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Super bowl history.

The Super Bowl is America’s biggest sports event. More than 100 million people tune in to watch the big game. Let’s take a look at its history. There used to be two competing professional football leagues: the National Football League…

Messi in Miami

Lionel Messi is the greatest living soccer player. He might be the best ever to have played the world’s most popular game. In 2022, he led Argentina to its first World Cup win in nearly four decades. And on July…

Wolverine Win

Michigan’s Blake Corum is tackled by Washington’s Elijah Jackson in the College Football Playoff National Championship, on January 8. Corum ran for 134 yards, s…

The Teqball World Championships ended December 3. The sport is a mix of table tennis and kick volleyball. Thailand’s Jutatip Kuntatong won second place in the w…

Start Your Engines

Jaxon Porter is happiest behind the wheel. Sitting just inches off the ground, he pops his go-kart into high gear as he comes out of a turn, accelerating to 
70 m.p.h. “I just love going fast,” Jaxon told TIME for…

19-year-old Coco Gauff became a Grand Slam tennis champion after winning her final match at the U.S. Open on September 9. She’s the youngest American since Sere…

The Slugger

In late September, Aaron Judge stood in the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium. The voices of 40,000 fans hushed as the pitcher wound up. Judge smacked the ball deep into the left-center-field bleachers. It was his 60th home run of…

Super Skater

British skateboarder Sky Brown, 14, practices in the United Arab Emirates on February 8. She won the World Park Skateboarding Championships there four days late…

Scoring King

On February 7, LeBron James, of the Los Angeles Lakers, became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He broke a record held for 39 years by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Girls Skate!

Sosina Challa lives in Ethiopia, in eastern Africa. When she was about 16, she and her friends saw a group of boys skateboarding in a parking lot. “I used to watch skateboarding in the movies,” Challa told TIME for Kids.…

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Favorite Moments in Sports

What were the most memorable moments in sports in 2021 for you?

By The Learning Network

The Times has gathered “18 Sports Highlights From 2021 Worth Watching Again,” but before you take a look at our list, we’d love to hear yours.

Whether they come from sports you played yourself, or sports you watched, live or on TV, tell us about some of your most memorable sports moments of 2021, and why you think they’ve stayed with you.

Post your thoughts in the comments then read the related article to see the Times’s list.

Want more Picture Prompts? Find them all in this column .

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Statistics on School Sports: How Many Students Play Sports? Which Sports Do They Play?

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School sports can give students an outlet and unite communities, but they can also cause consternation and sow division.

Today there is fierce debate over transgender students’ participation and furor over school mascots. School districts are also grappling with how to keep sports venues, spectators, and athletes safe .

To provide context to these discussions, we have pulled together key data on school sports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the National Federation of State High School Associations, including information on how often girls and boys are playing sports and which sports they are playing.

We’ve also highlighted a few of the more unique sports that are being offered by schools in some states. (Bocce, anyone?)

What percent of high school students play sports?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 1991-2019 High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data , about 57% of high school students played on at least one school or community sports team in the past year.

• All high school students: 57.4%
• 9th grade: 61.9%
• 10th grade: 57.9%
• 11th grade: 59.1%
• 12th grade: 49.8%

Is there a difference between how likely children are to play sports based on their family income?

Looking beyond high school sports, children from low-income families are much less likely to play sports than those from higher-income families, according to data on children ages 6 to 17 from the National Center for Health Statistics’ 2020 National Health Interview Survey .

Around 31% of children ages 6 to 17 in families with incomes below the federal poverty level played sports, compared to 50% of children in families with incomes between the federal poverty level and four times it, and 70% of children in families with incomes over four times the federal poverty level.

Where are children most likely to play sports?

According to the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Health Interview Survey in 2020 , about 58% of children ages 6 to 17 participated in sports in the Midwest and Northeast, compared to 56% in the West and just under 49% in the South.

What are the most popular sports in high school?

In the 2021-22 school year, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations, the sport with the most participants for boys nationally was 11-player football with 973,792 participants. For girls, it was outdoor track and field, with 456,697 participants.

How many girls play high school sports?

