It’s no secret to anyone working in an independent, Christian school that sports are important and can often become the focus of decisions ranging from hiring teachers to academic scheduling. However, athletics are a value added component and can do much to support academics. No one can argue that the special relationship of coach to athlete has had much success in directing and shaping the lives of millions of students. There are no easy easy answers when we enter these waters, and yet there are points at which we might sink. If you’re looking for a good co-struggler to take with you on this journey at your school, Adam Metz’s Elite? A Christian Manifesto for Youth Sports in the United States offers much guidance to aid you in the struggle between the powers of academics, athletics, and faith.
Writing for the church, Metz seeks to take seriously the cultural role of sports in our world before dealing with the benefits and dangers of athletic competition in the lives of young people. In the first part of Elite?, Metz seeks to provide a theology of sports, focusing on themes of play, competition, and sports as a spiritual power. There is excellent thinking in this book about play as a God ordained joy, connecting our creation as humans to creators of play. Competition is put into a proper theological perspective as Metz analyses not only competition’s ability to increase our performance, but also the danger of competition becoming “nothing more than a perpetuation of a kinesthetically-clothed prosperity gospel.”
However, the most eye-opening part of this discussion for me is when Metz points to sports as a principality and power. Naming the lies families are duped into believing about athletic goals, Metz points out that families:
“…are bound (believing a particular sports lifestyle is their child’s only hope for athletic success), led to where they don’t want to go (finding it a much more consuming commitment than they ever believed possible), unwittingly robbed of their freedom (believing they have spent too much time, money, and energy to let their child quit), and ultimately have their family’s relationship with God negatively impacted.”
Asking families and faith communities to thoughtfully consider their participation in the sports-industrial complex, and the incredible pull of this spiritual power, we can hopefully begin to take more seriously the role of sports in our lives and its damaging impact on families. Discussing the impact sports can have on politics, economics, and education, Metz helps us see the great potential, and harm, that can accompany the joining of sports with other, equally strong, powers.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing adolescents today is the conflict that arises from a pursuit of identity. Devoting a chapter to this topic, Metz is pointing communities to a path where they take seriously the performance-driven aspect of sports and the accompanying kind of identity formation that is happening through sports. Metz names such phenomenon as athletes, like the star quarterback, exalted as status symbols. This star treatment can have a tremendously negative impact on the development of an adolescent, resulting in entitlement, special treatment, and celebrity status. Often this formation is occurring simply through the ways in which we set up our athletic programs. As Metz deftly points out, “Imagine the dramatic effect that traveling around the country to play in basketball tournaments has on the identity formation of twelve year olds.”
I mentioned above that Metz is a good co-struggler for this conversation around sports and faith, and I mean that with all sincerity. Rather than solely offering a critique of youth-sports in America, Metz, as a father of athletes and a high school football official, offers a unique perspective as someone who loves, values, and is caught up in, the sports-industrial complex. His theological acumen resists easy answers, and he provides categories for schools to honestly and faithfully consider the impact sports are having on adolescents, even as a writer with the local congregation in mind.
Metz encourages congregations to go through a faithful assessment of the degree to which sports impacts their gatherings, advocating a deeper and richer theological conversation on these matters. Additionally, Metz invites us to reconsider the merits of the often overlooked redemptive qualities in “silly” youth group games. If it’s true that we are created by God to play, perhaps one path forward, is simply to create more space for true play, even for our most serious athletes.
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