They sorted the children onto two teams — the one their parents can afford and the one they cannot — and the movement that calls itself the party of family calls it freedom. An AP-Ipsos poll released this week puts a number on what every coach in every small town has been watching for two generations (Linley Sanders, Associated Press): among K-12 parents earning at least $100,000 a year, roughly seven in ten say their children play organized sports; among parents earning less, only about four in ten say the same. About half of all American K-12 kids play a structured sport. The other half — the working half — were not so much excluded as filtered out, by the registration fee and the equipment list and the travel costs that follow. Parents love their kids, and not every child thrives on travel ball, and some families choose other things — music, hunting with their father, the parish choir, helping with the hay. That is the small case. It does not explain a thirty-point gap between the household income brackets.
The other half is the half I have lived. I grew up in Friendship, Wisconsin, on a parish team at St. Leo’s — the small frame Catholic church the immigrant Catholic families of this county built in 1884. We played basketball three nights a week in the parish gym and baseball on Saturdays at the diamond behind the elementary school. The uniforms came out of the Sunday collection. The coach was a man named Marv who had a son on the team. The umpires were two retired railroad men who did it because their grandsons were in the league. There was no registration fee because there was no registration; you showed up at the gym on a Tuesday in early November and Father Angelo put your name on the list. My mother did not write a single check for any of it. She bought me a pair of basketball shoes at the Kmart in Wisconsin Rapids, and that was the end of our family’s financial obligation to the Adams County Boys Basketball League for the year.
There is a reason that system is gone. The leagues and the parish gyms and the volunteer coaches were all part of the same ecology as the railroad yard, the parish festival, the VFW hall on Saturday nights, and the county fair in late summer. When the railroad shed its crews and the paper mills up the road idled and the Diocese consolidated its rural parishes, the ecology thinned, and the leagues thinned with it. What filled the gap was the market. The travel-ball club. The three-hundred-dollar tournament fee. The fifteen-hundred dollars it now costs to outfit a child for a single season of a sport that used to cost a pair of cleats and a glove handed down from an older brother. The showcase weekend two states over that the family with two cars and a flexible schedule could afford, and the family with one car and shift work could not. The poll’s two numbers — seven in ten, four in ten — are not measuring parental love. They are measuring what parental love can buy in a country that has quietly allowed the commons of childhood to be enclosed. Conserve what, exactly?
What dissolved here is not a consumer product. It is a community institution. The local recreation league — the one the American Legion and the VFW and the Lions Club used to sponsor, the one run by volunteer coaches on the school field after practice, the one that took any kid who showed up with a glove and a pair of cleats — was a piece of the civic fabric the same way the parish was, the same way the co-op is, the same way the local paper was. Its job was not to sort children by their parents’ adjusted gross income. Its job was to put them on the same field.
The mechanism is older than I am. The mill closes, the tax base goes with it, the council cuts the rec department because the rec department is not in the state mandate, the league folds, the club circuit absorbs the kids whose parents can write the check, and the field that used to take any child who showed up now reads the household income at the gate. The parent who tries to do the right thing — enroll the kid, get her off the couch, let her learn to lose a game and come back — finds that the price of admission is the price of a small mortgage, and the doors that used to be open have been replaced by gates that read the household income before they read the name. This is the same dissolution that has eaten the rail job, the school, the parish, the hall, the newspaper. The anxiety over household costs that has now reached even the highest earners is the same accounting, written one zip code further up the income ladder. The country that built these institutions wonders why its children are walking away from the institutions that were supposed to hold them. Youth sports have not been destroyed by a single villain. They have been re-priced, and the working-class kid is the one who can no longer afford to play on the town team.
I will make the grammar plain. The party that calls itself conservative — the one that says it is for the family, the local institution, the small town, the country way of life — has presided over the largest single transfer of civic wealth from the common to the private in American history. The school athletic program. The municipal rec department. The community swim team. The little-league field behind the school. Each one was a commons. Each one was sold, defunded, outsourced, or replaced by a consumer product. The parents who cannot write the check are not opting out. They are being cut out — by the same logic that says a working rancher’s son should not be surprised to find the brand auctioned and the herd dispersed, because the market is efficient and the family had its time.
I will grant the harder steelman. I will grant that the club team often does the better job on the metrics we say we care about — better coaching, better facilities, sharper competition. I will grant that a family that budgets for travel hockey is exercising the freedom the conservative movement claims to defend. I will grant that the rec league that folded in your town was not stolen by anyone in particular; the rec department was a line item, and the line item lost. None of this saves the argument. The dissolution of a community institution is not a budget problem. It is the market doing what markets do — sorting — and the people sorted out are children, and they do not get a vote, and the institution that used to put them on the same field is gone. And the people who are losing it are the ones who never had a say in the sale.
There is a counter-model, and it is older than the league that is gone. It is the parish raffle — the one your mother bought tickets for in the fall, the one that bought the new uniforms that spring. It is Coach Ernie, who drove the yellow school bus to the away game because his own boy was catching. It is the American Legion post that wrote the check for the new backstop because the post had a meeting on the second Tuesday and the commander knew whose kid was up next. It is the school district that kept athletics in the curriculum because the school board still met in the high school gym and the parents in the bleachers could look the members in the eye. It is the local YMCA before the Y went corporate, where the membership card was thirty dollars and the swim team was free. It is the cooperative — actually member-owned, actually member-governed — that decides what its money is for and decides the kids get a field. The progressive instinct here is not wrong, and I will say so plainly — a country rich enough to put a man on the moon can afford a pair of cleats for every child in Adams County. But the federal program is the wrong instrument, and the federal program’s instinct — to treat childhood as a uniform commodity delivered in identical packaging to every ZIP code — is exactly the mistake the market has already made. The answer is the older one. It is local. It is the rebuilt parish gym and the volunteer coach who is still teaching teamwork because the coach is still there. It is the school board that funds the team out of the public budget the way it once funded the band and the janitor and the heat in the building. It is the co-op rec league that puts the directors on the same footing as the parents and the kids, because they all have a stake. None of this is socialism. None of it is the state. It is the distributed answer — the same thing the rentier corporation and the centralized state both want to control, the local institution can do better, and at a fraction of the cost, and with the people who actually live there choosing how.
It is harder to build now than it was in 1965, because the same dissolution has been eating the institutions that would have built it — the parish, the lodge, the school board, the local paper — and rebuilding any one of them is a longer row than I have left to hoe. But the alternative is what the poll is showing us: a childhood sorted by tax return, and a movement that calls itself the party of family calling it freedom. This is what we are trying to learn again here, in the same county, on the same kind of field. We do it small. We do it volunteer. We do it with cleats passed down and uniforms outgrown and Father Angelo’s memory at our back. The gym is open on Tuesday nights, the lights are on, and the coach’s son is checking his shoes at the door. It is not enough. But it is the only direction that does not ask some distant fund manager to approve of your son’s jump shot before he is allowed to take it.