The practice of reclassifying grade school students (a polite way of saying, “Holding them back for sports”) is certainly not new, but has gained more attention as seemingly more and more families are opting for this approach. Briefly, reclassification refers to the practice of holding a child (typically but not always a boy) back for a repeated year of grade school for athletic purposes, not for academic or medical reasons.
The argument families use to justify reclassification in the absence of any academic or health reasons necessitating such reclassification is simple: little Tommy might become big Tommy later on in high school, and thus more attractive to college recruiters, with an additional year under his belt in grade school. Some parents have already spent a considerable amount of money in the hopes of landing an elusive athletic scholarship to college for their child, or to otherwise make their child more marketable to elite universities, what with travel teams, personal skill coaches and summer sports camps, so why worry about the expense of another year of grade school (even at a private or parochial school)?
I first ran across this practice in the South in the late 1970s while working for the NCAA. I recall hearing several parents of grade-school children make remarks such as, “Our boy needs to be able to compete with the big boys at Bama.” One way to help him compete, they believed, was to hold him back a year in grade school so that he would be a year older than would otherwise be the case when he enrolled in college. Some parents in the 1970s explained to me that it typically was easier to hold a child back in grade school than in high school, and apparently that is still the case today.
Of course, even with the perceived benefits of reclassification, the odds of earning a scholarship to college are still very long. Aside from the very top recruits, for whom the question might be how long they should stay in college before entering the professional ranks as opposed to whether they are good enough to earn a scholarship in the first place, the process of recruiting is more art than science. In fact, I have heard coaches claim that an older, more physically mature young person actually can suffer in the recruiting practice because it is felt that he has less upside than the younger, less physically mature candidate.
This is a provocative article about the feeding-frenzy among affluent parents and their children in the sport of lacrosse in the greater Washington, D.C. area. I found this remark by a parent particularly interesting:
“There’s no social reason, emotional reason, or academic reason they’re [redshirting],” the parent says. “It’s to have an advantage physically over everybody else. It’s institutionalized cheating, and it’s everywhere, and the thing that’s troubling is everybody’s closing their eyes.”
Please see this article regarding high school basketball players in New Jersey. The headline (“Staying back to get ahead: High school basketball players are repeating grades to get an edge”) is somewhat misleading, as the focus of the article is on top players spending an extra year in middle school, not high school. Here is a quote from Bob Hurley, the highly regarded coach of St. Anthony High of Jersey City: “It’s not because a kid is not doing well in school or is too young for his grade. It’s just because you’ll be one year older in high school and you’ll be that much better of a player.”
As ESPN national basketball recruiting analyst Dave Telep noted in this same article about reclassification: “The genie is out of the bottle. It’s no longer a trend — it’s an accepted practice within high school basketball.”
Many folks bemoan the increased regimentation of youth sports, and the practice of reclassification in grade school would appear to be one more example of youth sports being less about fun and more about reaching a longer-term goal. I suppose if that goal is in fact sought after by the child and not just by his or her parents, then reclassification can make sense for a family.
On the other hand, I would be interested in seeing research dealing with the number of young people who cease their participation in a sport because they are simply burned out. Participation in sports is supposed to be fun, in addition to being a wonderful way to infuse values into a young person. I fear that the more participation in youth sports becomes a part of a business plan developed by parents, the less it becomes about pure enjoyment and teaching moments.
My kids are in college now, and reclassification was never an issue my wife and I considered. I’d be interested in what those of you with younger children think about reclassification. Please contact me with any thoughts at mike.gilleran@gmail.com. Thanks.
