Recently I was reading the newspaper and saw an article on the local high school's spring football, SPRING FOOTBALL???? Are you kidding me? That is a college thing, not a high school thing! Why do we insist on stealing youth from our young people? Let kids be kids for a while. Let them enjoy down time and do the things they won't get to do when they move into the responsibility of the adult world. If this state's athletic governing body had any guts, they would set up a calendar with definite starting and ending times for each athletic season. A calendar with dates that don't have seasons that overlap or allow for multiple seasons of one sport. Sure, it has been a while (OK, quite a while) since I was a high school athlete, but I can't remember one season spilling over into the next - and there was at least a week between seasons. Coaches encouraged you to play more than one sport. Not now, coaches want you to specialize in their sport. The pressure on coaches at the high school level is far too great. Too many "supporters" (you know the ones who applaud you when you win and ask for your hide when you lose) have built up a pressure cooker for our high school coaches. After all, every parent has a kid headed for a big time scholarship, right? Better check the stats Dad, only 6% of high school footballers will earn a scholarship to an NCAA institution and only 1.7% of those will end up in the NFL. Geez, get off their backs and just let the kids play, yeah the word is play, you know fun and all? Stop making it a drudgery and stop trying to relive your glory years (or lack thereof).
"That's when a sport was a sport......"
We need to move back to those days.
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