Pass the Ball to the Kids Who Can’t Jump

I went to high school in the 1970s in suburban Washington, D.C., where I lived and died for the game of basketball. I wasn’t all that good, mind you, but I still played on the team.

No, not that team. Slow and flat-footed, I was also afflicted with what kids of every race called “white man’s disease”: I couldn’t jump. I would never make the 12-man varsity squad at school, and I knew it.

So I played in the Zim-League instead.

Actually, I invented the Zim-League -- a boys intramural basketball program named -- oh so modestly -- after myself. We prevailed upon our county’s recreational department to provide uniforms and officials in exchange for a small fee from each participant.

By the time I graduated, the league had about 100 players on eight teams -- four at my high school and four at other schools.

I don’t know whether the Zim-League still exists. But I do know we need more programs like it. By the time kids get to high school, the focus is on elite athletes. That’s unhealthy, and it’s also unfair.

You’ve surely seen the alarming statistics about kids and weight problems. The obesity rate for Americans aged 12 to 19 has doubled over the last 30 years, to 15%. An additional 10% of teenagers are considered overweight or at risk of becoming so. They eat too much junk food and watch too much TV. Of course, they also don’t get enough exercise.

But these are the same kids who crowded the soccer leagues, the T-ball fields and the swimming pool when they were younger. Whatever their skill level, elementary school children have many opportunities for organized athletics and team competition.

As they mature, though, their options narrow. Some kids join “travel” teams, which select from the best players in a wide geographical area and groom them for high school varsity competition. That means most kids drop out because there’s nowhere left to go.

It wasn’t always that way. Until the dawn of the 20th century, American high school sports teams were organized and managed by the kids themselves. According to most accounts, anyone could play. The students raised their own money, set their own schedules and hired their own officials. Unfortunately, they also allowed paid professional ringers onto the teams. And sometimes they let drinking and other raucous behavior mar their games.

So adults took over, and coaches were invented. That cut down on the alcohol consumption and kept the ringers out, but in their place was created a new caste system. In their classic 1929 study of community life in Muncie, Ind., sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd described varsity athletics as a virtual religion -- and varsity athletes as its priests.

“The highest honor a senior boy can have is captaincy of the football or basketball team,” the Lynds wrote, “although, as one senior girl explained, ‘Every member is almost as much admired.’ ”

Muncie invested dollars as well as adoration in its best student athletes, building a new 7,500-seat gymnasium at a time when the town lacked enough money to staff its public library. Officially, the gym was called the “vocational and physical education building.” But its size and design reflected its real purpose: to allow people to watch basketball. Only a handful would actually play.

And that’s the way it remains. High school by high school, we lavish money and attention on the 12 best basketball players -- or the 60 best football players -- and we let the others languish. And then we wonder why they’re getting fat.

Sure, our schools offer physical education, but when budgets tighten, phys ed is often the first thing to get cut. Besides, phys ed classes increasingly emphasize “fitness” rather than team sports, which remain the province of the varsity and occasionally (in fewer than half of our high schools) organized intramural programs .

What if we made intramural sports easy? What if we opened up the gyms and let the kids organize alternative teams? Start with three sports a year and one rule: Anyone who is interested, boy or girl, can sign up. The students could elect a league commissioner, set up squads, provide their own equipment and draft a schedule. Then they’d be off and running.

Of course, they would need some adult supervision, and that would cost money. So would liability insurance, building maintenance and the like. But next to what we spend on varsity teams, the total price tag would be minimal -- no specialized coaches, no long-distance travel, programs, cheerleaders or the rest of the trappings.

Three decades ago, the federal Title IX law unleashed the greatest social revolution that American sports had ever seen. In 1972, just 10% of varsity athletes were female; today, nearly half are. Now it’s time for another revolution, to address the next great inequality in sports: between the varsity players -- of both sexes -- and the rest of us. Let a thousand Zim-Leagues bloom.