There was only one time Katie Mazza really felt left out. The Elk Grove Village teenager and her sisters, Kim and Karen, had always been successful gymnasts. They competed at the second highest national level in gymnastics, they loved their sport, and they knew they were going to go to college on scholarships.
One thing the triplets didn’t do was join their high school team at Conant. But they went to the high school state meet each year anyway, cheering on girls from their own school and others they knew from the years of competing.
Katie had lots of friends on the team from the Mundelein private school Carmel. When Carmel won the state championship in 1992, Katie felt the tiniest twinge of regret.
“When Carmel won it and they played `One Moment in Time,’ I thought it would’ve been a lot of fun,” the 19-year-old says now. On the other hand, says Mazza of herself and her sisters, all on scholarship at Iowa State University in Ames, “We never even thought about (going out for) high school. High school (team) is a fun a experience, but don’t expect to learn anything.”
She was talking about gymnastics, not academics.
If anyone out there still thought high school athletics were supposed to equal fun and friendship, they haven’t been paying attention lately. That equation has been altered over the last decade-drastically.
Look around the neighborhood for the old-fashioned kids’ pickup game and if you can’t find it, chances are it’s because the children are at an organized sporting event somewhere.
The Mazza girls are members of Gymkhana in Hanover Park, one of a number of athletic clubs that are thriving in the northwest suburbs. These clubs not only compete against each other, but they compete for kids’ time.
According to their national associations, about 6 million of the country’s 16 million soccer players are under the age of 18, making it the largest youth sport, while close to 250,000 do gymnastics and 50,000 compete regularly in national volleyball competitions. That’s just a small sampling. There is a team and a competition to go to virtually every month for every sport, except football, baseball and basketball.
With so much specialization available, it is easier than ever for children who achieve some success in one sport to chuck the others and concentrate on only one activity the whole year.
More and more specialty clubs are answering that need. Parents can enroll their children in gymnastics clubs, swimming clubs, volleyball clubs, soccer clubs, tennis clubs, even badminton and wrestling clubs.
The simple argument is that organized sports have gone out of control and that parents, overzealous coaches and a society obsessed with competition are to blame. The most significant study on participation in youth sports, done by Michigan State University in 1991, found that by 18 most teens had dropped sports. The reason: They weren’t having fun anymore.
It’s easy, too, to make gymnastics the microcosm of the nasty side of youth sports. Girls may work out four hours a day and be pressured into participating on either their high school or club team; they may suffer chronic injuries, then be washed up or burned out at 15 or 16, when their bodies have peaked for that sport.
But there’s a flip side: A lot of kids like the routine.
Nobody forced the Mazzas, who started tumbling when they were 4, into 20 hours of gymnastics a week, says Katie. Their mother, Joanne, took a job to help pay the cost. At Gymkhana in Hanover Park, where the triplets and their older sister, Kristi, still train, intensive instruction can cost $175 a month per child. The club has 1,000 students and employs four full-time and 10 part-time coaches.
From the time they reached high school age, their goal was to achieve college scholarships. So why forgo the high school team, with the recognition that goes with it?
Club coaches cite the higher potential for injuries in high school because the gyms are not equipped with spring floors, as clubs are, and a lesser level of coaching.
“The equipment was not the standard of safety I wanted,” says Joanne Mazza. “Competing on wrestling mats, I don’t want to think what can happen. Then we came to realize the girls never learned anything new.”
But, says Fremd high school gymnastics coach Larry Petrillo, whose team won the state championship in February, “Safety is No. 1 in my gym. The level of difficulty has increased and changed a lot, and as a result there have been some tradeoffs. If you’re going to be a club gymnast, you’re going to practice three hours a day, plus the drive, and whatever you have left is for homework. Those kids have no life.”
Rolling Meadows gymnastics coach Al Galatte agrees. “I think (club coaches are) leading kids down the wrong path,” he says. “Realistically, if a girl isn’t at elite level by high school, she’s not going to get it. There are 250,000 girls doing gymnastics; they take six for the Olympics.”
Only one area gymnast currently has a realistic shot at the Olympics-17-year-old Larissa Fontaine of Deerfield, a member of the U.S. national team who works out at Wheeling’s American Academy of Gymnastics.
What’s left for the rest? About 750 college scholarships are currently available.
Kathy Kautz, 19, got one to Illinois State University in Normal two years ago after participating in the state high school meet for Hersey High School and setting a state scoring record. She first went out for the high school team her sophomore year but had to leave her club, the American Academy in Wheeling, to do it.
American Academy club owner Leonard Isaacs says, “I probably have lost girls. I don’t try to give them an exit interview. I’ve never taken a hard-line approach, and it’s hard to say Kathy didn’t make the right decision.”
Kautz says she made the perfect decision. “You can’t throw the same tricks on the floor in high school that you can in the club,” says Kautz. Nevertheless, “I had a great time doing high school and I’m so glad I did,” she says. She had scholarship offers from five schools, including University of Illinois-Chicago.
