BookWire - Meet The Author

Neela Sakaria: Thanks for joining us Mr. Bigelow. Can you tell us how you got involved with the topic of youth sports? Why are you so passionate about the subject?

Bob Bigelow: Well, two reasons. Number one, having done hundreds of basketball clinics from the time I was a teenager in the late 60's and early 70's, all the way through the late 80's, I finally recognized one day that I was teaching things all wrong to the children that I thought should be learning. It took a fresh slap of reality in my face to find out that maybe I should take a look a little further about how to approach and talk to these kids, so that they might actually learn something. This was sort of the alarm going off in my head in the late 80's, then I finally got around four years later to figuring out that organized sports should be for the children.

Then I began to research. In the early 90's, my own child was now 14, and was just getting into school and would soon be entering organized youth sports. So it was a nice little parallel with my own child just about to start and my own reality being that maybe I should learn about this stuff. That came about in the early 90's. Then I researched it for about a year and started speaking about it in 1993, and I've now done over 400 talks.

The book itself - actually I started trying to write it in 1995. But I had to go through two other co-writers first, who couldn't find the time to do it, before I found Tom and Linda, my co-writers, about two years ago. So the book is not new. It's just that I finally got it written because I couldn't write it myself. I didn't have the will or the discipline, not to mention the writing ability. I've always been a speaker not a writer, so finally I got someone - Tom and Linda, to translate my words onto the written page.

BB: Very serendipitously. Tom is sort of a media maven up here in the Boston area. He has apperaed in TV and radio and writes his own column in the Suburban Metro West Daily out in the Framingham area. I found him on Channel 2 where he was appearing one night, we did something on youth sports and they invited me in and that's how I first met Tom officially. He had known of my work and I had known of his. We got talking after our appearance on TV and it was love at first sight. I like the way he writes and he liked the way I spoke. He wrote the way I spoke -- very direct and blunt and brief, so I knew it would be a good combination.

BB: At what time did I decide? Probably around 1995 - that's when I first started thinking about it. But I knew that I couldn't do it myself, so then the question was - could I find someone else to write it with me? I went through two other guys, one who I knew for many many years, a friend of mine who covered the Boston Celtics for years, but he just couldn't find the time.

So Tom and I took a shot at this, he had never written a book, and his wife is Linda Hall, she's the third writer. She's an editor, so when she came on board the project really got cooking, because they were able to do it together. They were a nice yin and yang because Tom is sort of a "half full" guy and Linda is "half empty" - she's the pessimist and he's the optimist, she being the editor and he being the writer.

NS: How did you get involved with HCI publishers?

BB: The summer of year 2000, Linda had looked up several different publishers on the internet. You know, there are hundreds of publishers out there, and in their definitions they describe what kind of books they like to publish. So Linda picked about 15 publishers all around the country. What we did, off the advice of people who had written books, was send them two chapters and also a chapter outline of the book, and waited to hear. What's interesting is that I probably received out of the 15, about 6 or 7 kindly worded rejection letters, saying "thank you very much, we wish you good luck but we're not going to do business with you." Then HCI called me, Allison *** called me out of the blue, probably in July, maybe a little later. I didn't know HCI but I did know Chicken Soup, which is of course their most famous brand of books. She said "we'd like to do this" and once they mentioned Chicken Soup, I thought "these people know what they're doing." I had never really read a Chicken Soup book although I breezed through a couple pages. That's where we started with Allison.

Actually we had another publisher that was looking also, and they weren't part of the original list, but Tom had found them through some friends in the business. They were also looking. So we had two going down to the wire and in October we signed with HCI. We had submitted the first manuscript by the end of March, and then we did the editing and proofing and all that fun stuff for another three months. So when we were done, basically it was about a 6 month process of writing and editing.

BB: The whole system and culture of organized youth sports in America has really grown phenomenally in the last 15 or 20 years. The biggest lever in that system at the community level has been what is known as "select" or "elite" teams. Often times they are called "travel teams" for the simple fact that they go play someone from another community. Now, what ends up driving this whole mentality is that you are taking like-talented kids and playing against kids of the same age in another community.

This is not any different than high school sports. In fact, it's really the inter-scholastic high school model that has trickled down to middle schools and elementary schools in this country. This is what has happened, and this is where the system has gone awry. As I like to tell people, I haven't found too many elementary schools in this country where you teach Calculus and Trigonometry, although those are two courses found often times in high schools. So, why are we designing sports and athletic models for children at age 10, and at the same time we design the same models for children who are ages 16 and 18? That's really what has driven the organized youth sports system in America.

This system that has built up has propagated an adult intensity that just doesn't belong around organized youth sports. My peers in the business, and there are some wonderful people and they're mentioned in the book, that are doing some great things, especially around the training area and trying to get adults to behave better on sidelines - what they're going after are what I call the symptoms. What I've gone after are the causes.

