Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Menino

In a single tidy sentence, Menino smuggles a whole theory of civic life into the language of youth sports. “True value” is doing a lot of work: it draws a line between what’s easy to measure (skills, drills, wins) and what politicians care about but can’t put on a scoreboard (belonging, safety, upward mobility, social order). As a mayor who governed Boston through boom years and deep inequality, Menino isn’t praising sport as recreation so much as positioning it as infrastructure.

The phrasing “more than the skills” nods to a familiar civic script: athletics as a proxy for character education. But the subtext is sharper. Sport becomes an argument for public investment - fields, leagues, community centers - framed not as “nice-to-have” amenities but as preventative policy. Keep kids engaged, the line implies, and you reduce the pull of the street economy; you build cross-neighborhood relationships; you teach discipline in a setting where adults show up consistently. It’s a compact rebuttal to the idea that sports are extracurricular fluff.

The word “young people,” not “athletes” or “kids,” widens the constituency. Menino is speaking to parents, taxpayers, and donors, making sport legible as a public good rather than a private hobby. The quote also carries a quiet moral hierarchy: skill is individual, value is communal. That’s classic municipal pragmatism - sell the romance of teamwork while pursuing the hard outcomes of stability, health, and civic cohesion.