Family Sports : Parents and Children Discover Organized Physical Activities Promote Togetherness

Steve Flowers of Chino Hills had known 17-year-old Tony Ramirez since Tony was a toddler. They had never been very fond of each other, Flowers recalls, and their relationship wasn’t enhanced when he married Tony’s mother.

Tony admits he was cutting classes and had an attitude as long as the 91 Freeway. And Flowers remembers that in his new role as stepfather he was getting rubbed the wrong way too often.

One day last year, though, Flowers took Tony bowling. To the delight of both, Tony discovered an unusual penchant for knocking over pins. They began to bowl together regularly, becoming so accomplished a duo, in fact, that they entered the 1988 Avco Family Bowling Tournament, winning the finals for Southern California.

The tournament, held annually for the last 14 years, pairs children with a parent or grandparent in an attempt by Avco Financial Services and, before them, by the Bowling Proprietor’s Assn. of America, to foster family togetherness.

Regional winners receive a $500 college scholarship and a free trip to Washington to compete in the nationals. National winners can win scholarships up to $5,000 per age division.

In October, however, Flowers’ right leg, hip and right arm were severely disabled by rheumatism. Undaunted, the pain-ridden Flowers hobbled onto the lanes and began to train himself to bowl left-handed. Anything to keep Tony interested.

This year, Flowers and Ramirez placed second in the state finals. Moreover, it was Tony who carried the two of them.

The family that plays together, as growing numbers of Americans have discovered, stays together. At a time when the traditional nuclear family--those with the mother at home, the father at work, the children at school and no domestic help or live-in relatives to count on--has become an endangered species, this realization appears to have sparked a modest renaissance throughout the country in organized family recreation.

Many American families, of course, continue to seek recreation on their own. Camping, fishing and other outdoor pursuits remain staples of the American recreative scene. And in some areas, city parks and recreation departments offer organized family-type activities.

For example, Jackie Tatum, assistant general manager for the Valley region, points out a plethora of recreative alternatives for families, which include softball, baseball and soccer teams in which parents participate as coaches and team mothers; equestrian centers such as the one at Griffith Park, and numerous Mommy & Me programs for women with children between 18 months and 2 1/2 years.

Organized Activities

In Los Angeles and nationally, however, there has been a pronounced paucity of organized leisure activities structured for the entire family. Jim Hadaway, general manager of recreation and parks for the city of Los Angeles, notes that his department has preferred to invest in such family-supportive activities as preschools, day care and latchkey programs rather than, say, softball leagues in which every member of the family, whatever their skill level, can play.

Yet after decades of segregating leisure activities by age, sex and skill level, a few recreation providers in both the private and public sectors are packaging such pursuits as bowling, tennis and Volkssporting--a German variety of non-competitive pastimes that translate as “People Sports”--to involve every member of the family.

They are doing so in the growing conviction that family play opens the lines of communication within this much-beleaguered institution, and salves the rifts and fissures all families--no matter how they are structured--accrue as a matter of course in today’s world.

Gene Lamke is chairman of the department of recreation at San Diego State University and director of the Institute for Leisure Behavior in San Diego. He believes that the proliferation of specialized leisure pursuits in America that occurred after World War II--freeing mom to play tennis while dad golfed, junior pitched for a Little League team and sis pirouetted at dance class--was nothing less than a social disaster.

“During the mid- to late-’70s in particular,” Lamke noted, “it became important for each individual to become self-actualized. Everyone found a little niche and explored it. Everyone became a member of the ‘me’ generation.

“Unfortunately, kids were consequently deprived of good role models. Without any lasting interaction with their folks, they lacked direction, guidance and the skills they needed to take care of themselves. The result was a lot of teen-age problems.”

Unhealthy Situation

If this situation proved unhealthy for the traditional family structure, it wreaked havoc upon those in which contact between family members had already been minimized or undermined by divorce or the demands of the workplace.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Canada, where one-third of all marriages end in divorce; where families, which average 3.2 persons, are smaller than anywhere in the world, and where only 20% of them fit the traditional mold.

National Program

Recreation experts such as Jack Harper, a faculty member of the Physical Education and Recreation Studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, responded by developing a national program aimed at generating awareness as to the desirability of organized recreational activities for the entire family.

Although the effects of his “Together is Better” program have yet to be assessed objectively, Harper says he believes he can discern in his country a departure among public recreation providers from male-oriented, skill-intensive recreational programming toward a more generalized and inclusive family format.

Public recreation agencies in Canada, he says, have begun supporting such leisure pursuits as block parties by dispatching mobile vans with tug-of-war ropes and other game equipment. Back-yard camping has also become popular, with public parks signing out tents and other camping equipment free of charge for the weekend. Swimming and skating lessons are being provided to people regardless of age or sex.

