It's All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports (review)

The title of Michael Messner's study of youth sports, families, and gender, as he points out in his preface, carries a tinge of irony. It's All for the Kids becomes a statement of self-awareness when spoken somewhat facetiously by adults who are highly involved in children's sports leagues. In fact, youth sports culture can reveal much about the adult coaches and other volunteers, as Messner demonstrates in his examination of gender roles and expectations in youth baseball, softball, and soccer in South Pasadena. Messner, a professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California, has written extensively about issues related to sports and gender. He embarked on the present study in an effort "to understand the role youth sports plays in the social organization of gender and other forms of inequality in an era of social change" (xii).

The author drew on three types of data: numerical data quantifying male and female coaches of Little League Baseball/Softball and American Youth Soccer Organization teams (displayed in one of the book's four appendices), ethnographic data from field notes and participant observations with his son's Little League team, and in-depth interviews with fifty participants, nearly all of whom were head soccer coaches or baseball managers. Despite the interviews Messner and his research assistant, Suzel Bozada-Deas, conducted, the study is not an oral history. Participants were promised anonymity and assigned pseudonyms, and they did not archive the interviews for public use. Messner does not say how long the interviews lasted or include an interview protocol. Still, oral historians can learn from the author's analysis of his interview data, which shapes the book's themes, and the extensive excerpts he deftly weaves into the text to illustrate points and raise questions about society and gender that go beyond youth sports in Southern California. To this end, Messner succeeds in demonstrating that "what people see as individual (or familial) choices are in fact bounded and shaped by institutional constraints, they are given meaning by stubbornly persistent cultural belief systems about gender and families, and they are given force by deep emotional commitments to gender difference" (italics in original, 20).

Messner organizes the book into six chapters, with the middle four dealing specifically with gender issues. In chapter 2, "Looking for a Team Mom," Messner demonstrates ways in which parents are channeled into different roles based on a gendered division of labor. Whereas men are likely to be recruited or chosen as coaches, women are asked to be "team moms," less visible jobs that require a high degree of organization. Interview excerpts and field note observations show that even when women manage to start the season in coaching roles, they can end up "demoted," or their contributions may be unacknowledged. In what he calls the sex category sorting process, Messner does not deny his participants' agency, but "underline[s] the fact that what people often think of as 'free individual choices' are actually choices that are shaped (both constrained and enabled) by social contexts" (47).

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the experiences and coaching styles of women and men, respectively. "Women's assessments of their experiences in coaching range from the extremely positive to the singularly nightmarish" (56), Messner writes, and he includes examples of both. Particularly powerful are excerpts from interviews with a woman who becomes emotional when she recounts being told she was no longer needed because there were too many coaches, and another of a young woman who left the coaching ranks after one year because she felt she did not know the "secret language" male coaches used. Whether Messner and Bozada-Deas could have captured the same emotion and candor had they not promised anonymity to their participants is impossible to know. Disparities exist even within the male coaching ranks, where coaches privilege different forms of masculinity for teams in different age groups...