Unless you're deep into sports research, the letters and numerals LA84 might signify a long-forgotten bunch of martyred radicals. But they mean something way more forward-looking than that. Born of monies left over from the highly-successful 1984 Olympics, LA84 represents some of the best amateur sports support available. Of most interest to me — unless the group decides to send me to a baseball camp— is the Paul Ziffren Sports Resource Center. The center is a world-class holder of comprehensive sports information.

On Tuesday I reached out to LA84's Wayne Wilson, Vice President of Education Services, for clarity on a number of issues. We talked this morning.

MOLI: It seems to me that the sports library is overlooked.

Wilson: In the last five of six years, a lot of use of the library is happening
over the Internet, rather than in person, here. I think that’s probably
the pattern that’s consistent with what other libraries are experiencing
as well. In as much as we have 300,000 pages from our library on the
Internet now and those pages are gonna be downloaded 12 million times this
year, I would say we are well-known to people who are interested in doing
sports research.

MOLI: Can you give me the general background on the foundation?

Wilson: The foundation was created with the a portion of the surplus from the 1984
Olympic games. The 1984 games created a surplus of $234 million. Forty
percent of that was earmarked for a youth sports foundation in Southern
California. The other sixty percent went to the United States Olympic
Committee. We started operations in 1985 with that 40 percent.

MOLI: Why do we even need a sports library, specifically?

Wilson: The prime mover behind the library was a man named Stan Weaver, the first president of the foundation. He and the board decided very early on in our
history that a sports library would be a resource that could be used not
only by people with an interest in youth sport, but by researchers,
generally, who had an interest in sports. The underlying assumption was
that sport is an important part of American life and that there ought to
be a center where people who want to study it could go and do that.

MOLI: I blogged about Regan McMahon’s Revolution from the Bleachers on my
personal website and got more hits than anything I’d done there. Yet a lot
of people I know who read sports books weren’t at all familiar with it. Is
that strange? Are we in a strange place where sports literature is
concerned?

Wilson: Sports literature is very diverse. It ranges from the instant,
congratulatory coffee table book because a particular team wins the world
series to scholarly works that people can put five or six years of
research into. I think that, because of that diversity, there are all
kinds of books that fall through the cracks. Or come close to that.

I wouldn’t be surprised though to see more books on youth sports coming
out in the next few years. There’s already a genre of books on youth
sports and I think that’s going to continue as the professionalization of
youth sports continues.

MOLI: The professionalization would be the main reason for books in that category?

Wilson: Yeah. I think that trend is going to produce a reaction where people like
Regan McMahon are questioning the direction that it’s taking.

MOLI: Sorry, but what do you mean by professionalization of youth sports?

What I see happening is that kids are spending more time doing organized
sports, under the supervision of adults who are paid to provide
opportunities for them and that there is a greater interest in
specializing in an early, early age so that if someone shows an aptitude
for basketball, he may only play basketball. If someone shows an aptitude
for soccer at an early age, she may only play soccer all the way through
high school. I think that what we’re seeing is an increased interest in
sponsors and media in youth sports. Increasingly, we’ll see high school
games broadcast on television, for example.