Playing Junkyard Sports

By JO GLADING DILORENZO

Originally published in the Newhampshire Gazette on: Thursday, May 04, 2006

One rainy day last month, one of my daughters and I were sitting together sharing a moment of boredom. To me this is luxury. To my 9-year-old daughter, it's the end of the world.

She scanned the room, picked up her cousin's jacks and asked me to teach her the game. We played, but unless I intentionally threw the game I won every time, which was even more boring than unstructured boredom.

So we changed the game on the fly, assigning point values to each color. That leveled the playing field fast but soon we'd both mastered that. Then my daughter took a jack, snapped it between her fingers and spun it like a top. We were on to another new game: spinning jacks.

The play stretched on, each of us adding a new twist - a penny, a tiny Mojo JoJo action figure. The farther out the window we threw the rules, and the more random objects we threw into the game, the better it got.

We didn't know at the time but our little game had all the makings of a revolution. Our crazy jacks was a ''junkyard'' game. That's ''healthy competition'' guru Bernie DeKoven's chosen name for a new - he calls it revolutionary - approach to athletics and recreation that seeks to put people, not sports, at the center of recreation programs.

Since 1971 (that's before steroids had turned average ball players into hitters roughly the size of the Incredible Hulk) DeKoven has been devising new ways of bringing simple joy to community sports. His 1971 book ''The Well Played Game'' described a philosophy of ''healthy competition'' that helped revolutionize physical education programs in the U.S. Over the years, the Ideal Toy Company, Children's Television Network and Mattel Toys have used his innovative designs to develop new, cooperative games for children.

Now he's back with ''Junkyard Sports'' which borrows from a notion he first voiced in ''The Well Played Game'' that ''It's not the game that's sacred. It's the people who are playing.''

So what exactly are junkyard sports or games? They're games based on actual, popular sports only they're played with recycled objects, junk, or whatever is handy and by rules devised by the players, rules that are meant to be revised to meet the different skill levels of participants who go ''head-to-head, toe-to-toe, face-to-face, person-to-person, and team-to-team,'' DeKoven says.

Think about it. Every sport that we shell out $100 or so a season for our kids to play started out as a junkyard sport. Fast-pitch softball is said to have started on military bases with gloveless players using overstuffed socks as balls. Basketball began using a peach basket.

Baseball, I'm not sure. The way it's worshiped in this country you might guess it was hatched by a virgin mother in consultation with an angel dispatched from heaven, but it's tough to prove.

The problem DeKoven has been targeting for more than 30 years and has taken up anew in ''Junkyard Sports'' is that organized sports fail far more children than they serve. He's right.

Certainly, they don't fail because the parents who so generously volunteer their time and energy are uncaring or because the community leagues and resources that support them are all poorly run. They fail because most organized sports are about developing particular athletic skills, which is great fun to those who develop the those specific skills and ultimately defeating to those who do not or cannot no matter how badly they want to participate.

Don't get me wrong, I know that boys and girls in organized sports have the potential to develop marvelous personal and interpersonal skills - confidence, a sense of mastery, a respect for fair play and teamwork. But the ones who do are, sadly, very much in the minority because by the age of 13 anywhere from 70 to 85 percent of kids get weeded out.

Personally, I love competitive sports and have thrown my heart and soul (and, for the record, several phalanges, my right ankle and my left anterior cruciate ligament) into the games I've played. And I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. Really. But the reason I love organized competitive sports is that I was lucky enough to be pretty good at most of them and very good at one or two. And success, particularly during play, tends to breed joy.

Now, as I observe my own children and those I coach, and listen to parents talk about their children's experiences in sports, I am confronted with a sad conundrum: that the games that reward successful athletes with joy and a sense of belonging often create equal and opposite reactions for those who don't fit the mold. Traditional organized sports separate people into sides - not just ''us'' versus ''them,'' but those who are good enough to play and those who aren't.

What I find so intriguing about DeKoven is that he's developing real programs to do something about it. He is training educators in DeKalb County, Georgia., and in Orange and San Diego counties in California.

And there are stirrings right here at home. Take the parents and children in Northampton who've organized an all-ages, all-ability come-as-you-are Sunday soccer league. Or The Center for Cultural Change Through Sport at Hampshire College in Amherst which promotes the creation of youth sports programs that de-emphasize winning and losing and offer exercise, fun, challenge and the opportunity for mastery over a lifetime.

What these people and groups hold in common is a radical notion that fun and challenge come first, regardless of what game gets played or who wins. Why so radical? DeKoven responds: ''Try telling parents who sent their kids to soccer camp that, although their kids lost almost every game they played and didn't show any particular athletic skill, they succeeded because they had a lot of fun.''

Yes, it's idealistic to believe that whole sports programs can be redesigned so that the ultimate goal is fun for all. Even DeKoven admits that. It would require that sports programs be redesigned to appeal to - to include - the majority of young people, the 75 percent who walk off the field as young teens.

And that, DeKoven says, is an act of faith in human motivation: ''When people have fun playing, they put more of themselves into play. They engage body, spirit, and mind, challenging themselves to excel because in excellence there is even more fun. When they play, not for score or recognition but for enjoyment, they play for life.''

Jo Glading-DiLorenzo of Northampton, writes a biweekly column about sports