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People my age tend to grumble about how today’s youth are obsessed with their electronic devices and as a result are missing out on outdoor recreational opportunities.
While I tend to agree with this view, upon reflection, I am not sure how much today’s young people differ from my generation and the one in between.
Growing up in the late 1950s and the 1960s, we were pretty creative about our recreational entertainment, more out of necessity than anything else.
For example, my brother and I conjured up a game known simply as “Off the Chimney” in which we would pitch a ball to each other using the chimney of our house as a backstop with an outline of a strike zone. We used a smaller bat and a whiffle ball and designated certain markers to determine outcomes; there was no running of bases. A batted ball that got past the pitcher was a single, a ball into the neighbors’ window well was a double, a line drive into our garage was a triple and a ball off the neighbor’s house was a homerun. Breaking the neighbor’s window resulted in automatic forfeiture and an undetermined suspension by our dad. This game provided hours of entertainment and required only two people.
I also recall playing a lot of pickup games involving multiple players in a variety of sports. I was fortunate to live a short walk from an elementary school where there were plenty of courts and fields to accommodate these makeshift games. I would routinely leave the house in the morning armed with a basketball, football, baseball bat, glove and ball as well as a tennis racket not knowing on any given day who was going to show up and what we were going to play.
I also remember my mom being upset with my brother and me for staying indoors too much due to our obsession with a baseball game played with dice and cards of individual baseball players known as APBA baseball. We would play this game incessantly, keep statistics and match major league players and teams against each other. I learned later in life that many people my age were hooked on these dice baseball games, the most popular of which were APBA and Strat-O-Matic.
The only organized sport that was available to us was Little League baseball, which my brother played but I did not. I preferred the pickup games, rejecting the pressure that organized ball imposed.
When I became the parent of three boys, things had changed, but maybe not as much as I remember. We have a sizeable back lot where many pickup games were played, resulting in multiple sprained muscles and broken bones and subsequently, unhappy parents. Regina Coeli was also walking distance for the larger pickup games.
I had tried to get my kids interested in my dice games but to no avail. At that time, Atari and Nintendo had begun introducing video games. I remember being fascinated by Super Mario Brothers and the Duck Hunt, which seem archaic by today’s standards. But in their day, they were fun – and obsessive.
The other change that had been made from my generation was the advent of organized everything. It seemed that every sport the kids played, even as young as 5 years of age, had to be organized. This included soccer, baseball and basketball. Kathe and I, and most parents of this generation, found ourselves having to drive our kids everywhere to play these sports in an organized fashion.
I got the bug to coach youth sports and fell into the norms of the times, holding organized practices in order to play organized games, all in an orderly fashion. We parent-coaches thought we were doing a favor to our kids but in retrospect it was probably overkill, and in fact, we may have driven them to the comfort of their video games.
Parenthetically, I discovered while coaching youth, that baseball was failure-oriented while soccer was success-oriented, which explains clearly to me why more kids are playing soccer and fewer are playing baseball. Think about it, even at the Major League level, one hit out of three, an average of .333 probably gets you in the Hall of Fame. That same player has failed two out of three times. An 8-year-old could go 0 for the season and we still expect them to have fun?
Whereas in soccer, if the young player kicks the ball in the right direction, they are showered with encouragement and applause.
Meanwhile, as the pressure was put on the kids to succeed in the respective sports, they found their escape to be the video games that they could better control.
So here I am a grandparent with grandchildren still too little to be corrupted by what lies ahead. The innocence and likelihood of a pickup game will likely never be seen. More likely is an early career in organized sports, perhaps soccer or T-ball. Inevitably, they will be drawn to the electronic versions of the games in which we participated and watched live.
And now there is esports, a billion-dollar industry that draws the best electronic gamers to their video screens for hard-fought competition against each other. These competitions are played indoors with seating available for spectators who can root for their favorite video game player.
We’ve come a long way from the days of pickup competition and dice games. Or have we? Thanks to organized sports we have placed enough pressure on our youth that we have driven them back indoors to become obsessed with their technology.
Time will tell where this will lead; it’s possible that as esports grow and become even more organized, kids will find comfort in outdoor pickup games again.
Regardless, I am guessing I can throw away my “Off the Chimney” rule book.
Harry Paidas is faculty emeritus at Mount Union and writes a monthly column for The Review. He can be reached at paidashp@mountunion.edu.
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