Since the early 1970s when Title IX was enacted, girls’ participation in high school sports has grown from fewer than 300,000 to a high of almost 3.5 million in the 2017-18 school year. In 2021-22, 3.2 million girls played high school sports. Girls now make up almost 43% of high school athletes, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations .

What are the most popular high school sports in each state?

In 44 states, the most popular boys’ sport is 11-player football. For girls, the landscape is more varied—in 24 states, the most popular sport for girls is volleyball, followed by outdoor track and field, in 14 states.

How has the pandemic affected high school sports?

The most recent data (from 2021-22) shows that both girls’ and boys’ sports participation took a hit from the pandemic. There were about 161,000 fewer girls and 158,000 fewer boys playing high school sports in 2021-22 than in 2018-19. That’s a 4.7% decrease for girls and an almost 3.5% decrease for boys.

What are some obscure school sports?

There are some pretty unique school sports out there (including sports adapted for students with physical disabilities and “unified” sports where students with and without intellectual disabilities play together), according to 2021-22 data from the National Federation of State High School Associations:

• Some schools in California and Hawaii have surfing teams. Hawaii was the first state to offer surfing as an official school sport .
• Some schools in Arkansas, California, and Ohio have rodeo teams.
• Some schools in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Vermont have bass fishing teams.
• Some schools in California, Maine, and Ohio have rock climbing teams. ( This rock-climbing-related story by teacher Jennifer McDaniel is a great read for anyone aspiring to be an educator or mentor.)
• Some schools in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio have bocce teams.
• Some schools in California and Ohio have kayaking teams.
• Some schools in California, Michigan, and Ohio have figure skating teams.

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Kids are losing interest in organized sports. Why that matters

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This is the Dec. 6, 2021 , edition of the 8 to 3 newsletter about school, kids and parenting. Like what you’re reading? Sign up to get it in your inbox every Monday.

For more than a century, team sports have been a mainstay of American childhood.

What began as a way to keep boys in cities occupied and out of trouble has evolved into a $19-billion industry , with much of that revenue being generated by elite travel teams.

Yet the number of kids involved in team sports has been falling. In 2018, 38% of kids ages 6 to 12 played an organized sport on a regular basis, down from 45% in 2008 — mainly due to increasing costs, time commitments and the hypercompetitive nature of many sports.

A report by the Aspen Institute shows that the pandemic may have accelerated this trend. The national survey conducted in September 2021 found that not only has the pandemic disrupted the supply of local sports programs — with 44% of families reporting that their community-based program had closed, merged or returned with limited capacity — but that many kids right now have simply lost interest.

I know what you’re thinking. Of course participation in team sports is down at a time when gathering in groups still poses a risk, especially for unvaccinated kids. And that reality was borne out in the data; half of the parents surveyed said fear of contracting COVID-19 prevented them from re-enrolling their kids in sports. But outside of safety concerns, nearly three in 10 parents said their child athletes didn’t want to return to the main sport they played before the pandemic.

I wanted to find out what might be driving this pattern, so I spoke to some folks who have devoted their lives to studying youth sports, including Travis Dorsch, founding director of Utah State University’s Families in Sport Lab and lead on the Aspen Institute report.

An optimistic explanation is that the pandemic created the time and space for kids to try new and different hobbies, including individual sports such as cycling and running, Dorsch said.

“The pessimistic view is that when kids tell us they aren’t interested, they’re walking away from sports entirely,” Dorsch went on. “There’s probably a little bit of both in there.”

Jennifer Agans, a Penn State professor whose research focuses on the role of out-of-school recreation in youth development, noted that many parents had an unprecedented opportunity to slow down and reassess their priorities while on lockdown. Families involved with travel teams in particular got a taste of life without hour upon grueling hour of driving to games, eating meals on the road and the unrelenting pressure to win. The cultural norm of the affluent, multi-sport athlete may have lost out to the desire for a less hectic schedule.

“It’s a broader problem with youth sports that the pandemic has shone a light on,” Dorsch said. “I don’t know that we’re doing a great job of catering to young people in sports. It’s become a very adult-driven, competition-focused context.”

The Aspen data shows that younger kids were more likely to lose interest in their primary sport. This made sense to Agans, who noted that organized sports are more attractive for a teen who’s spent years playing soccer, for instance, and has built an identity around being an athlete.

