Change is in the heir

In relative terms, what we know as youth sports might become a thing of the past

Clay Latimer, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 22, 2005 at midnight

Text size

More More Sports

More stories »

It's Friday morning, midway through the 2015-16 school year, and a 14-year-old high school freshman rolls out of bed, takes a quick shower and gathers his books and soccer gear.

Leaving his dormitory near Chatfield State Park, he crosses the busy campus and enters the Colorado Rush Soccer Club's main clubhouse, where hundreds of classmates unwind with video games and munch on energy bars.

From there, the boy makes the short walk to a lush complex of practice fields, where his soccer team will do some preparatory work for a weekend game against a U.S. national junior team in an adjacent 4,000-seat stadium.

After practice, he crosses campus again and enters the main classroom building for five hours of core academic subjects. Then, it's on to another soccer practice and eventually back to the dorm and some down time with a couple of teammates from Hawaii and Arvada.

Welcome to The Rush Soccer Complex - and perhaps the future of youth sports in America.

Far-fetched?

The Rush already has purchased the land, drawn up the architectural plans and set its sights on a 2015 opening . . .

"The potential is out of the roof with the land we bought down here," said Erik Bushey, technical director of the Rush. "We have the ability to have our own classrooms, to bring in our own teachers, to walk outside and step on the playing fields and to bring players from all over the country to school and train them."

First stage in place

The prototype already is up and running. Every weekday morning, about 30 players gather at Ken Caryl Community Park at 7:30 and practice until 9, then walk a block to the Collegiate Academy of Colorado, a Jefferson County Schools charter school, where they take traditional classroom subjects for the remainder of the school day.

The private/public partnership - Jeffco supplies the school, the Rush the coaches - is modeled after European soccer academies and is thought to be the only program of its kind in the nation.

"It's totally unique," Bushey said. "With everything we do, we try to be pioneers in some form or fashion.

We're always trying to push some kind of envelope."

Added Tim Schulz, Rush president and chief executive officer: "I don't think this would have been possible in the '80s. The evolution in the game is for smaller clubs to become part of larger clubs. With the numbers, you can do more, you have more resources."

The youth sports scene in America constantly is evolving, a fact that isn't likely to change in the next 30 years.

Certain trends seem likely to accelerate - early specialization in a single sport, professionalized coaching, endless seasons, personal instruction, a widening gap between haves and have-nots. An increasing number of elite athletes are apt to skip high school teams altogether.

But these trends could be dwarfed by more profound scientific and technological alterations that seem as impossible today as the Internet would have seemed to Americans in 1975.

Genetic Technologies is selling what it calls the world's first DNA test for sports performance. At present, it assesses a person's genetic predisposition to either sprint and power events or endurance events. Before long, scientists might be able to identify a cluster of genes that accounts for hand-eye coordination.

Not everyone is sold on the bold new future, though. A cottage industry of critics hopes to stir a counter-revolution, including Fred Engh, author of Why Johnny Hates Sports and founder of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, and Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, who wrote The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding the Hyper-Parenting Trap.

"If we could just cut back 10 to 15 percent . . .," Rosenfeld said.

But Schulz is pushing headlong into the future.

Building the Rush

Schulz, a graduate of Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs, where he earned Parade high school All-American soccer honors, played for six professional teams, including the now-defunct Denver Avalanche, before turning to coaching 15 years ago. His career took an important turn in 1997, when the youth team he ran, Club Columbine, merged with the rival Lakewood United Soccer Club to become the Rush.

Schulz quickly lined up a sponsorship deal with Nike, creating the foundation for a club that soon would become a national powerhouse.

In eight years, the Rush has:

• Expanded into Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, Utah, Alaska, Kentucky, Hawaii and Colorado Springs.

• Won 12 national, 21 regional and 76 state championships, produced 80 Olympic Development Program players and eight alumni who have played in professional leagues, in World Cup competition or on an Olympic team.

• Grown to 400 recreational and competitive teams and 7,000 players overall.

During the next couple of decades, Schulz hopes to field a professional team made up of Rush players, form an overseas team and add eight American locations.

"When I was a player, I never thought of coaching or becoming involved (in a soccer club)," Schulz said. "I was working on a construction site for a year before I became a coach. I wasn't sure what I was going to do."

