Small Problems With Sports

Right now, we have the World Junior Hockey Championships being held in Toronto and Montreal. I understand that in Europe, it's known as the Under 20 (or U20) championship, in keeping with the naming system used in soccer and other sports.

But here in Canada we prefer to name our age ranges. And that brings up an issue I would have blogged about when I was a child, if someone had been willing to type it out, and invent blogging for me: Our sports age classes have embarrassing names.

We seem to have an obsession with making kids feel small. I played soccer, not hockey, but the problem seems to be the same. I started off in "squirt" which is the youngest level. Fair enough, though that does seem like an unnecessarily insulting name. Then I moved up to "atom." Obviously, that brings up the question of what the squirt could possibly be made of, if it's smaller than an atom, but I'll leave that to Neil Degrasse Tyson.

The point is, someone was clearly going out of their way to emphasize the concept of smallness if they named the class after the smallest thing most people have ever heard of, and that's the class the kids have to work their way up to.  I would have had to keep playing for most of my childhood before I even got to a level of sport that didn't have a silly sounding name.

Had I stayed in the sport, I could have gone on to levels like "peewee" and "bantam". Peewee is clearly meant to be demeaning. Bantam is more esoteric, but it's not just a small bird, it's a small chicken. There's even a hockey class named for an insulting word for small people, thus insulting people who aren't even involved in the sport.

I know, this probably all started when people created "senior" and "junior" classes to divide adults and teens. Then as younger kids wanted to play organized sports, the organizers realized that they'd painted themselves into a corner and had to come up with ever smaller things to name divisions after. But they didn't have to come up with such demeaning names. Why not name them after different sized animals? Instead they had to succumb to sports' tendency look down on inexperienced newcomers. The Europeans and their boring age range names have a point.