“My hunch is that kids who aren’t going back to sport are those who weren’t as invested in the first place,” Agans said.

The Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club’s baseball league enrolled 80 kids in East L.A. this spring and summer, compared to more than 300 pre-pandemic, said director of operations Carlyn Oropez. Low participation was mostly tied to safety concerns, but many kids also are just much more interested in unstructured play right now.

“I have met more and more kids who have never played sports, never been in a league,” said Charles Boyden, the baseball league’s director.

Motor skills fundamental to athletics atrophied for children who adopted more sedentary habits during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, sports are less enticing to kids who lack those skills, said Dan Gould, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University.

“ They’ve been home on their computers, they’ve been gaming,” Gould said. “It’s hard to get out of that pattern.”

At the same time, community programs that offer a laid-back, affordable environment for youth athletics have shrunk or disappeared during the pandemic (though experts anticipate many of these programs will rebound as more kids are vaccinated and community organizations rebuild their staffs and budgets).

Boys & Girls Club of Metro Los Angeles, which serves low-income youths in South L.A., has yet to resume its popular basketball leagues. Staffing and safety logistics — such as not being able to mix cohorts of kids and difficulty hiring folks to staff after-school programs — are the main drivers, said Patrick Mahoney, the organization’s president.

“We have no plans to bring them back any time soon, not in this current school year,” Mahoney told me. “My hope is that we can start league and game play by summer.”

Private clubs and travel teams, meanwhile, have been much quicker to recover, the Aspen study shows. In some cases, these clubs have pulled kids from school and community athletics.

Club sports can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a year, making them financially prohibitive to many families. School sports have largely returned and are more accessible, but they can also be highly competitive and exclusive.

Clubs and some school teams are “focused on winning and trying to get their kids positioned for future scholarships and careers,” Agans said. “That’s important for families who want to pursue that goal, but that’s not the goal for everyone. We don’t want to have a pyramid-shaped picture of who participates in sports, where everyone can play soccer at 5 years old, but by 15, only the best soccer players are still at it.”

In community leagues the social, emotional and physical benefits of team sports are available to all, regardless of socioeconomic status or skill. The city of Los Angeles has recognized this by committing $160 million (donated by the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the International Olympic Committee) to the parks department’s youth athletics programs. The initiative, launched this month, aims to ensure that children ages 5 to 17 can access low-cost or free sports programming at their local rec centers.

For his part, Dorsch hopes that this shaking up of youth athletics will begin to push them in a more equitable direction.

“We have an opportunity to reimagine youth sport,” he said. “What will design and delivery of sport look like when we come out of this?”

The downside of high school sports (and other matters)

We haven’t discussed the Mater Dei High School football hazing scandal in this space yet, but it feels like it’s time. It goes beyond sports; it’s a teenager’s — and a parent’s — nightmare. My colleague, Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, has written about the sports powerhouse in Santa Ana for years and says there was nothing particularly surprising about the scandal. “Student abuse at Mater Dei isn’t a few rogue individuals over the decades; it’s institutional,” he writes. And Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke spoke to the parents of the student who was allegedly the hazing victim. He quotes the mother: “You drop your kids off at school and give them a kiss goodbye … and you feel like you’re putting them somewhere they can be safe. … Then for [Mater Dei] to turn a blind eye and be so unsupervised. ... It’s like, you failed my child.”

A school district in San Diego County is creating a separate academy for unvaccinated students so they can learn in person.

We’ve become frighteningly accustomed to school shootings. But one in Michigan last week, in which four students died, still came with an element of surprise: This time, the parents of the shooter were charged with a crime.

Here are 15 gifts for the Gen Zers on your holiday list . And here’s where you can get your family’s Christmas tree in SoCal.

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What else we’re reading

[Note: Some of these articles may be behind paywalls.]

