Jason Harper, Director, Rancho Cordova Athletic Association

Go watch a soccer field filled with six-year-olds. It’s chaos. Kids are everywhere. Some are chasing the ball. Some are chasing each other. One is probably picking grass. Another has stopped playing entirely because somebody’s dog walked by. The sidelines are packed with parents.

Now, go watch a game involving 16-year-olds. Something happened. Where did everybody go?

We spend enormous amounts of energy getting children into sports. We hold registration events. We advertise. We recruit coaches. We buy uniforms. We offer fee assistance. We build introductory programs. We build bridges. And it works. Little kids play sports.

Then, somewhere along the way, we start losing them.

By the teenage years, the funnel shrinks dramatically. Some attrition is natural. Kids discover music, theater, jobs, academics, and other interests. That’s healthy. Nobody should play a sport simply because an adult wants them to. But there is another group. They still love sports. They just don’t believe there is a place for them anymore.

That should bother us.

Because somewhere along the way, youth sports began confusing development with selection. At eight years old, everybody develops. At 10, we start separating. At 12, we start labeling: travel, competitive, elite, select, premier — and then there is everybody else.

By 14, the message can become clear: If you aren’t one of the best players in your age group right now, maybe this isn’t for you.

That’s a strange way to develop teenagers.

A 14-year-old boy may not remotely resemble the athlete he will become at 17. The seventh-grade girl sitting at the end of the bench may become a varsity starter. The awkward kid hasn’t necessarily reached his ceiling. He may simply be 14.

For a lot of kids, this is their Achilles’ heel.

It was mine.

I walked onto my high school campus at age 13. Yes, thirteen. As an October baby with parents who needed a second income, the alternative was essentially, “Put him in school.” So I started early.

Then high school athletics hit.

Before a five-inch growth spurt between ninth and 10th grade, I was physically behind the classmate who was already 15 as a freshman. By 19, I was at a NCAA Division I school with a year of college ball completed. Today, you can find 19-year-old seniors still playing high school sports. Compare that with me as a 16-year-old senior.

Three years during adolescence can represent an enormous difference in physical development.

Development isn’t linear. Kids grow at different rates physically, emotionally and socially. Confidence comes at different times. Coordination changes. Bodies change. Interests change. Some kids explode early. Others arrive late. Yet our sports systems often make permanent decisions based on temporary versions of children.

We can do better. There should be another doorway — a place for the teenager who says, “I’m not done yet.”

Maybe he isn’t ready for baseball. Fine. Keep playing baseball. Maybe she didn’t make the competitive soccer team. Fine. Keep playing soccer. Maybe he sat on the bench last season. Get stronger. Maybe she just discovered basketball at 13. Welcome.

The answer shouldn’t always be another $3,000 travel team. Sometimes a kid simply needs a field, a coach, teammates, meaningful competition, and another year to develop.

That is one of the next great challenges for community sports. We have become pretty good at introducing children to games. Now we need to become better at keeping the door open.

That means recreational opportunities for teenagers, developmental leagues, open gyms, strength programs, clinics, school partnerships, and alternative levels of competition. Most importantly, it means adults willing to coach kids who haven’t finished products yet.

Coaching the superstar feels special. Coaching the kid nobody knows is going to become good yet maybe even more important.

Give me the second kid. Give me the undersized 16-year-old senior. That kid has probably had to learn to work, grind, and compete. The bigger, older athlete might look across the field and think, “I’m three years older. I’m twice as strong as this runt.”

Maybe.

But that runt may have spent his entire athletic life learning how to fight, outwork, outhustle, and out-effort everyone around him.

Sports aren’t supposed to identify finished athletes.They’re supposed to help build them.

And there is another reason these matter. A 15-year-old who belongs to a team has somewhere to be Tuesday afternoon. Someone notices when he doesn’t show up. Someone expects something from her. There are teammates counting on them. An adult says, “See you tomorrow.”

Those things matter far beyond a scoreboard.

This is one reason the Rancho Cordova Athletic Association exists. This city believes kids who want to keep playing should have recreational opportunities — opportunities that recognize that development doesn’t happen on the same timetable for every kid.

Belonging matters. Purpose matters. Being expected somewhere matters.

For younger children, sports are mostly about play.

For teenagers, sports can become something deeper: identity, friendship, structure, confidence and a place to belong during some of the most complicated years of growing up.

So maybe our biggest youth sports question isn’t only, “How many kids can we get to sign up?”

Maybe it’s: “How many can we keep playing?”

Look at that field filled with six-year-olds again. Hundreds of possibilities running around. Some will become great athletes. Most won’t. That’s okay.

Our responsibility isn’t to turn every child into a varsity starter. It is to make sure we don’t unnecessarily close the gate before they have had the chance to find out who they might become.

Sometimes developing an athlete requires great coaching. Sometimes it requires better facilities. Sometimes it requires thousands of repetitions.

And sometimes it requires something much simpler.

One more season.