Constructing a state-of-the-art soccer complex is Schulz's ultimate project. In February, the Rush acquired 52 acres near Chatfield State Park, and if everything goes as planned, the next generation of Rush players will study and train at a facility on that land.

"It was a long time coming," Schulz said of the land acquisition.

Starting in Center

The Center School, another of Schulz's pet projects, was a long time coming, too. For years, he dreamed of forming a public-private partnership in which a school would provide core academic classes and his students would receive intensive soccer instruction from A-list coaches.

Schulz saw his opening when the Jefferson County School District implemented a new Adjusted Schedule Options Program, allowing students to substitute school electives with outside programs such as soccer.

In 2002, he formed The Center School - a group of soccer players who took classes at Stober North Elementary School (through sixth grade) and the Manning School in Golden (seventh and eighth grades) and trained under Rush coaches.

Wanting to expand beyond eighth grade and to find one location, Schulz shifted Center School students to Collegiate Academy of Colorado, a K-12 charter school with 320 elementary, 80 middle school and 148 high school students.

"We didn't want to create a program where these kids are special and where they have special advantages, where they didn't have to take math because they're in the soccer program," said Doug Meer, Collegiate Academy's marketing director. "There was a lot of resistance to that.

"But everybody seems to be doing great. A charter school looks for uniqueness, and a unique soccer program is going to set us apart. There is no reason we can't expand this into other sports."

'Special opportunity'

Jimmy Shannon, a seventh-grader, is pleased with the program, even though it takes him 45 minutes to reach the school from his Park Hill home. On the days he goes to his Rush team practice after school, Shannon returns home after dark.

"Sometimes, my friends wonder what happened to me," he said. "But this is a special opportunity, because the coaches really push you. My technical knowledge is really improving. I don't have to think about tactics as much; it's getting natural."

Don't expect to see Jimmy in a high school uniform. He plans to play for an older Rush team, a decision that mirrors a growing national trend.

In 1990, every member of UCLA's NCAA championship volleyball team came from club teams.

Stanford women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer estimates that she has spent two months of her life watching the End of the Trail basketball tournament in Oregon, a summer Amateur Athletic Union tournament that lures many of the nation's best AAU teams.

Two years ago, adidas started a national, invitation-only basketball camp in San Diego for fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders that lured college recruiters from major schools.

The National Draw is regarded by many coaches as the nation's most prestigious high school club lacrosse tournament, and there were 100 teams from across the country competing in the Maryland event during the summer. But for many girls, winning was secondary to making an impression on the college coaches who seem to camp out at the tournament.

Future of high school teams

Today's elite preteen club players might not even bother with high school teams.

"I think that's going to happen, and it's unfortunate," said former Horizon High School basketball standout Jamie Carey, who plays for the Colorado Chill. "College coaches see more players in AAU, and if you want to play at a big college, it's beneficial to play AAU. But I think playing in high school is important. You learn to have pride in your school, how to work with a different type of athlete. You get a different perspective with a different coach, and that makes you grow. AAU will get you a scholarship more often than high school, but I think high school is just as important.

"Our society is so overly specialized. Basketball has done wonderful things for me. But it's important to be prepared outside of that."

If elite players go AWOL, high school sports would crumble, says Bob Ottewill, former commissioner of the Colorado High School Activities Association.

"Part of having teams is that the rest of the student body is excited," he said. "But if the best kids aren't involved and no one knows about the ones on a team and no one goes - well, it's all kind of over at that point. A school board will say, 'Why are we spending this money when the kids aren't going out?'

"Will that happen? There's still social - and media - status involved in high school sports. You could be the best kid in an AAU tournament in Memphis, but the media won't cover it even though the competition might be better."

A lack of resources could decide the matter for ambivalent athletes.

Recent budget cuts in 21 Long Island, N.Y., school districts threatened the fall seasons. In New Milford, Conn., golf, swimming and gymnastics were eliminated because of money problems. In Richmond, Calif., most of the 1,452 students at De Anza High School walked out of class in March 2004 to protest proposed cutbacks in sports. A freshman football player displayed a banner with the words: "No Sports, No Students."

For financially strapped school districts, club sports could turn into a valuable asset.

"The best quote I've heard in a while is that high schools are outsourcing their sports," said Jay Coakley, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. "Instead of volleyball being school-sponsored, it's being club-sponsored, and schools are letting it happen. If the high schools can play a low-profile kind of volleyball game, with their expenditures and budget being cut, and let the clubs play the high level . . . well, then the high schools can be concerned with teaching and having a good time."

