beefing up their social media pages than they do putting extra time into practicing their sport!

None of this is meant to be an argument against NIL or social media, as both have created meaningful opportunities for athletes.  The growing concerns I raise center around introducing adult-like NIL and social media conversations too early, especially at young ages where kids should be focusing on developing sport skills, training their bodies, and learning how to work well with others on a sports team.  Childhood and adolescence should still be about learning, competing, failing, improving, and simply enjoying sports — a personal brand can always be built later.

Final thoughts

Maybe the goal of youth sports shouldn’t be raising athletes with the strongest online presence, but instead about raising young people who love to compete, respect their teammates, and discover who they are long before they worry about who the internet thinks they should become.  Help kids grow and develop through sports, including embracing the countless life skills sports teaches that prepare kids to grow into successful adults.  Youth sports should be about fun, not constantly posting sport metrics and videos designed to build a brand and get clicks.

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But here’s the bigger question: Is this really about sports anymore?

Increasingly, it appears the answer is no.  We are now living in the era when everything becomes a bet.

Understanding the psychology behind gambling

The rapid growth of legal sports betting has revealed something much bigger about human psychology: People aren’t simply drawn to football games or horse races, they are drawn to uncertainty.  Humans are naturally curious about the future, and we enjoy making predictions, testing our judgment, and wondering what will happen next.  Add the possibility of winning money, and that curiosity becomes even more compelling.

Psychologists have long understood that one of the most powerful ways to reinforce behavior is through variable-ratio reinforcement—the same principle that makes slot machines so addictive.  You don’t win every time, and that’s exactly the point.  Because the reward is unpredictable, the brain continues anticipating that the next wager might be the big one.  Each near miss, small win, or unexpected payout releases dopamine, encouraging people to return for another try.  Ironically, uncertainty itself becomes rewarding.

The rapid growth of legal sports betting has revealed something much bigger about human psychology: People aren’t simply drawn to football games or horse races, they are drawn to uncertainty.

Many bettors also develop an illusion of control, believing that careful research, intuition, or sports knowledge allows them to predict outcomes better than others.  While knowledge certainly has value, the unpredictable nature of sports—and life—means chance always remains part of the equation.  Yet people routinely overestimate their ability to forecast events, a phenomenon psychologists refer to as overconfidence bias.

Then there is FOMO, or the fear of missing out.  Betting has become a shared social experience — friends compare wagers, social media celebrates big wins, and television broadcasts routinely flash betting odds across the screen.  For many people, not participating begins to feel like missing the conversation.  What was once a niche hobby has rapidly become normalized.

Perhaps the most interesting psychological trait involved is sensation seeking.  Some people naturally crave novelty, excitement, and stimulation.  Betting transforms ordinary events into emotionally charged experiences.  Suddenly, a meaningless Tuesday night baseball game between two last-place teams becomes must-see television if money is riding on the outcome.

Betting beyond sports

If uncertainty is what people truly crave, then perhaps sports are only the beginning.

Today, prediction markets and other wagering platforms allow people to speculate on events far beyond authentic athletic competition.  Depending on the platform and legal jurisdiction, people may predict political outcomes, entertainment awards, economic indicators, and other future events.  The object of the wager is becoming less important than the simple fact that there is an unknown outcome to predict.

That raises an important question: If people enjoy wagering on uncertainty itself, where does it stop?

Will we eventually see betting attached to nearly every significant event?  Corporate announcements?  Television finales?  Scientific breakthroughs?  International diplomacy?  At what point does every uncertain outcome become another opportunity to place a wager?

Final thoughts

The more betting becomes integrated into everyday life, the more we risk changing our relationship with the events themselves.  Do we watch a football game because we appreciate athletic excellence, teamwork, and competition?  Or because we have money on the point spread?  Do we follow current events because we want to understand the world, or because we’re looking for the next betting opportunity?

History has shown that technology often removes barriers to behaviors people already enjoy.  Sports betting no longer requires a trip to Las Vegas or an illegal bookmaker — it now lives in our pockets, available with a few taps on a smartphone.  As access becomes easier and betting opportunities expand, we may discover that the biggest story isn’t the legalization of sports gambling, but instead the gradual gamification of uncertainty itself.

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Everyone has a voice today

Athletes host podcasts.  Former players produce YouTube channels.  Social media allows anyone to instantly share opinions with millions of followers.  In many ways, this is a positive development.  Fans gain direct access to athletes, and athletes no longer have to rely entirely on traditional media to tell their stories.

But there is also an unintended consequence.

We’ve reached a point where having an opinion often seems more valuable than having expertise.  Turn on sports television today and you’ll quickly notice that much of the discussion isn’t about the games themselves.  Instead, we’re treated to athlete podcasts, social media arguments, reactions to other reactions, celebrity appearances, and endless debates over comments someone made on another platform.  Before long, the original athletic competition almost feels secondary to the conversation surrounding it.

We’ve reached a point where having an opinion often seems more valuable than having expertise.

Why has this happened?  The answer may be surprisingly simple.  Attention has become one of the most valuable commodities in modern media.  Thoughtful, balanced discussions rarely go viral, but outrage and conflict does.  So do personal attacks, as well as bold predictions.  The louder and more controversial the opinion, the more clicks, views, and engagement it tends to generate.  Algorithms understand something psychologists have known for decades: people are naturally drawn to conflict, controversy, and novelty.  As a result, sports media increasingly rewards the most interesting voices rather than the most informed ones.

Ironically, many of today’s biggest sports stories aren’t actually about sports at all.  Instead, they revolve around what someone said about someone else.  One athlete makes a controversial comment, another athlete responds.  Next, a podcast discusses the response, and television shows debate the podcast.  Social media then reacts to the television debate.  Suddenly, an opinion has become a three-day news cycle, even though no actual competition took place.

None of this suggests athlete podcasts are inherently bad, as many provide fascinating insights into leadership, teamwork, preparation, and the realities of professional sports.  Giving athletes a direct voice is, in many respects, a positive step forward. The concern is what happens when media incentives reward controversy more than substance.

Final thoughts

Perhaps the question isn’t whether athletes should have podcasts or social media platforms, but whether we’ve confused having a platform with having something meaningful to say.  Sports have always produced extraordinary stories through authentic competition.  Hopefully, we don’t reach a point where the games themselves become merely the backdrop for the endless stream of opinions surrounding them.  The constant arguing and negativity can wear fans down, but until we stop clicking we should expect more rage, arguing, and sensational takes.

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