In the new enterprise of directing children’s play, adults working as coaches and supervisors figured out ways to do what they called “building character,” evolving a variety of systems to divert children’s competitiveness into positivity.
Famed coach Glenn “Pop” Warner wrote in Woman’s Home Companion in 1934 that parents should pay attention to the way their boys were playing, make sure that they weren’t getting tackled in vacant lots with “rocks and bricks or bottles scattered about,” or playing at a mismatch against much bigger kids. Adults wanted to sand the rough edges off student-run sports and make them into something constructive, “useful for redirecting high school youth away from the common social vices of drinking, smoking, gambling, and sexual exploration.”įor younger kids, experts advised adults to notice the conditions of their children’s play, regulate them to make sure they weren’t overexerting themselves, perhaps sign them up for an organized league. This change, Pruter argues, was all about adult control. Historian Robert Pruter writes about the transition, between 18, between a loose arrangement of student-run high school teams and our present regime of more formal, adult-supervised interscholastic sports. Slowly, sports-both the games that younger kids used to play in the street or field, and the football and baseball that older kids played behind their high schools after classes let out-came under adult scrutiny.