What makes a pickup game very different, in my eyes, is how *real* it came be in comparison. A child picks up a ball with friends and has a sudden excitement at that moment to play a game. Yes, *that* is something that humans have been doing forever. It is coupled with spontaneous emotion and drive. That makes it *real* for me.

I think this has a lot to do with my reasons for unschooling. The urge to learn is innate, right? Why would we feel the need to create this institution, with it’s age segregation and planned hours of operation and cutthroat competition, instead of just going with the spontaneous learning that goes on in life? There are problems when we create that institution. So why, if kids have naturally been having these pickup games for centuries, do we create this other sort of game, with its’ pizza parties and cheers, and inevitably, its’ losers?

Playing hoops or baseball with my friends are some of the fondest memories I have from high school and ended up being my single constructive escapism in college. The best benefit I got from playing actually had to do with my grades – I tended to do better on exams when I played hoops before studying. My guess is that it was a combination of using a different part of my mind and getting really deep, solid sleep.

I would also suggest that there are many possible lessons to learn through sports, and those same lessons can be learned elsewhere. More than where and how the lessons are learned, what I feel is important is the ideas we seek to instill and whether or not our children actually learn lesson and make them useful in their lives. Whether we learn teamwork on the field or helping build a house, what counts is our ability to work on that team in the place where our very best makes that team a better group.

There is a *huge* difference between pickup games and organized sports. I must clarify that my post concerns organized sports. Pickup games are often quite different – multiple ages and abilities, done by spontaneous interest, no cheering bystanders or coaches, rules can be made up or altered on-the-spot by participants. And the most important aspect of the pickup game is that they are usually small and populated by friends. Hopefully friends that are close and care about each other. I would hope that would lead to the participants not feeling the need to overly compete or to feel that there are losers-winners in the sense that an organized game does.

Some lovely individuals have made comments in which they use insults against my children, assume that I live on a *compound* (Ha! That one is funny), and that our family is made up of overweight and/or unhealthy individuals. I guess I was right that people would be upset by my opinion, but I was surprised by how much anger this created. BTW, I refuse to publish comments that insult my family or resort to ad hominem arguments.