The Kansas State University men’s basketball team advanced to the Elite 8 last month before falling to Florida Atlantic. For first-year coach Jerome Tang, the accomplishment was exceptional.
In those ways, playing in the fourth round was elite.
However, that word — elite — has become a marketing crutch, if not an all-out lie, in sports. This is especially true in youth sports, where the sale of nearly everything these days seems to lean on some kind of elite status.
Consider the examples in Kansas youth baseball alone. Last year, Topeka hosted the Kansas Elite Championship for players in the 15U and 16U age groups. The 316 Baseball academy in Wichita merged two baseball programs to become 316 Sluggers Elite. This June, teams from 15U to 18U can play in Manhattan at the Midwest Elite tournament.
Whoever names these teams and tournaments understands something essential about youth sports these days. The word “elite” sounds irresistible to parents, who must decide whether to give up their family weekends and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in the pursuit of competitions that promise to showcase their young athletes.
In that way, “elite” is exactly the right word. It signals a status that will cost something. And it describes competition that is substantially better than normal.
Thirty years ago when I was growing up, precocious athletes played on Olympic Development teams, invitation-only squads that chose players and coached them explicitly for potential national teams. The rosters of developmental teams helped provide talent for international competition, such as the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup. While these developmental teams still exist, their local importance and prestige have diminished.
In the ’90s, if a talented athlete wasn’t on an Olympic Development team, many areas of the country had “feeder teams,” constructed to gather middle school players who would soon attend the same high school. The jerseys for these feeder teams were in your soon-to-be high school’s colors. You learned the high school team’s offense and defense. The focus was on high school athletics, playing with kids from surrounding neighborhoods and building the prestige of making the local high school’s varsity team.
More recently, club teams sprouted up with polished uniforms and professional coaching to increasingly young kids. As a high school coach and teacher at the time, I worried, along with many others, about club sports. The specialization on a single sport could bankrupt kids’ bodies. The cost might exclude many of the most talented athletes. The travel might erode the hometown pride for sports teams.
Nevertheless, when our family had a decision to make about soccer for our son, we pulled him from his recreational team and dad’s coaching when he was 8 years old. The prospect of elite competition — with all of its attendant costs and travel — appeared on the horizon.
Today, those clubs, from soccer to volleyball to basketball, have become so large that an extra level of prestige seems necessary to designate the top teams. The best teams travel the most, have the most patches on their uniforms and join leagues with professional sounding names and impressively designed logos. They are explicitly elite.
The question is, is all of this hype necessary? And who is clamoring for it? The kids or the parents?
If seeking that status is misguided, then count me in as part of the confused mass of parents.
My son currently plays soccer in a league of 64 clubs called — you guessed it — Elite 64. The number of clubs borrows some of its swagger from the 64 teams that made up the iconic NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The branding is impeccably alluring and familiar to avid sports fans.
Sponsored by United States Youth Soccer, the league groups 64 teams from across the nation into regional play. Two boys soccer clubs from Kansas — TOCA FC and Sporting Blue Valley — play teams from Wisconsin and Illinois.
