Raising Children Connected to Local Community and Sports
Meet Tina Syer, who has dedicated her career to positive, healthy youth development. She shares her concerns about how youth sports have changed into an industry that devalues balance in kids’ lives, local community, and families without financial resources. Tina and her wife Jen have coached in local leagues for their two sons, showing that a place-based youth sports system is still possible. This post is part of Profiles in Living Connected to Place, my series that portrays individuals living connected to place with intention and the support of systems that make it possible. Prior posts can be found here.
Tina Syer and her parents moved to Davis, California, when she was in the 3rd grade. From an early age, she was enthusiastic about playing sports. However, Girls' team sports were nonexistent where she had lived. That all changed in Davis.
Her dad, a professor at the local university, and other parents helped put together an AYSO soccer league for girls. Local leagues for girls’ sports continued to grow. Tina went on to play soccer, softball, and basketball in school.
Tina went to Stanford University, where she played field hockey and lacrosse. While there, she developed an interest in psychology. Tina thought a lot about the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in youth behavior.
She coached at Stanford and then joined the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), where she spent 20 years in different leadership roles. For Tina, the PCA represented the perfect blend of her two primary interests— sports and psychology. The PCA leverages partnerships and runs programs and workshops to “ensure a positive youth development experience for ALL kids through sports.”
Tina is now the Chief Advancement Officer at the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula (San Mateo County, California). She remains committed to providing youth with a variety of local activities that support their overall development and strengthen their communities.
Tina and her wife Jen live in San Francisco and are raising two boys. She’s developed insights into youth development that only being a parent can provide. As she and Jen go through the inevitable challenges of parenthood, Tina looks back on her childhood with two supportive parents and ample sports opportunities for guidance.
As a family in San Francisco, they have found many ways to connect to community and youth activities where they live. Tina has coached soccer and Jen has coached baseball for their boys’ teams in local San Francisco leagues. Like their moms, the boys love sports. They can often be found playing them in outdoor spaces at a school in their neighborhood.
Through her career in youth development and sports, Tina has seen profound cultural shifts that concern her when it comes to raising children to be healthy and thriving. She shares:
There is a troubling trend in moving from community-based, by neighborhood or school, teams to more competitive clubs that draw from wider geographies and on the desire to be elite. Youth sports are now more about capitalism, making a lot of money and paying a lot of money.
Tina has seen firsthand the impact on local leagues of more and more youth specializing in one sport at an early age and playing it year-round on travel teams. Her son’s seventh-grade boys’ soccer team that she coached was one of only five local teams left at that level in the entire city of San Francisco.
Tina would like to see cities like San Francisco prioritize local youth teams. This includes ensuring local leagues have first access to fields over travel teams. She posits that youth and their families do not need to spend lots of money and travel long distances to participate in a tournament. There can be plenty of competitive teams in the local area.
Tournaments for travel teams, according to Tina, are part of an “arms race to be showcases for college scouts.” In reality, very few who attend will play in college. She notes that travel teams for sports like volleyball and ice hockey can cost a family $6K a season. When families invest so much money into their children’s sports specialty, Tina has witnessed how children feel like failures when they do not play at the next level. She hopes we can return to focusing on present, positive, and local experiences for children as we raise them.
As evident in youth sports and Tina’s experience, children and youth recreation systems need to be overhauled to prioritize the health and well-being of children and our communities. So much time traveling for sports takes people away from their local communities, weakening community bonds. It also adds to climate emissions and pollution from all the driving long distances and even flying for tournaments and competitions. Nothing has to be reinvented, as the model existed for decades before the youth sports industry took control.