or “rec,” teams that AYSO sponsors, as they have year-round seasons, they sometimes play multiple league games each week that require travel, and they almost always have paid trainers and/or coaches.75 These traits are characteristic of the professionalization seen in various children’s athletic activities.
Another way youth soccer has tried to professionalize, which is noteworthy among kids’ activities, is that they require all coaches—even volunteer parent coaches in recreational leagues—to get a license to coach. This rule is mandated by the national organizations. Such licenses go from A to F, with A being the most advanced, certifying someone to coach at an international level. Most youth coaches have only an E or F license, the lowest, and while these licenses simply require a few hours of training, the fact that they are required highlights the professional attitude many within the world of soccer have toward youth programs in the United States.
Soccer America, the monthly publication for soccer fans in the United States, also devotes at least one article each month to issues affecting youth soccer, illustrating its salience in the wider soccer community. Jim Haner writes in his 2006 memoir on being a soccer dad and coach that soccer is now simply a part of American childhood, at least for those from a particular class: “Soccer is now one of the defining experiences of childhood in suburbia—like Boy Scouts or Little League two generations ago, only much bigger—but it barely existed in most places as recently as twenty years ago.”76
While youth travel teams did exist in the 1980s, many soccer writers are quick to point out that they barely resemble the teams of today, with their names, uniforms, and “highly evolved infrastructure.”77 Given that organized competitive soccer developed so recently, it is all the more remarkable how professionalized and organized the competitive landscape already is for kids in the twenty-first century.
Dance
Dance has long been considered a classic childhood experience, the way soccer is for many kids today. And as with soccer, the contemporary dance landscape is quite different than it was thirty years ago. It is now filled with hundreds of dance competitions run by private companies. “Competitive dance” refers to for-profit dance competitions that organize regional and national competitions for all forms of dance, as opposed to dance that is competitive only for admission to companies and programs or for roles in specific productions.
The history of dance education in the United States spans the twentieth century, though formal instruction outside of the home began in the nineteenth century. Dancing academies, such as the Dodworth Academy, started in the 1840s in New York City.78 These academies helped mold upper-class American children in the image of upper-class Europe an children, teaching them social dances.79 The Dodworth Academy reached the height of its popularity in the 1890s as the nouveau riche wanted their children to acquire the proper cultural capital; on Saturdays they offered classes to children as young age three. But by the 1920s the Dodworth Academy had closed due to economic difficulties and family politics.
By that time ballet schools had stepped in to fill the void in dance education. One of the first formal ballet schools opened in 1909; it was affiliated with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Before schools like this developed, teachers would hold lessons in their homes.80 Dance schools and studios developed and expanded over the next few decades. Dance teachers’ organizations, including Dance Masters of America (DMA), organized in 1948, helped to legitimate the field and promote dance education. In the 1960s these teachers’ organizations began to hold national conventions where teachers could take workshops and bring their students to show off their skills and compete.
Dance competitions did not arise for the first time in the 1960s, however. They were preceded in the nineteenth century by a tradition of mostly informal dance competitions among children and adults. For example, “challenge dancing” was common in African American communities, and Irish step dancing competitions (at fairs, pubs, and even in homes) were common both in Ireland and in the Irish diaspora.81 What distinguished the new competitions of the 1960s is that they were organized, and the organizers earned money for their efforts.
DMA held its first competition for individual dancers in 1963, and another dance teachers’ organization, Dance Educators of America, also started competitions in the early 1960s. These competitions awarded scholarships to winning dancers, supporting them in their continuing dance education. Dance competition expert Pam Chancey explains that the goal of the competitions of the 1960s “was to challenge professionals and add prestige to the art of dance. At that time, many people criticized dance competitions for attempting to turn dance, an art form, into a ‘sport.’”82
But comparisons to sport likely helped establish dance competitions, at least in terms of the way parents viewed the value of participating. Private competitions, eager to jump into this competitive space and thinking of dance competitions as a different form of athletic contest, started to pop up in the late 1970s.
Showstopper National Championships was one of the first to enter the field, and today it remains one of the largest competitions. Showstopper held its first event in 1978, claiming it was the first of its kind. The founder, Debbie Roberts, explained her motivation for starting the competition: “It was my son’s participation in organized soccer that inspired me to start Showstopper. I saw how excited and challenged he was to play each week. When he would lose, he would leave the game saying, ‘I’ll try harder next week.’ He learned to practice and work hard to achieve all he knew he was capable of accomplishing.”83
Another form of competitive dance—though not the focus of this book—is ballroom dancing, which has also relied on similarities to athletics to aid growth. Social ballroom dancing had been popular since the time of academies like Dodworth. But social ballroom dancing steadily lost popularity through the first half of the twentieth century. By the time of Chubby Checker and nightclub dancing, social ballroom dancing was as its lowest point. Interestingly, this is the moment when the competition system for ballroom dancing started to develop in the United States, around the 1960s.84 By the 1980s this style of competitive ballroom dancing had been labeled DanceSport to “designate a competitive and more athletic form of ballroom in order to set it apart from its more recreational and social counterpart, which is often stereotypically visualized as dancing by seniors.”85
Just as ballroom dancing became more competitive from the 1960s to the 1980s, so too did the dance competitions that are the focus in Playing to Win. The early years of private competition were far less competitive than they are today. One dance teacher reflects, “My studio began competing around 1985. . . . Then probably in the early ’90s, some of the stronger studios started coming alive.”86 This teacher went on to explain that today the costs of participation (entry fees, costume costs, etc.) is much, much higher than in the 1980s and 1990s and that in some areas of the country a lot of the camaraderie that used to exist between teachers and studios has been replaced by animosity. The proliferation of dance competitions, “sparse thirty years ago,”87 has also fueled the proliferation of thousands of dance studios, which explicitly train students to participate in the competitive events.
There is continued growth in competitive dance in the twenty-first century as some of the major competitions attempt to organize themselves into a dance competition federation. Popularity and growth has been reinforced by such TV shows as So You Think You Can Dance and Dance Moms, which feature many “competition kids” and their tricks. These tricks, such as triple turns performed by nine-year-olds, are a sign of the hypercompetitive atmosphere. To win, children have to perform feats that were rare twenty years ago and certainly not expected of children of their age.
Also unimaginable twenty years ago is the behavior of some adults involved with dance competitions. For example, some teachers and parents have been known to lie about the age of the competitors. Because of such misbehavior competitions now often require proof of age. This type of misconduct by adults highlights