School shootings like the one in Michigan are creating “trickle-down trauma” for kids who haven’t personally experienced the terror of a shooting but fear one. Washington Post

We know how to stop school shootings , one educational consultant says. We just don’t do it. Hechinger Report

School officials in Marin County are trying to figure out what to do after parents let their two kids go to school despite knowing they had tested positive for COVID-19. Eight other students contracted the virus afterward, and 75 were quarantined. San Francisco Chronicle

Gov. Gavin Newsom has a reputation for being slick. But Newsom told elementary school students in Sacramento last week that he suffers from dyslexia that traumatized him as a child. “People literally started laughing at me because I couldn’t read,” he said. “I’ll never forget it the rest of my life.” Newsom has a children’s book coming out this week about his experiences with dyslexia. Sacramento Bee

Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

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Laura Newberry is a former reporter with the lifestyle section at the Los Angeles Times. She wrote Group Therapy, a weekly newsletter that answers readers’ questions about mental health. She previously worked on The Times’ education team and was a staff reporter at both the Reading Eagle in Eastern Pennsylvania and MassLive in Western Massachusetts. She graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and also has a master’s degree in social work from the University of Central Florida.

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New sports add thrills to Summer Olympics

Skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing are three of six sports you haven’t seen at the summer games..

As most sports fans know, the Summer Olympics are coming. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, more than 11,000 athletes are expected to compete in Tokyo, Japan, from July 23 to August 8.

When kids think of the Summer Olympics, they naturally think of the big sports that dominate television coverage of the Games — such as swimming, track and field, and gymnastics.

But the 2021 Games will feature six sports kids have never seen at the Olympics: surfing, karate, sport climbing, skateboarding, baseball and softball. (Baseball and softball were Olympic sports in the 1990s and 2000s, but the International Olympic Committee voted to drop them after the 2008 Games.) Let’s take a look at these new and returning Olympic sports.

The first modern Olympics, 125 years ago, was nothing like today’s huge spectacle

The surfing and karate competitions will take place at cool venues. The surf will be up at Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach on the Pacific Ocean about 60 miles outside of Tokyo.

The karate matches will take place at the Nippon Budakon . Karate is popular in Japan, and the Nippon Budakon is sort of the Yankee Stadium of the sport.

Most kids have tried skateboarding, but the Olympic competitions won’t be like rolling down your street or in your school parking lot. Skateboarding will have two kinds of events: street and park.

In the street competition, skateboarders will navigate a course full of stairs, handrails, benches and slopes made to resemble what a skater might find on a real city street.

In the park competition, the athletes will speed through a course with twists and turns as well as high walls, where the competitors will send themselves to eye-popping heights.

Skaters, some as young as 12 years old, will be judged on the tricks they perform. One more thing, they will do this to music. Things may get loud.

There will be three types of sport climbing. Speed climbing is when two athletes race up a 15-meter wall (about 50 feet high) as quickly as they can. Those competitions should be fast and exciting.

Sport climbing moves into the spotlight in Olympic debut

Bouldering is when the athletes move across difficult routes of artificial rocks on lower walls. Lead climbing is when athletes see how high they can climb on a super-difficult course in six minutes.

Don’t worry, all the climbers will wear safety gear to keep them from falling.

Baseball and softball are familiar to American sports fans. Some of the players on the United States Olympic baseball team may look familiar. The team is made up mostly of minor leaguers and former major league players.

Edwin Jackson is one of the team’s pitchers. If he sounds familiar that’s because the 37-year-old Jackson pitched for 14 (!) teams, including the Washington Nationals (2012 and 2017) during his 17-year major league career.

Finally, there will be new events in several familiar sports. Men and women will compete together in certain swimming and track relays as well as in a mixed archery competition.

The Summer Olympics are always exciting, but this year they will be a little different.

Read more Score columns:

Teens are among the swimmers to watch at Olympic trials

Olympic athletes show how to be resilient. They fall, get up and try again.

What were the highlights of the 2016 Olympics in Rio?

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Living Better

Kids can't all be star athletes. here's how schools can welcome more students to play.

Selena Simmons-Duffin

Going into his last tennis match of the school year, high school senior Lorris Nzouakeu knew he might get knocked out in straight sets. He was scheduled for one of the first matches of the day during the regionals competition in western Maryland, against a student from another school who'd won the championship last year.

"So it wasn't really looking good at the start," he laughs. "My goal was definitely to continue rallies and maintain pace and also just have fun."

"Fun" is sometimes hard to find in high school sports. Gunning for college athletic scholarships, many students and families go all in – focusing on one sport and even one position from elementary school. It's also big business – the whole youth sports industry is worth $19 billion dollars, more than the NFL .

