In 1978 a real-estate agent showed Colman McCarthy a brick house overlooking Friendship Playground, an Elysium of baseball diamonds and basketball hoops in northwest Washington, D.C. It was the easiest sale that agent would ever make. "Didn't even bother to check the plumbing," remembers McCarthy, a writer and teacher whose three boys grew up playing on what became an extension of the family's front yard.

Now, on summer weekdays on that very playground, one of those boys, John McCarthy, runs Home Run Baseball Camp. It's an enterprise that nods gratefully to his childhood by recreating a sandlot atmosphere in which kids don't need the intercession of an SUV-driving, PDA-wielding baby boomer parent to amuse themselves.

To be sure, Coach Mac and his staff provide pl

"I know a lot of people don't like what we're doing," says Carey Moseley, whose son, Cooper, has spent more than five hours in a car to commute round-trip from the family home in Montgomery,

"Girls are more important than baseball. I mean, the human population depends on us."

When 10-year-olds speak, they give those findings voice. "I play a lot of sports, but I don't excel," says Andrew Somerville of Kensington, Md. "I can admit that I stink because I'm good at other things, and that's just me."

-- SPORTS EVERY YEAR, by Lorie Borelli of Orange, Conn., written

Analysts disagree on what accounts for this attrition. Do kids willingly drift off to acting and music and Dungeons and Dragons? Or do adults turn kids off with misplaced emphasis and boorish behavior? Rick Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports Parenting at the University of Rhode Island, believes that 11- and 12-year-olds go elsewhere because parents and coaches aren't giving them the sports experience they want. He cites the boom in extreme sports as proof. "With mountain biking, snowboarding and skateboarding, kids know parents aren't involved," he says. "And because parents aren't involved, they know they can go do those things to enjoy themselves."

Sports offers many of the things 10-year-olds crave. Teams are clubs; victories and defeats are real, not made-up; and rules are presumably applied evenly. "Ten-year-olds are collectors and organizers," says Bob Ditter, a family therapist who practices in the Boston area. "That's why baseball, which is very methodical and specific, and basketball, where there are plays, appeal to them. There's an elegance to sports that makes sense to a 10-year-old."

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