A beautiful spring day, I sat on the Iowa meadow – but I couldn’t see the horizon. I was in a gymnasium, a painful back, cramped knees, looking at my son playing travel basketball. We were three hours away from home and had spent $ 120 on a hotel room. There were other expenditure on gas, food and entry fees. While I was walking around 300,000 square feet, $ 45 million from Reclexible monks this weekend, I couldn’t help but ask myself: who are all these people? Where do they come from? Why do they spend money for this? And who could be excluded?
Sport is an essential element of human culture. It allows us to express ourselves, to practice rigor and endurance and to build the community. Too often, however, our sport contributes and exacerbates the problems of our society. For many families today, travel teams for young people are a parental obligation. We participate without thinking and infants an industry of the giant whose value is estimated at $ 19 billion per year. What should be a great expression of creation and an opportunity for the community becomes exclusive and expensive.
I have become more and more alarmed by the number of my Roman Catholic compatriots participate in travel sports for young people regardless of their faith or the teachings of the Bible and the Church. In particular, the clear teaching of the Church on solidarity should force Catholics (and, I could add, all Christians), to use sport as an opportunity for the community and inclusion rather than the opposite.
I suspect that most Catholics have heard the word solidarity. I don’t know how much know what it means. Pope Francis recognizes That the word solidarity has become a “little worn and sometimes misunderstood”. Solidarity, as Francis says, must include convictions and habits that are put into practice. Solidarity is not only a principle, but a virtue.
Youth sports should be the perfect training ground for solidarity. A team meets to work towards a common goal. All participate and think of the good of the whole. The teammates demonstrate empathy to each other. Unfortunately, our sports are increasingly devoid of solidarity. We consider them more for personal gain than the strengthening of the community. Dobie Moser calls this The “Sports AS Ladder to Success” model of participation. As the handpicked travel teams become the norm, the poor are left out. If Sport presents an opportunity for solidarity to us, we are swinging and missing.
Example: no black player born in the United States participated in the World Series 2022. A culprit is the privatization of travel baseball. While more and more families are leaving affordable community organizations like Little League, there are fewer opportunities for poor or marginalized communities to participate. As John W. Miller wrote“Baseball becomes a mainly white country club sport so that families in the upper class consume, such as apnea holidays or a golf round.” Baseball is now the American hobby only in an ironic sense: it again reflects the inequality we see in society.
I saw this first -hand inequality. Every spring when we start to miss the fields and write the teams of our local chapter in the small league, some of the players of last year were gone. No one asks where they went. We all know that they have rather chosen travel teams. Many of these teams are private and organized by parents. It costs a player’s family up to $ 2,500 to participate for a season. I know the families who travel every summer of summer for baseball. A friend sold his family cabin because “we can never get there because of the baseball calendar”. I saw images of high -speed cameras on ipad on the big screen analyzing the minute minors of a 12 -year -old child. A travel baseball patriarch asked me once if I knew the rotation rate on my son’s fast ball.
Although the sacrifice stroke disappears from baseball, we praise sacrifices in sport all the time. The players “bring their bodies into play” or “take one for the team”. These sentences refer to the personal sacrifice oriented towards the group. Rarely, however, this sacrifice extends to a world of solidarity in which we sacrifice for the good of those who are less privileged. Why do we appreciate sacrifice on the ground and forget us outside the lines? For a Roman Catholic, the words of the Bible are clear: it is our duty to “dress with great honor” the members who are “less honorable” (1 Corinthians 12:23).
Pope Francis expresses this same feeling: that our sports must never forget those who are on the fringes of society. “I also think of these many children and young people who live on the banks of society,” he said in a Address 2016 to a global conference on faith and sports. “Everyone is aware of the enthusiasm with which children will play with an old damaged old ball in the suburbs of certain large cities or the streets of small cities. I wish to encourage you all … to work together to guarantee that these children can take sport in circumstances of dignity, in particular those excluded due to poverty.”
When Catholics participate in sports, our faith and its teaching on solidarity should force us to ask us: who is included and who is excluded by how, when and where we play?
Living with Solidarity can seem crazy and unorthodox. The pressure today is to be a good consumer and to comply. “Of course, my son should play travel base. Why shouldn’t he be there. Shouldn’t his friends have the best?” Such a thought manifests a logic of privilege and lack of solidarity with those which are affected by our actions.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes: “Do not conform to this world, but be transformed” (Romans 12: 2). The transformation he describes would imply to live as if we are all one body, where we honor and prioritize those whom society deems less honorable. Economic pressure and self-aging grow in the opposite direction. Living with Solidarity would mean leaving exclusion practices and working on behalf of those excluded. A life of solidarity would work to ensure that all children can assume sport with dignity, in particular those excluded by poverty.
Catholics are dismissed every Sunday (assuming that they do not skip mass as I did to monks for my son’s basketball tournament), with these words: “Go to peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” Thanks to sport, Catholics can be an outgoing church, living with solidarity that aligns the gospel and the example of Christ. We must notice if we find ourselves in situations where the groups are excluded or unable to play. Sports practices built on equality and inclusion could be a good place to start to glorify the Lord with our lives, to show that when we participate in the body of Christ and say: “Amen”, we want it.