From Little League to President, it's in Coach Todd we trust

My only memory of team sports at the age of six is being plonked down on a football pitch and told to get on with it. The boys with size, speed, or talent on their side made a point of hogging the ball, making the rest of us feel distinctly unwelcome. Nobody, as far as I remember, actually taught us how to play.

It could not be more different in the United States, where sports are regarded with utmost reverence and organised, from the tenderest days of kindergarten, with a near-military zeal.

If you are six years old in this culture, chances are you will be enrolled in basketball, or Little League baseball, or association football. What this means is showing up for training one evening a week, and then playing a league match each weekend.

Along with a main coach comes a bevvy of assistant coaches, each assigned to improve a different skill. Ever wondered what a V-dribble in basketball is? Or the precise position of second short-stop in baseball? My son Max, who is six, knows this stuff better than I ever will.

Everything is organised by parent volunteers, which reinforces the sense that sports drive this culture in ways that academic skills, or individual creativity, never will. We are now in baseball season, and Max's coach, Todd, is boundlessly energetic, always cheering everyone's efforts and making sure that kids will learn to love the game.

Training can look like a production line, with one lot of kids at catching practice, another group running bases, and yet another honing their batting skills. But it works andthe players have a blast.

This is, in many ways, the best of America: enthusiastic, democratic and imbued with ideals about teamwork and self-improvement. In Santa Monica, our impeccably liberal beach town, the park where many of the games take place truly resembles the melting pot much of the country can only fantasise about: multilingual, multiethnic and representing every social class.

Like much else in America, the sporting idyll is not without its darker side. Despite many well-intentioned efforts, rank competitiveness creeps in startlingly early, among parents as well as children. It is sobering to realise, too, that the key to success in this group is not being friendly, intelligent, or witty. What it's all about is how adept you are at knocking the ball over the pitcher's head or shooting hoops on the playground.

And then there's the Little League pledge, which opens with: "I trust in God. I love my country and will respect its laws." What on earth has that to do with baseball? Since my encounter with the pledge came on the eve of the war on Iraq, it set me thinking how easily American idealism can get perverted for all the wrong causes.

With its talk of God and the law, the pledge comes perilously close to the rhetoric of George Bush – the first former Little Leaguer to become president. Is this what my son has signed up for? Actually, I don't think so. This is Santa Monica, not the wilds of Mr Bush's west Texas. Here, our motto is simpler and more secular: In Coach Todd we trust.