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Are We Having Fun Yet? 207 207 Are We Having Fun Yet? Chapter 12 RHONDA SINGER Well, having a good time is extremely important, and I bet you the NBA players, if they didn’t have a good time, they wouldn’t be up there. —LeAnn, fourth grade I think it’s just fun to play. Everything. Shooting. Just about everything. —Jerry, seventh grade WHEN I ASKED FOURTH- through eighth-grade recreational players why they played basketball, not a single player said, “I started playing because I wanted to be socialized” or “because I wanted to learn the value of healthy competition and teamwork.” These are adult reasons, the kind we give at coaches’ meetings, in our talk with other adults, in our articles and pamphlets about the value of sport, and in our well-intended speeches to players. If you ask kids why they play, they are most likely to talk about how much fun it is.1 And even those kids who don’t play to have fun report having fun while they play. This finding is not surprising, given research that has found a positive correlation between enjoyment and sports involvement of youth (Scanlan and Lewthwaite 1986; Wankel and Berger 1990). So, in order to ensure a satisfying, rewarding sports experience for kids, all that must be done is to keep it fun. Sounds simple. Unfortunately, it’s not. Fun has an amorphous character, difficult to nail down to a single definition. It is an experience that is shaped by the situation, the team culture developed by players, the gender of the players, and the model of sport promoted by adults. Fundamentally, fun is a result of the situation that is collectively negotiated and created within each team. 208 RHONDA SINGER The purpose of this chapter is to increase our understanding of kids’ conceptions of fun and the potential for a lack of fit between kids’ situated interests and league goals. As numerous researchers have shown, the participation rate of kids in sports begins to drop dramatically by sixth or seventh grade for both boys and girls, although the rate of decline is much greater for girls than boys (Gould and Horn 1984; Scanlan and Lewthwaite 1986; Leonard 1998). It would seem to be the case that kids drop out of sports because, among other things, they are no longer having fun. This explanation fits with Vogler and Schwartz’s (1993) finding that kids stop playing sports because they are not getting playing time, feel too much pressure from adults, encounter a disproportionate amount of failure, and experience sports as overly organized and controlled by adults. This research provides an excellent starting point for considering the relationship between definitions of fun and kids’ participation in sports. Using qualitative research methods, I was able to examine in some depth the situated behavior and discourse of kids as they actively participated in defining fun. Drawing on a wide repertoire of activities that might be defined as fun—ranging from water fights and wrestling matches to winning a highly competitive game—kids made sense of their experiences and announced their identities in recreational basketball. This process involved navigating the competing demands of the prevailing sports ethic, adult interests, peer pressure, and the kids’ ages and athletic and gender identities. As situated conduct, this definitional process was always dynamic and at times seemed contradictory as kids moved among social acts that emerged in their everyday practices. The Study This chapter is based on research I conducted in 1995 and 1996 with four teams in the Westland Youth Recreational Basketball League (WYRBL), which is located in a small college town in the northeast United States. The Westland league has two divisions: the coed division, which is open to girls but is nearly all male, and the all-girl division, which is open only to girls. Each division is divided into levels based on the players’ grade in school. Teams are made up of players from two consecutive grades; the exception is the sixth/seventh/eighthgrade girls’ team, which includes the eighth grade because of the low number of girls in eighth grade and above who sign up for basketball. My season-long study involved the players from four teams: one fourth/fifth-grade coed team, one fourth/fifth-grade all-girl team, one sixth/seventh-grade coed team, and the sixth/ seventh/eighth-grade all-girl team. I was the head coach of the fourth/fifth-grade coed team, and I provided...

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