By Ed Piper
I applaud 18-year-old Olivia Moultrie of Santa Clarita for breaking down the barriers for a teenaged girl in the U.S. to play pro soccer (L.A. Times, "Olivia Moultrie's fight for the right to play kicked off a U.S. soccer youth movement", Feb. 20).
But the then-15-year-old's lawsuit against the NWSL, which the NWSL conceded three years ago, has introduced another issue into youth and prep sports: the immense pressure that comes with going pro at such a young age.
Imagine, your daughter--for me, it would have been my granddaughter back when she attended LJHS 2004-2008, though she didn't play soccer--just out of middle school, though having played youth soccer since she was seven years old or so, heading into the limelight that included international stars Meg Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, and others.
The pressure would be immense. The media coverage would be something else. The whole lifestyle would be, literally, life-changing in going from middle school and high school to spending her time in a giant stadium atmosphere.
I would say the same things for a son or grandson.
I'm not for limiting someone reaching their potential; my interest is in growing a person to be normal, competent, confident, able to hang out with friends and enjoying all those things that a teenage can expect. They need to grow healthy in physical, emotional, relational, even spiritual ways.
The young person may have outstanding ability in one particular area, whether playing soccer, or for that matter, violin, math (a youngster entering Harvard at a young age), or some other skill. The "rest" of the person still needs to be attended to (emotional, relational, etc.).
An extreme but real case of youth getting too much attention too soon--a victim of the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) revolution that enables amateur youth athletes to make tons of money through signing lucrative contracts with Nike and other companies--is Mikey Williams, the San Ysidro High basketball player who bought a million-dollar house, then put four bullets through the back of a car over jealousy that his girl friend was talking to someone else.
Now, that's pretty extreme, and Olivia Moultrie isn't violent, nor is Mikey Williams, other than the shots.
But it shows the immense layer of air that descends on a young person at such a young age, that they feel anxiety, tension, loneliness. They need a good support system, which our local San Ysidran apparently didn't have at the time.
Bringing the discussion back to more familiar territory, young female gymnasts have had a long history of gaining early training and heading to the Olympics. Olga Korbut competed for the USSR in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games and won four gold medals. She was only 17 in her first Olympics in Munich, where she won three golds.
Nadia Comaneci, from Romania, took it even further. At age 14, in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal (I'm showing my age here), she was the first gymnast to receive a perfect 10.0 at the Games. (They had to create new scoreboards displaying more than three digits after that Olympics.) She won three more 10.0's and won three gold medals in '76.
Both of those athletes were competing during the Cold War, when Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries under the USSR had state-run programs that funneled kids into programs that are different from our Western world concepts. Perhaps they're not the best examples.
I'm just arguing for concern for the person inside those athletic bodies, whether Olivia Moultrie, Bronny James, or others. Too much, too soon, is a formula that cannot be undone. Also, adults can be unscrupulous in using these kids to achieve earlier, bigger, better accomplishments in their respective sports.
In the worst case, things like the abuse at the Karolyi Ranch occur: Romanians Bela and Marta Karolyi established a facility in Houston in 1983 to train elite young gymnasts. The U.S. National Team doctor, Larry Nassar, was convicted of sexual abuse. The Karolyis left the camp and went back to Romania after 2021.
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