The Over-Committed Child

Excerpts from the Harvey Araton's Dec 8 article on UNC soccer player Yael Averbuch...

That little girl with the soccer ball at the school bus stop around the corner -- only yesterday, it seems -- won an N.C.A.A. championship last weekend.

In a blur of touches and time, Yael Averbuch grew into a 5-foot-10, 20-year-old sophomore star with legs so strong that she scored for North Carolina in September from an opening kickoff. Four seconds into the game, after the quickest college women's goal on record, it was Yael 1, Yale 0, a ''SportsCenter'' highlight now easily found on YouTube.com.


But the most unshakeable image as my wife and I watched Averbuch anchor the midfield for dynastic North Carolina as it held off Notre Dame for its 18th national title Sunday was that of Yael a decade ago, dancing with the ball at the bus stop, sending it across the street to a parent or her sister, as we chaperoned our own children to school.

Rain or shine and even in snow, she had a ball. When her peers were playing more for the salt-laced snacks, when she was outmaneuvering the first-grade scrum for the town-league Orange Bullets, a more ambitious goal was inexorably hatching in Averbuch's head.

''From the first teams I played on, I knew this is what I wanted to be,'' Averbuch said in a telephone interview from Chapel Hill, N.C. ''And whenever I set my mind on something, I'm the kind of person who will devote myself thoroughly, whether it's soccer, studying for a test or making a fruit salad.''

Yael Averbuch has been something of a lightning rod for the soccer crowd and the sports community at large in Montclair, N.J. Her special talent was recognized early, but her unusual commitment raised questions about the emerging sports culture of specialization that often demands the sacrifice of well-rounded socialization.

Should Averbuch have played with boys' travel teams, making her a barrier crasher instead of one of the girls? Should she have skirted the high school team experience for the developmental benefits of elite club soccer? Should any adolescent endeavor be so consuming as soccer was to her?

''I think if she had been pursuing math skills or violin or art, there's no issue,'' Averbuch's mother, Gloria, said. ''But because it's sports, and maybe to a lesser extent girls' athletics, those questions were asked.''

First and foremost, whose dream was it, anyway?

The past several years have seen the incorporation of individual-sport parenting values into the team-sports arena. Whereas once it was mainly tennis players and gymnasts being primed almost from the time they could walk, we now require serious-minded athletic children to pledge allegiance and often exclusivity to their preferences at increasingly tender ages or risk being left behind.

In a multitude of ways, the results aren't always pretty, especially when parents buy into the belief that a champion can be made, more than molded, when ''we'' becomes the family pronoun of performance.

Yael was barely out of grammar school when her parents turned her over to the local youth trainers, when they realized they had done all they could.

Gloria Averbuch, an author of sports and fitness books, is a long-distance runner. Her husband, Paul Friedman (Yael took her mother's surname), was a two-time qualifier for the United States Olympic marathon trials.

''What we did was create a culture at home for the love of sport for the recreational benefits,'' Gloria Averbuch said. ''But after a while, you need to know you are only there to drive the S.U.V. and buy the Starbucks. To love them and hug them when they don't get picked or when someone tells them they aren't athletic enough.

''I learned a long time ago with Yael to separate the experiences and issues of my own athletic life from hers, and that wasn't easy. I remember having to physically pull myself away once, go over by a tree and repeat over and over, 'It's not my life, it's not my life.' It's become a Zenlike mantra.''

It was Yael's decision to sacrifice the parties and the proms, to make North Carolina her destination of destiny. Years before her mother would co-write a book with Anson Dorrance -- the John Wooden of women's college soccer, whose Tar Heel program spawned, among others, Mia Hamm -- Yael was insisting that was where she would go.

She was 12 in 1999, when Hamm and the United States women's World Cup team practiced at a North Jersey school, and she waited by the edge of the field for autographs. Last weekend it was Averbuch's turn to sign for the ponytailed masses in Carolina blue and time for Hamm, the homecoming queen, to congratulate her.

It was time, finally, for Averbuch to win for her school and to better appreciate why her sister, Shira, who is also on the national-team track, recently finished her junior season for Montclair High School.

''After experiencing college, I think now I possibly did miss out by not playing for my high school, but it didn't even enter my mind back then,'' Yael said. ''I was so focused on being as good as I could be so I could get here.''

Her choice, her career, is blossoming now as she had dreamed it. She is a finalist this season for two college player-of-the-year awards (the Hermann award, won by Notre Dame's Kerri Hanks, and the Honda award, to be announced next week).

A decade ago, passing by on the street, who could have seen that the little girl with the ball was a future candidate for the national team and possibly a World Cup or an Olympics in China?

''I knew what I was looking at athletically,'' Gloria Averbuch said. ''But that last part that convinces you to let them try, I don't think we can know where it comes from or if we can even define it.''

How do you know if your child has it?

''When she loves what she's doing like nothing else,'' she said. ''And when the discipline and investment that's required is never, ever a task.''