According to UIC gymnastics coach Peter Jansson, scholarships are awarded to both club and high school team gymnasts, but only to high schoolers who do club gymnastics the rest of the year too.
Participating in a club system for any sport requires the desire, as well as the financial resources, self-discipline and determination to stick out the sport’s rigors.
The last may be most important, says Circus club volleyball coach Dave Boze. The Circus club, which holds practices in Palatine and Schaumburg, has 100 members.
“Some people get into club for the wrong reason,” says Boze, also the volleyball coach at Fremd High School. “They want to get a scholarship, and you’re really rolling the dice there. You might not be good enough.”
What a club offers is “a commitment to excellence,” says Boze. “The expectations are higher” than on high school teams. It also offers a chance for athletes to compete not only on a local but a national level. The rewards are often success-Circus has won several Amateur Athletic Union national championships.
But the days when a kid could play volleyball in the fall, then perhaps basketball and softball in the other seasons, are waning. Year-round training-something the clubs expect-is the norm. “The exposure is really important,” Boze says. “The (college) coaches won’t always see them” during their high school season.
So for a volleyball player like Schaumburg’s Lindsay Truedell, 17, a choice had to be made about her commitment to volleyball. One of the top players in the state, the high school junior gets letters from interested colleges every day. She also threw the shotput and discus on the track team, placing first and second, respectively, in the state meet this year.
Boze asks Circus members not to participate on high school teams other than volleyball unless they demonstrate they are good enough to receive a scholarship in that sport.
Truedell passed the test, but it meant practicing track and volleyball during the week, then track meets on Saturday and volleyball on Sunday through the spring season.
“My schedule is so busy,” she said in May. “I get so run down in the spring season, especially with club.” But when she broke a finger in March, she was out of circulation for three weeks. “I realized I can’t live without volleyball,” Truedell says. “When I had nothing to do I realized I had to have it. I love the competition. There’s no comparison between high school and club.”
Elk Grove Village’s Lindsay Farella, 15, one of the best young swimmers in the nation, would agree. While kids in such sports as volleyball and soccer are fully expected to participate on high school teams, swimmers can fall into the category of gymnasts-should they or shouldn’t they?
This year, Farella participated as a freshman for Elk Grove High School, though the school has no pool and had only nine girls on the team. “We were wondering if it was worth it or not,” Farella says of her and sister NelliRose, a junior, who was also on the team.
“I did it because I really wanted to have a chance at the (state) record,” she said of the 50- and 100-yard freestyle records (she won both events but didn’t break the records). “I had gone to the state meet and seen the excitement. It’s more exciting than any national meet I’ve ever been to.”
Then there was the recognition-newspapers snapping her picture and reporters gathering around. But swimmers need specialized training. Yardage must be carefully calibrated at intervals to build athletes to peak performance for big national meets in December, the spring, and summer.
Because of Farella’s confidence in her Schaumburg Park District club coach, Scott Walker, and because Elk Grove swim coach Roho Llerandi is retiring, she may skip the high school team next season. By late 1995, she’ll be training to qualify for the 1996 Olympic trials. Practice is 4 1/2 hours a day, plus weight training.
“It sounds weird, but I guess I love hard work and knowing that you’re giving your body a workout.”
While Farella busts her biceps, 50 percent of girls 17 and under, and a third of boys 12 and under, can’t run a mile under 10 minutes, according to statistics compiled by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.
A lot of parents would argue that kids could do worse than to pour their energies into sports.
Sports psychologists agree-up to a point. When the parents start living their lives vicariously through their children or exploiting them financially, then children often find themselves participating for all the wrong reasons-to please others, to find a sense of self, according to Dr. Michael Burton, sports psychiatrist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
From the 1,600 children and teens who play on Palatine park district club teams to the few dozen who are invited to join Jim Cartwright’s Junior Cougar wrestling club in Hoffman Estates, the motives are to improve skills and get the best competition possible.
A club is beneficial, says Cartwright, the wrestling coach at Conant High School, because “the competition has gotten so much better. But I encourage kids to do other sports. Confidence breeds success.”
For boys who wrestle, play football, basketball or baseball or do track, multiple sports are still the norm.
More often, for athletes who demonstrate prowess in a sport, that may no longer be possible. Palatine soccer player Keri Nelson, 18, bound for Clemson in the fall as one of the country’s most heavily recruited players, found herself at 11 having to make a choice between promising futures in figure skating and soccer.
“I kind of wonder … I wish I knew,” Nelson says of the possibilities she left behind with skating. But the multi-sport exploits of a Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Olympian in track and Hall of Famer in golf, lie far in the past.
She chose soccer eventually because “soccer was more exciting.” Nelson, who plays club soccer for the Sports Club in Frankfort, says, “You never knew what was going to happen.”
Excitement and enthusiasm should be the measuring stick for youths who take the plunge to club sports, says Wayne Harris, a sports psychologist at Mankato State University in Minnesota.
“Once a kid is hooked on the game, develop the skills after the enthusiasm is there,” Harris says. “Too often now we’re developing the skills before the enthusiasm is there. Let’s step back to see what sports are for.”