For a lot of kids of all ages, sports are not working for them. Less than half of kids play sports at all, and those that do only stick with it for about three years and quit by age 11 . That's a whole lot of kids missing out on some of the huge benefits of sports, including spacial awareness, physical activity, and team skills.

Increasingly sports educators, health researchers and parents are pushing back against this trend and arguing that playing sports should be for all kids.

During the last few pandemic years, physical activity fell, while obesity rates and mental health challenges grew, note Tom Farrey and Jon Solomon of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program in a 2022 handbook for reimagining school sports . At the same time, interest in sports has grown, which "presents an historic opportunity for schools to reimagine their approach to sports," they write.

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How to cut back on junk food in your child's diet — and when not to worry.

But schools can create space for more types of students in sports. One example of what this looks like in practice is Nzouakeu's high school – Tuscarora High in Frederick County, Md. This school transformed its athletics program to prioritize including kids of all ability levels in sports. It's a model for handling youth sports, argues author and athlete Linda Flanagan , who highlighted the school in her book about youth sports entitled Take Back the Game .

Here's how Tuscarora High does things – plus some guiding principles for how schools can help include more kids in the fun of sports.

Lorris Nzouakeu played tennis for three years at Tuscarora High. He appreciate that his school "gives a lot of space for people to actually engage, even if they don't believe that they're the strongest... it gives plenty of opportunity to be able to grow into the sport." Selena Simmons-Duffin/NPR hide caption

Lorris Nzouakeu played tennis for three years at Tuscarora High. He appreciate that his school "gives a lot of space for people to actually engage, even if they don't believe that they're the strongest... it gives plenty of opportunity to be able to grow into the sport."

Offer a variety of sports to appeal to all tastes and talents

Tuscarora is a fairly big school with about 1,600 students – 40% white, a quarter Hispanic, a quarter Black. A third of students get free or reduced lunch.

Half of these students play a school sport, well above the national average of 39% participation. "That's awesome," beams Tuscarora's coordinator of athletics and facilities Chris O'Connor. "That speaks to the number of sports that we offer."

Frederick County schools, including Tuscarora, offer 17 different sports , including golf, swimming and lacrosse, and starting next year, girls flag football . It also has three unified teams, in which students with and without disabilities play together – Tuscarora's unified bocce team won Maryland's state championship this year .

Variety is key because not everyone loves playing football, basketball or baseball, notes Brian Culp , professor of health and physical activity leadership at Kennesaw State University.

"What can happen is that if you're in a school system where you, for instance, have a high amount of African-American students, and you say, 'Well, I'm going to provide basketball and I'm going to provide football,' – you've basically designed their destiny," he says. If a student isn't good at either of these sports or doesn't like it, he explains, they might feel like there's no place in sports for them.

Offering options like fencing or gymnastics can help students find what clicks. "There are things that impact what type of choices people make: Are they skiers? Are they swimmers? Are they runners?" Culp says he himself didn't play a varsity sport until his senior year, when he ran cross country.

Chris O'Connor leads athletics at Tuscarora High. He says it's important to let kids try a variety of sport. His own kids, a seventh-grader and a fourth-grader, both do three sports so "they can figure out what they like," he says. Selena Simmons-Duffin/NPR hide caption

Chris O'Connor leads athletics at Tuscarora High. He says it's important to let kids try a variety of sport. His own kids, a seventh-grader and a fourth-grader, both do three sports so "they can figure out what they like," he says.

Don't force kids – even star players – to specialize

Variety is also important for athletically gifted students to help them branch out, notes Flanagan.

"There's no end to the specializing," she says, of the trend in sports today. A parent may go beyond specializing their child in hockey, she says, to asserting: "My child's a goalie, and don't deviate from that because that's where you're going to make your mark."

She thinks this way of approaching sports robs them of the fun, while also increasing the risks of repetitive stress injuries and potentially limiting a child's identity. In her book she advises: no sports specializing before puberty.

Tuscarora's O'Connor agrees that specializing is a problem. "I think that's what's wrong with youth sports right now in America," he says. "I'm from the mindset that you should do as many different sports as possible because you don't know what you're going to like."

