at [events like] the American Showdown, a giant, ‘Bring It On’–style tournament where more than 60 of the top cheerleading teams from Kindergarten–12th grade vie for cash and prizes.”60
Competitive cheer is but one example of the hypercompetition that began in the 1980s and 1990s and characterizes competitive kids’ activities today, along with many other activities, such as skateboarding, golf, figure skating, and gymnastics. But what about the three case study activities of chess, soccer, and dance?
Chess
Chess prodigies have emerged fairly often over time, which is not surprising given the game’s long history. Chess has been part of the Western repertoire of games since the eighth century, when Arabs brought it to southern Europe.61 In the United States it’s been played since Colonial times. The first American chess prodigy was Paul Morphy, who is said to have beaten General Winfield Scott twice as a nine-year-old. Morphy famously went crazy and died in a bathtub at age forty-seven in 1884—not exactly an auspicious precedent for American chess prodigies.
Despite Morphy’s success as the unofficial World Champion, there was not much youth chess development in the United States in the early twentieth century. Instead growth in chess for children occurred in other parts of the world. The USSR, which focused on developing children’s chess after the 1917 Revolution, was the real center of chess excellence. There chess became as popular as soccer and ice hockey. Clubs were formed and children as young as four were tutored in strategy.62
The United States Chess Federation (USCF) was not even founded until 1939, the same time as Little League (though the USCF was not limited to children). The organization soon began to sponsor tournaments and clubs, and in less than two decades it helped develop the best American chess player and the most famous chess prodigy: Bobby Fischer. Fischer taught himself how to play at age six and achieved the status of National Master at twelve. He won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship in 1956. A year later, at age fourteen, he became the youngest-ever U.S. champion (a record that still stands). Before Fischer, the USSR had been certain of its global dominance in chess, especially because it had started teaching chess in school classrooms in the 1950s.63
The idea of teaching children scholastic chess finally began to take hold in the United States in the 1960s, as Fischer’s star rose. But it was not until the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972 that American scholastic chess really took off. The phenomenal success of Fischer during the World Championship inspired moms to pull their sons out of Little League that summer and enroll them in chess lessons.64 After 1972 it became possible for some chess players to make a career out of teaching chess in the United States as parents eagerly signed their young children up for lessons.65
As with other competitive children’s activities, chess grew steadily over the course of the twentieth century and then exploded in the 1970s. Over the next three decades scholastic chess became more organized and competitive. The first national chess championship run by the USCF specifically for young children, also known as the Elementary Championships, was held in 1976.
In the early 1990s, the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, about another young chess prodigy, Josh Waitzkin (the book was written by his father, Fred), helped scholastic chess reach a bigger audience. Chess journalist Dan Heisman wrote that the movie “was a phenomenal success, and served as a catalyst for the growth of scholastic chess in North America. In 1990, only about 10 percent of tournament chess players in the U.S. were under 19; today [in 2002], over half are.”66 The depth of this chess mania is reflected in the fact that parents were banned from tournament rooms in the 1980s, as they were all too willing to help their kids cheat.
Along with Searching for Bobby Fischer another type of chess story garnered media attention in the late 1980s and 1990s. This narrative focused on the success of chess teams from poor, mostly African American urban communities like Harlem and the Bronx. In 1991, a school from an impoverished section of the Bronx won the national championships, showing that kids from all class backgrounds could compete in chess.67
Children from poor urban areas could not afford the private coaches used by children from private schools, like Waitzkin, but they did have nonprofits in their corner. The most prominent of these programs is Chess in the Schools, based in New York City. Founded in 1986 as the American Chess Foundation, Chess in the Schools provides chess teachers for schools in impoverished areas all around New York City. Another organization, The Right Move, sponsors free tournaments where children can play without paying a fee—and these are some of the most competitive events for children in New York City.
Competitive chess is unusual in that it has refocused itself on helping children from less-advantaged backgrounds, in much the same way that settlement houses and boys’ clubs did in New York City at the turn of the last century. This is partly because of the game’s low cost, but also because there are many perceived benefits to chess, including academic outcomes (some say math scores increase, though the scholarship in this area is difficult to accurately assess) and developing life lessons (such as learning to make a plan before making a move). Many major cities now have a chess program serving underprivileged youth, sponsored by a not-for-profit organization.
In addition to urban programs, the rise of Internet play has enabled children from rural areas to find regular chess competition and instruction. The development of better chess software has also made a difference. Grandmaster Maurice Ashley (the first, and only, African American Grandmaster) claims that there is “an accelerated growth of prodigies,”68 clearly a phenomenon with which chess remains preoccupied. Scholastic chess has become so prominent and vital to the success of the USCF that in April 2006 they started a bimonthly chess magazine just for their scholastic members, entitled Chess Life for Kids.
Soccer
While scholastic chess has grown in the past two decades, it cannot match the explosion of youth soccer in America. Today, according to soccer experts, more kids play soccer than any other organized youth sport.69 Of course, this has not always been true.
Soccer came to the United States from Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, during the nineteenth century as immigrants brought the game with them.70 As there were already sports considered “American,” particularly baseball and basketball, soccer did not garner much of a following in the United States for most of the first half of the twentieth century. The same immigrants who brought soccer here, and their children, are the ones who kept soccer “alive in the United States until the 1970s [through] ethnic leagues, private schools, and colleges.”71 Colleges began offering soccer scholarships in the 1960s, helping to establish the legitimacy of the sport.72
As more and more competitive athletic activities established their own youth leagues and national organizations after World War II, soccer followed suit with the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) in 1964. AYSO’s guiding philosophy of “everyone plays”—which is essentially noncompetitive—along with Pele’s popularity during that time helped soccer become the fastest growing youth sport in the United States by 1967.73
But by the mid-1970s many families were frustrated by AYSO’s egalitarian philosophy; they wanted to challenge their children to be above average. Resistance from AYSO and other recreational organizations to the increased competitive impulse spurred parents to develop their own private clubs. As these private clubs developed, with their higher participation fees, many children from the European immigrant and working-class families who had previously kept soccer alive in the United States, along with an increasing number of Latino immigrants, were excluded.
By the end of the 1970s there were about three thousand of these private clubs.74 Most were connected to U.S. Youth Soccer (USYS), which was founded in 1975 as the competitive parallel to AYSO. USYS explicitly focused on organizing leagues and tournaments for what are known as elite
