As fun, entertaining and fulfilling as sports can be, there is a glaring dark side to sports. Having been on both sides of the spectrum as a professional basketball player and now a coach, I can share from experience the pitfalls athletes fall into and unfortunately, the wrong path some are led down. Approximately, 36,000,000 kids play organized sports each year in the United States (Statistic brain, 2015). That is an astounding number and shows how important sports are in our society, however, what tends to get lost is the number of young athletes suffering from psychological, physical, emotional issues. An article ran in the San Francisco Examiner labeled youth sports today as legal and celebrated child abuse (Eitzen, 2012). Have youth sports