Meanwhile in the United States, two nationally organized, regularly scheduled family sporting opportunities have been developed through corporate sponsorship: the Avco Family Bowling Tournament and the Equitable Family Tennis Challenge.

Companies such as Avco, which target their loans to families, believed supporting family sports to be a good business investment, although there is some talk that they may turn the tournament back to the Bowling Proprietors Assn. after this year, according to Richard Steinbaugh, executive director of the association, who says the tournament will continue no matter who sponsors it.

Whatever the motivations behind this sponsorship, though, these bowling and tennis activities do seem to be getting families out of their sometimes debilitating ruts.

Joe Tomasello, a 40-year-old textile sales rep from Sherman Oaks, gets his 14-year-old daughter, Nicole, on the weekends. During the week, Nicole lives with her mother in Orange County.

Father-Daughter Game

Tomasello spends much of his own leisure time playing tennis, and Nicole belonged to an Orange County team until last year, when she gave up the game to follow other interests. But with high school looming in September, Nicole decided she wanted to make the school tennis team. Getting her on the courts to practice, however, proved no mean feat, said Tomasello, who thought that committing her to play the Equitable in June would do the trick.

The Equitable, sponsored by the Equitable Life Assurance Society for the last 15 years, is touted as the world’s largest amateur tennis tournament. Involving more than 175,000 participants annually, it pits family doubles teams against each other in mother/daughter, mother/son, father/daughter, father/son, husband/wife and brother/sister constellations. Local play began in May and June at about 240 tennis clubs throughout the country, and the regional winners compete at the U.S. Open in New York during September.

Kristine Heinberg of Agoura Hills never needed an excuse to get out on the courts. Though only 9 years old, she’s ranked No. 1 in the girls 12s division in Ventura County. She has not yet played tournaments within the United States Tennis Assn., and thus qualifies to play the Equitable Challenge.

Kristine has been hitting regularly with her father, 39-year-old Craig Heinberg, a tennis instructor, since she was 6, while her 6-year-old brother, Ryan, trains with his mother, Diane. Tennis, Craig says, is very much a family affair.

Some Americans would rather avoid stressful competition. For those, there are less aggressive alternatives. Among them, “volksmarching,” sponsored by the American Volkssport Assn.

Volkssports Take Hold

Since the mid-’70s, when it was first imported from Germany by servicemen and their families, volkssporting has become increasingly popular as a non-competitive family pastime.

While volkssporting in Europe includes non-competitive walking, swimming and cross-country skiing, Southlanders appear interested mainly in the pedestrian pursuit volksmarching.

It’s a cross between a sightseeing outing and a race, explains Stephen Stone, 26, a word processor in Hollywood who has helped form volksmarching clubs in Southern California and, in 1987, established the Hollywood Star Trekkers.

Events are planned along routes of scenic or historic interest. Volksmarchers are required to complete the march, which averages between 6 and 12 miles, within a generously proscribed time period (rambles last between 3 and 6 hours, but there are no winners or losers).

Participants, who include babies in strollers and the elderly, are encouraged to take their time, talk to each other and rest frequently.

There are about 15 clubs in Southern California that host between them an average of three outings a month. Stone estimates the existence of about 600 hard-core volksmarchers in the Southland and perhaps several thousand taggers-along.

“I like the no-hassle feeling of just walking along,” he says. “In a world where people don’t sit around the dinner table talking like they used to, volksmarching gives you a chance to communicate and exercise concurrently. And you get to see parts of the area you never would by car.”

Lamke believes that as volksmarching and other family leisure pursuits continue to attract greater numbers of Americans, as corporations continue to sponsor family-friendly activities and as country clubs host parent-child tennis and golf tournaments, public recreation providers in the United States will find themselves responding with programs of their own.

Classes in the Works

In some municipalities, this process has already begun in earnest. Katherine Chappelear, superintendent of recreation for the Department of Parks and Recreation in Sunnyvale, Calif., says her office has introduced programs emphasizing intergenerational activities--parent/child swim classes, play exploration classes and other activities.

Most municipalities, however, have not explored the possibility, for instance, of altering the structure of softball teams so that kids and parents can actually play together in leagues.

“What we’ve seen so far in this country is just a start,” Lamke said. “We have a long way to go, and I think it’s going to take policy directives issued by governmental agencies for us to do the concept of family play justice.”

For information on the bowling tournament, contact the Bowling Proprietors Assn. of Southern California, (818) 845-2602; for the tennis tournament, contact the Equitable office in Stamford, Conn., (203) 353-9900; for information on Hollywood Star Trekkers, call (213) 466-8881 or write to P.O. Box 6415, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90212.