Un certain regard

At the Festival de Cannes (the glamorous and world-renowned annual film festival in the French riviera town which just ended this weekend), there is a competitive category for imaginative and daring films that are a bit off the beaten track of cinematic expectations, but that are still deemed worthy of critical attention. This year's winner in the Un certain regard (A special look) category was a Cambodian film called L'image manquante (The missing picture), based on the director's own memoir about life under the Khmer Rouge.

Paying special attention to misfits or non-traditional participants has brought France success in the past, in cinema, and also in athletics.  The story of Zinedine Zidane, the famous French footballer is a good example.  His parents were working class immigrants from Algeria, living in a poor area of Marseille when their athletic son began playing in a local football club.  His talent was obvious, and he got enough certains regards that he was soon swept up into the soccer academy at the Cannes professional football club, where he spent several years, and then went on to a successful national and professional football career.  He probably first drew the attention of district level scouts at a tryout like our soccer-playing son attended this past January.  This son received an obligatory summons to a district-wide brassage (a type of tryout), along with two other 12 year olds from his club, and about 60 other boys from the District de Provence, the same district in which Zidane once played.  The tryout was run by an organization called Les espoirs du football (Football's hopes) which identifies football talent on the local level for France's national team training programs , as I understand it.  While it's certain that many an immigrant or immigrant's child has been vetted in such tryouts, apparently our son's appearance, as an American, was a novelty.  It was such a daring thing to be nominated that his chances for being chosen to advance to the next step were virtually nil, as one of the organizers told our son afterwards.  (He was kind about it, saying that it had nothing to do with his talent, but his nationality.  He didn't however address the fact that our son does play with a French player's license.)  In any case, just one of the three boys from our son's club in the U-13 age group were selected to a weekend training camp.  Since then though, there have been a few other opportunities during club play to show off for French national and professional team scouts as they travel the South of France looking for future candidates for their programs and academies. (This process begins early in youth sports, in France as in the U.S. I wrote about it several years ago, from a sociological perspective, as we experienced it in U.S. youth baseball; see Tracking Little Leaguers, March 2009.)  One of our son's teammates has been scouted by Monaco's professional football club over the past two seasons, and will likely join the academy there in a few years' time, while an older Norwegian expatriate clubmate had the opportunity this past winter to show his soccer stuff in front of scouts for Metz, a club from northern France.   

A country like France is able to centralize its scouting and discover unconventional talent much more easily than might be the case in the U.S. with its many thousands of players, myriad clubs, and numerous umbrella organizations.  In France, the Fédération Française de Football, or FFF, is the umbrella organization to which all football clubs are affiliated, and to which all French football roads seem to go.  Despite the lack of recreational leagues like we have in the U.S., the French football club system though is not especially elitist, at least not at the lower levels.  Football in France is an everyman's sport, drawing working class families' kids, with the relatively affordable fees at the youth level.  (I compare these to our U.S. fees in another post, La vie familiale, Jan. 2013.)  The past successes of Zidane and other athletes with immigrant roots no doubt also attract immigrant youth to the sport (although the attractions are not necessarily the same for girls, French or immigrant: see Le bonheur, Dec. 2012 ).  In our experience, the French clubs seem open to foreign youth players on their turf, as long as we pay our fees, but I do remember being asked at our son's first club if we were planning to hang around France for a while, implying that there had been problems with foreign kids joining, benefiting from the training, and then scooting.  The current club asked no such thing last spring, and lately the technical directors have even seemed a bit proud to have an American player on the club's roster (after some initial surprise that this player  could actually play le foot).  Now though, everyone is under scrutiny at the club, regardless of national origins (the foreign players at the club include a Finnish boy as well).  Les detections (tryouts) are in full swing for the next season.

Tracking Little Leaguers

As my inaugural post, I repeat an example I used last week to illustrate mobility paths in my Introduction to Social Stratification course.

My twin sons recently went through their first Little League draft, to join the American League. This league is for children who turn 9 by April 30, and it is characterized by draft selection, fancier uniforms, and the spectacle of kids pitching to kids. Up to this point, any child could participate in baseball, and the teams have typically been composed of school and family friends. Tee-ball and coach-pitch games have been convivial affairs, with parents socializing on the sidelines, and coaches and volunteers shepherding kids to home plate and then again from base to base (in the early years, one sees a lot of wrong-way running). No one keeps official score, but the kids try to, with the final score invariably reflecting a win for their own team.

Now, everything is about to change. All the kids that want to play still get to, but their selection onto teams depends on their performance in a draft. In the draft, the coaches rank the players by ability and then select them onto teams (with the rankings and selection order kept secret by the coaches). The goal is to create more evenly-matched teams, and then to begin keeping score and reflecting each team's performance on a league scoreboard.

Creating more evenly-matched teams will certainly make for more competitive games. But this year is really just the beginning of the tracking process in youth sports, where the opportunities to move up begin to narrow. I suggested to my students that this reflects 'contested mobility', a concept illustrated in Ralph Turner's classic piece on social mobility (1960). In that piece, Turner characterizes the U.S. school system as a system of contested mobility where individuals seek elite positions through the means of an open contest, purportedly based on merit. The best, most talented will ascend to the top, and those in the middle go to middling positions, and so on. But, as we have seen in the U.S., a contest based on merit assumes a level playing field, which we do not have, in school or in youth baseball. Our educational system does not receive children with the same level of school preparation, nor does it create level outcomes for children at the other end, and neither does baseball. The draft was an attempt to identify talent, but it also reflects much more. Certainly, there were some clearly talented kids at the draft, batting at the balls coming out of the pitching machine or successfully catching fly balls. But, how fair was the contest? One student in my class wondered how much my children's performance in the draft, for example, might have been influenced by social capital investments. Indeed, the fact that I have signed the kids up for baseball each year gives them an edge in experience. The pre-draft warm-up course in which my sons participated over three evenings several months ago also was an investment in their skills. And, the encouragement from extended family helps, the support from grandparents and aunts on the sidelines, and gifts of mitts and baseball bags. So, the draft doesn't only reflect talent, but also level of preparation and other intangibles.

This year, such investments may not matter all that much. But, next year, the path narrows even more apparently, as the draft rankings determine which kids go on to the elite league and which ones to the common league. Merit, or talent, remain the basis of the ranking in the draft, but from this point, the system begins to resemble what Turner calls the sponsored mobility track, where the elite are identified relatively early in the process and put on a separate track altogether, while the rest are directed into another track.

These two kinds of mobility systems, sponsored and contested, have other kinds of distinctions. Turner brings up the difficulties of ensuring loyalty to either kind of system (e.g. how to get the masses vested in systems in which most of them will never reach the top). It will be interesting to see how Little League fosters that American loyalty to baseball that seizes the populace each spring, even though most of those fans never got picked for the elite teams in Little League. Something still inspires them to 'play ball' or to fork out money to watch it being played. Needless to say, I'll have lots of time to ponder this as I sit on the sidelines during the interminable innings of kid-pitch baseball this spring.

(Citation: Turner, Ralph H. 1960. "Sponsored and contested mobility and the school system." American Sociological Review 25.)