The statistics don’t lie, and every one of us has a role to play.
Having done some work with WSL academy staff around the “retain and release” process, it got me thinking about how sports actually present their programmes to parents and young people in the first place.
Deep down, most of us know the chances of a young person becoming an Olympian, or turning professional in football or any other sport, are incredibly slim. Plenty of sports parents still dream, and still hold those expectations regardless.
Bill Mallon, past president and co-founder of the International Society of Olympic Historians, has worked out the odds of making a Summer Olympic team against the world’s population, landing on roughly 1 in 562,400.
In the US, surveys show 67% of parents hope their child earns a college scholarship, while 34% dream of them making an Olympic team or turning professional. It’s one thing to fantasise. It’s another to be convinced — fully 40% of parents with young athletes describe themselves as “certain” or “fairly sure” their child’s gold medal or pro contract ambitions will come true.
According to NCAA statistics, only a tiny percentage of high school athletes ever make it all the way to professional sport:
- 1 in 610 (0.16%) get drafted by a Major League Baseball team.
- 1 in 10,399 (0.0096%) get picked by an NBA team.
- 1 in 12,873 (0.0077%) get chosen by a WNBA team.
- 1 in 3,960 (0.025%) get picked by an NFL team.
I’ve always been open in our WWPIS workshops about my own children, and the fact that I have more chance of being hit by a meteor than my son playing professional football, this despite him signing a Category 1 football contract at the age of nine.
None of this is about stunting dreams. Children should absolutely be encouraged to reach for the stars, it’s far better to have a dream than none at all. However, it’s our responsibility as adults to keep these statistics somewhere in the back of our minds when we’re making decisions about, or supporting, our young children.
I like the meteor analogy myself, but Tony Fretwell, former Barclays FAWSL Academy Manager, once put it a different way that painted just as clear a picture. When we’re sold a holiday, the brochure is 99% about the glamour, the hotels, the beaches, the pools, the attractions with a small disclaimer somewhere about the things that could go wrong. That disclaimer is a fair reflection of how unlikely those things actually are.
In sport, and football especially, we face very similar odds of a child turning professional yet we often sell our programmes in reverse. We sell the dream and the glamour first, when we’d probably be better off selling the journey, and everything a young person genuinely gains along the way. We need to show far more of how we’re actually going to develop a young person, with perhaps a final 1% acknowledging there’s a chance, at the very end of that journey, of turning professional.
A number of the clubs we work with are already being proactive about this. Talking to parents early, being upfront about the possibility of release, and gently encouraging parents to expect they may have to deal with it at some point, genuinely helps. It starts paving the way for any disappointment that might follow, while reassuring parents that the club will still work hard to develop both the person and the player, whatever the outcome.
Both sporting organisations and parents have a real part to play here. There’s something genuinely powerful about sporting success, how we as a population see it, and how the media fuels and portrays it. Do we, as parents, place too much emphasis on it?
That will differ from household to household, and sport to sport. But if we go in realistically understanding the odds, and feel properly supported along the way, does that give us a better chance of managing our own expectations, and our children’s, sensibly?
Plenty of people working in sport cite unrealistic parental expectations as one of the biggest issues they encounter. I’ll admit, it’s a parent’s prerogative to be a little biased toward their own child, that’s simply human nature. The real question is whether sporting organisations do enough, particularly early in a child’s journey, to help align those expectations properly.
We want parents to hold expectations of the right things: physical and holistic progress, character development, life skills, and positive relationships with coaches and teammates.
When we buy a lottery ticket, we already know the odds of winning the jackpot are vanishingly small. So when the results come in, whether it’s an email or a trip to the shop counter, we still feel that little rush of excitement in the moment. More often than not, we’ve won a tenner or nothing at all, and we move on quickly, because our expectations were already in proportion to the actual odds.
In sport, faced with similarly long odds, our reaction can look very different.
There are plenty of great reasons to play youth sport that have nothing to do with scholarships, Olympic medals, or professional contracts. Focus on those, and you’ll likely celebrate far more wins along the way, without running the risk of being crushed by however the journey ultimately ends. I’m confident, too, that your children will get far more out of their sporting experience if we can all get better at taking this approach.
