He walks off the court after practice feeling good about the camaraderie and chuckling about the inside jokes typical of 13- and 14-year-old boys. Just yesterday he told me with a big smile that he was glad to have signed up for the spring NJB season.

He is participating in a youth sport the way it used to be played just a generation or two ago--for the joy of it, not for the potential college scholarship.

Now, I don't deny that if either of my children demonstrated athletic acumen in a given sports I might have pushed them to excel. Back in the day, if Title IX, a 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in education and athletics, had been around, I probably would have gone to college on a tennis scholarship. So no one can accuse me of not being high on the importance of athletics or where it can take you.

Yet, back then a kid could still play seasonal sports: soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring. Kids didn't have to commit to just one. There were no traveling teams or clubs. Sports were seen as that extra dimension that wasn't found in the classroom. It taught character building through team play, as well as the challenges of winning and losing. These are important skills that many of us take into adulthood.

All that is still there but somewhere along the way the emphasis changed. Perhaps it was the skyrocketing cost of a college education. Maybe it was the competitive need to keep up with the Joneses. Maybe it was the cutbacks in school athletics and physical education programs. Or maybe we have simply lost our perspective on what it means to let a kid be a kid. At some point recreational play morphed into something too serious and too focused, and many kids are no longer out there just for fun.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at the high school level. I watch some of my daughter's friends--hard-core volleyball and basketball players--live their weekends in hotels as they travel to play their chosen sports. I am sympathetic toward their parents. I understand their objective. Yet the lives of these teens are completely dominated by one thing: a sport that will be their passport into college. These girls miss out on school functions like dances, schoolwide events and just hanging out with their friends. They miss out on being a teen.

Somehow we need to get back to the center when it comes to sports. We need to stop believing that this is one of the only ways to get a child into college. We need to remind ourselves that it's brains versus brawn that goes the distance. We need to remember that playing a sport just for fun is still perfectly OK.

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Willow Glen Resident. She can be contacted at 400.200.1051 or mmilo@community-newspapers.com.