As Front Range athletic budgets were being slashed, Bill Hanzlik and Ray Baker stepped in to the void with the nonprofit Gold Crown Foundation, which grew from a weeklong girls basketball camp in 1986 to an organization that involves more than 27,000 young athletes.

It now offers youth programs in basketball, volleyball, golf and baseball and owns and operates such premier facilities as the Coca-Cola All Star Park and the 56,000-square-foot Gold Crown Field House, both in Lakewood. But IMG Academies might be the blueprint for the future.

After adding golf, basketball, baseball and soccer to its tennis school in the past decade, IMG is considering expansion into football, hockey, figure skating and swimming. And the concept already is going global.

IMG Academies Bharata, which is under construction, is being patterned after the Bradenton, Fla., complex and will offer the first Olympic-standard sports training facility in India.

Spain also is on the drawing board.

"These are large deals," said Greg Breunich, senior vice president and co-director of IMG Academies. "We are not going to replicate all over the world. Only a few of these."

Turning to DNA for help

In the not-to-distant future, parents could go to Genetic Technologies for help. The Australian biotech company sells what it claims is the world's first DNA test for sports performance. The test, which is available for about $100 on the Internet (www.gtg.com.au),uses a sample taken from a mouth swab to identify whether a person has the genetic makeup to excel in sprint/power sports or endurance events.

Although it doesn't measure other factors that go into determining potential for all types of athletic performance - and most of the genetic contributors to athletic performance still await discovery - the test is based on science gained from the Human Genome Project.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Dr. Lee Silver, a Princeton geneticist and molecular biologist, said during a telephone interview. "Within the next decade, you'll be able to identify 90 to 95 percent of the children who have any potential be a professional athlete. You'll be able to do a complete profile: physiological, muscle composition, hand-eye coordination . . .

"You'll be able to know if a child has the potential to be a great baseball player or a distance runner or a tight end. We're not talking high school athletes, but the pros.

"Right now, it's very rudimentary, but it's already happening because of the Human Genome Project. We've already identified certain genes (that are necessary) - and certain genes with no chance."

An Australian rugby league has employed the Genetic Technologies DNA test for two years to tailor training programs, and two clubs have expressed an interest in using genetic markers for recruiting purposes, according to The Age, Melbourne's leading newspaper.

The Australian Institute for Sport, which receives $40 million a year from the government to identify and develop potential stars, has used the test, according to ESPN.com. Athletes in England, Japan, China and Mexico also are being tested.

But critics urge caution.

"The value of this test is very ambiguous, and there is no proof it means anything," Lyle Palmer, a professor at the Western Australia Institute for Medical Research, told The West Australian, a Perth newspaper. "This is people cashing in on genetic testing in a trivial way."

Sports Potential Inc., a company in Menlo Park, Calif., that helps those 13 and older find their ideal sport, also could have a significant impact on youth sports in coming decades.

SPI has prepared a similar test for the 8- to 12-year-old market. CEO Steve Spinner says studies indicate that, at some point, 49 percent of children in that age group lack the skills necessary to play organized sports; identifying the point at which a child has mastered those skills and can make use of them in a particular sport is the goal of the Sports Readiness Assessment.

Based on physical and cognitive exercises, the assessment matches a child's capabilities with the skills required in 40 sports and activities.

The boy who instinctively chases a soccer ball across the field, abandoning his position? He isn't ready for team competition. The girl who hasn't developed a sense of balance? Forget about gymnastics for a while.

But the real object, Spinner says, is to help a child find a sport he or she can play - and love.

Of the 20 million children who sign up each year for league sports - hockey, football, baseball, soccer, etc. - 70 percent will quit by age 13, then never play any sport again, according to The National Alliance for Sports. The No. 1 reason: Sports stopped being fun.

"It's time we rethink how we present youth sports to kids," Spinner said.

Some children already are.

In an era of highly structured, parent-run programs, many boys and girls are heading to skateboard and BMX parks - and back into the past, to the days when children were in charge of their own games.

"I see kids developing absolutely amazing skills without an adult ever blowing a whistle," Coakley said.

"They have nobody to imitate except their peers."

latimerc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2596

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News