I think the biggest challenge is this whole travel, select, elite mentality of adults in youth sports. And, you've got to recognize something - the people who are making these decisions, a lot of times, barely know a soccer ball from a baseball. But they do know that their child can have an advantage if they become politically wired in the system. So we have a system that is out of wack, and out of control, as the book certainly makes mention of.

So that's what I'm trying to do -- I'm trying to get people to look in a mirror and ask themselves some very important questions. I'm sometimes very direct when I'm looking at these guys saying "Who are you in it for? Your own self aggrandizement or because you couldn't be an athlete when you were a kid? Or are you doing it for all the children." Often times, these are guys who were barely decent high school athletes, who want to re-live their childhood at the expense of those who are trying to live their first. And that's a real challenge -- the unrequited male ego, as I call it.

NS: You propose various solutions in the book. Can you just tell us about a few of them? What are the first few steps that a community or school can take?

BB: One of the solutions is to calm down the intensity. Less is more. Why do we need youth ice hockey seasons that are 8 months long, when your high school seasons are 3 months long?

See, what ends up happening is by lengthening the seasons, having more games, having more practices, it tells the coaches that this is too important -- after all, "I'm doing this 3, 4, 5 times a week." Number two, the parents end up going along like lemmings being led to the sea, because "if my child isn't involved, someone else's child is going to get ahead." This is what I call the "great baby boomer angst." So now we have 8-10 year old children, in this area of Eastern Mass., who are literally starting hockey before Labor Day and finishing around April or May vacation. 34 week seasons -- they're playing longer than the Bruins. Tell me why our 8-10 year olds should be playing longer than million dollar paid NHL pros. It's madness.

They know it -- the parents laugh. It's crazy, they're in the rink and it's a beautiful September weekend afternoon and they're thinking "what the hell are we doing playing hockey?" Because someone else does it and they don't want to be caught short. This is the challenge -- less is more. This is a real challenge with 35-55 year old people, especially suburban affluent adults. It's just idiotic adults who are clueless and who should know better.

BB: Coaches and parents. Most of your coaches in youth sports are parents who coach. So sometimes it's one in the same. Your classic youth sports coach is a 42 year-old guy who probably played high school baseball, football, or basketball. He probably has never taken a training course in child development, or gross motor skills, or psychokinetics, stuff that physical educators have to know. What he's doing is trying to remember 25 years ago, how his high school varsity coach treated him, which could have been anywhere from great to horrific. Or looking at ESPN trying to see how they coach, which is completely useless because the people on ESPN are coaching 20-30 year old elite athletes. This is what they're using as their model as a bunch of nine and ten year olds file into a gym or onto a soccer field. Completely useless model. They think this is what coaching is about. And when the kids act up, they get mad. They aren't bad people, these adults, they just don't have the training. I tell them all of the time, the first thing you have to know is kids. I don't care how much training you have in basketball, baseball, etc. It's immaterial. Do you understand kids, how they think, how they act? If you don't understand that first, you don't belong out there coaching.

BB: They respond fine. I always get some furrowed brows. I understand the guys, I know them by now, I've seen so many of them. The response is overwhelmingly positive because finally someone is educating them about this stuff. I tell them stuff that as I tell them, is profound simplicity. But so many of them don't understand because they aren't educators. The whole idea of high school sports in this country -- it is run by educators, boards of education, people with a background in kids.

Organized youth sports in this country from kindergarten to 8th grade, is generally run by butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers -- consultants, lawyers, and computer salesman. They are good people, but they generally don't have an understanding of children ages 5-14. That's what I'm trying to do -- get people some education so they understand the kids first, before they ever set on the field or before they start yelling from the sidelines -- idiotic stuff that the kids can't hear.

NS: What kind of response is the book getting? I would think it would take someone with an awareness that there is a problem in youth sports, to then consider picking up and reading the book in the first place.

BB: The book has been out since about August 15th, so a little over two months now. The way we marketed it is, I've done a few book tours up and down the East coast. I've also been on the radio with somewhere between 35-40 stations in the last two months. There is a PR firm in New York that has been has been doing all of that stuff and rounding up radio interviews. Tom has done a few too. The other thing is that they've shipped it out to many stores -- Borders and WalMart and Barnes and Noble, places like that. So as far as I know, it's selling pretty well. I don't have daily or even monthly statistics. I'm also selling it at my talks. I do about 45-50 talks a year, so that's a good place to sell them. How's it selling? I don't know at the moment. I'd like to see more of a national splash by HCI but they have other books to sell also. So I think this will be more of a slow roll rather than a big splash like Jack Welch or something like that.

I'm just trying to change the culture and change human nature, especially human male nature when it comes to 35-55 year old guys, who don't understand that this is not sports. This is educational development. As I often say in my talks, this has nothing to do with developing better athletes. It has everything to do with developing better kids. Often times, in this rush to get kids involved earlier and earlier, we forget that. That these are children and we are trying to develop better kids through a medium we call sports. The book brings that up many times, and that's all we're trying to do.