Worried about your kids' video gaming? Explore their online worlds yourself

Give kids of varying skill levels opportunities to play.

The school system today is geared toward channeling the top-performing young athletes toward collegiate and professional goals, says Flanagan. "If you're at a giant school and you're trying to make the basketball team, you are competing against four grades [worth of students] for five spots," she says. "So where does that leave the kid who's just like, 'Okay, I want to play, but I'm not fantastic'?

"The arms-race nature of it has really had such a terrible impact on kids who might ordinarily grow into it if they had space, they had time," she adds.

Not every family has the resources to develop kids' athletic talents when they're younger, and some kids don't discover an interest right away. For students like this, Tuscarora has low-key, non-competitive sports that students can play during the school day, explains O'Connor — and that have meets every few weeks.

"It's providing that opportunity for the student-athlete in the school day to just have some fun with the sport and be around an adult who knows something about it," he says.

Official school sports also help students who come in as beginners stick with it and get better, says Nzouakeu, the Tuscarora tennis player. He started as a sophomore, and his game has improved steadily, he says. "I know that when I play out there, I can definitely find out which skills I need to practice more and I can take that time to continue getting better."

Use school space and time creatively

School sports are often jammed in after a long day of sitting in classrooms. That's not the only way to do things, notes Flanagan.

"In Finland, after every 45 minutes, they have 15 minutes of recess," she says. "Just this idea of moving your body to clear your head – it's well-established in science that this is so essential for clear thinking and for emotional well-being, too."

She says recess isn't the only way to get physical activity during the school day – intramural and club sports can offer that same kind of outlet, if schools think creatively about space.

"Most gym and field space is not occupied all the time – field space in particular is typically for sports after school," she points out. Why not use that field during a flex period? Or get students scrimmaging in the gym?

To do this, says Culp, you need "a principal, a district that actively promotes physical movement as a part of the school day." He notes decades worth of research showing the benefits of physical activity for kids. "A physically, actively engaged child is a better learner in school," he says "Their self-esteem is high, their self-confidence is high, and their ability to actually deal with challenges in the world is better."

Tuscarora High in Frederick, Md. Selena Simmons-Duffin/NPR hide caption

PE classes have a good ratio of teacher to student

One challenge for students who aren't confident in their sports skills is that it can be intimidating to try to join in, says Culp, especially if there are a lot of students and only one teacher or coach.

It's like being in a city waiting for a subway. "That train comes through and you're just like, 'I don't know if I want to get on that subway car because it's packed,'" he says. If there are too many other students, some kids may feel they won't get enough support from the coach.

School leadership and school boards can support physical movement, Culp says, by instituting a manageable ratio of educators to students. This can encourage students without a lot of skills (or even reluctance) to feel like they can join in.

High school senior Lorris Nzouakeu says he enjoyed improving his tennis game during high school and he'll keep playing tennis recreationally in college. Selena Simmons-Duffin/NPR hide caption

High school senior Lorris Nzouakeu says he enjoyed improving his tennis game during high school and he'll keep playing tennis recreationally in college.

Keep things in perspective

Yes, there are benefits to sports, says Flanagan, but they are not for everyone. With children, "you can't force them to like school or like to read or when to do sports," says Flanagan. "They have to come to it on their own."

Modeling low-key outdoor play and enjoying sports is an important thing parents can do, she says. But Flanagan – who has coached cross country and track and seen the intensity some parents bring to their children's athletic endeavors – says it's important to let kids quit when they want to.

"I don't think forcing kids to play sports is a good idea," she says. "We have this distorted notion here about grit. Obviously grit is important. But I think we shouldn't make children stick with things just because it's a virtue to stick with things and who cares how miserable you are."

That includes young people who never really took to sports at all, and talented athletes who played seriously for years and then decide they've had enough.

And maybe if you give kids a choice, and let them play without having to be the best, they'll discover a life-long love of sport. Lorris Nzouakeu, who just graduated from Tuscarora High, lost his regionals tennis match 6-0, 6-0, but that didn't bother him too much. He says next year in college, he may play on an intramural tennis team, or just recreationally.

"I'd like to continue tennis in college because not only do I think of it as a great pastime, but I also think that it's something that I can just continue doing for myself," he says. "Something I can de-stress with as I continue living my life."

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