Girls (and Boys) Just Want to Have Fun

The “F Word” has again surfaced in youth sports. That’s “fun,” of course.

As reported in today’s New York Times Peter Barston, a sophomore at Fairfield prep in Connecticut, has conducted a research project – by his own admission not scientific – that shows young athletes play sports for fun more than any other reason.

Barston began the project after taking a survey at the urging of his father, Mike, a board member of a local junior football league. He thought it would be interesting to localize the survey.

His questionnaire is a single page listing 11 reasons children might have for playing sports, including having fun and making friends to the more serious: to win and to earn a college scholarship. Like the survey he took, which was from Michigan State researchers, Barston asked the local players to assign points based on the importance of the reasons for a total of 100.

So far Barston has polled about 255 members of the Darien Junior Football League, who range from fourth grade to eighth grade, and 470 boys and girls in the same grades from the Darien basketball league. He plans to continue with other sports this spring.

The Times says: “From the mound of data he gathered, Barston found a striking pattern. No matter how he categorized the responses, the most important reason youngsters gave for playing sports was the same: to have fun. That was the top response from football and basketball players, from boys and from girls, and from players in each grade from fourth to eighth. In the basketball survey, 95 percent of boys and 98 percent of girls cited fun as a reason for playing, nearly twice the number who mentioned winning.”

The results thus far of Barston’s survey seem to mirror those of the Michigan State researchers Martha Ewing and Vern Seefeldt back in 1989. Their study of 28,000 boys and girls around the country asked, Why do you play sports? The top answer then was “fun,” followed by “to do something I’m good at” and “to improve my skills.” “Winning” did not crack the top 10.

The article reminded me of two recent conversations: one was with a woman I coached in soccer when she was 15. She left the team after 9th grade to concentrate on lacrosse and went on to play for a nationally ranked Division 1 school. But “It just isn’t fun at that level,” she told me. The other was of a friend whose daughter played soccer at a Division 1 school a year ago and did well enough to crack the starting line-up by the end of freshman year. But last year she transferred to a Division 3 school (where she was all-conference) for sophomore year. I asked her father why. “She wasn’t having fun,” he said.