18 years on Saturday’s fields
This autumn Saturday, more than
3,400 NCAA football, soccer and rugby teams will meet on fields throughout the
nation. More than 846,000 high school soccer players will play this week, along
with an even 1 million high school football players on approximately 13,800
teams.
Factor in 2.3 million youth soccer
players and 1.2 million youth footballers – and then consider the tens of
millions of total spectators.
These are staggering numbers of
participation and competition – there is no voluntary endeavor like it in
American society today.
I know these Saturdays well. Because
for the past 18 years, I’ve spent every single one of them on a field. My three
sons have played on various athletic teams - nearly three seasons every year -
from the ages of 4 to 22. Indeed, many weekday afternoons I attended a
practice or a game or drove to one or the other; then, there were the dozens of
tournaments and college recruiting camps, from Maine to Florida. In this age of
big data, I recently calculated that collectively, my kids played on
approximately 147 teams, attended more than 8,700 practices, and played in more
than 2,300 games.
But I’m hardly alone: Three out of
four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an
organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids; 61 percent of
boys’ ages 6 to 12 play a team sport. It’s even higher for females at 64
percent.
Certainly athletic participation
occasions the usual tropes: discipline, personal satisfaction, alertness of
mind. For example, as the Women’s Sports Foundation notes,
female high school athletes are 92 percent less liked to get involved with
drugs, 80 percent less likely to get pregnant, and 3 times more likely to graduate
than non-athletes.
But there’s a deeper benefit.
As a supercharged, 4th-grade lacrosse coach once lectured me and other parents
sitting in bleachers on the eve of what he called “a make-or-break” season:
“Folks, this field is the only place your Johnny puts himself out there to be
judged by a bunch of strangers. And half of them want him to fail.” Coach
Firebreather could have been talking about almost any young person on the
fields today.
And amen to that. In an age of adolescent relativism and
softness, on-field competition is where Johnny succeeds or fails, and he does so in direct relation to his
preparation, resilience, and teamwork. No excuses. There’s no app for grinding.
Twenty-three hundred games later,
what I recall most is the adversity: My kid in the soccer goal stopping 23
shots, but allowing another eight to get by; a kid fumbling near the goal line
and losing a championship game. And oh yeah, a kid never leaving the bench,
even in the fourth quarter of a blowout game. Kids choked up, parents
dismayed, coaches in shock, the echoes of cheers from the winning team and
crowd - all of it excruciating.
But I know that the recovery from
disappointments made my boys much stronger than the elation of victories.
And today, I bet few of the spectators today, except for parents, have even an
idea of what it takes to play on an NCAA Division I team, even a Division III squad. As the NCAA notes,
“Of the nearly 8 million students currently participating in high school
athletics in the United States, only 480,000 of them will compete at NCAA
schools.” What the NCAA left out was that maybe one fourth of those competing
will get much playing time. I know. Firsthand.
Ultimately, rewarded by grinding,
one son played four years of Division-III lacrosse on a team that twice had a
Top 20 ranking in the ESPN/Nike College poll; another was cut from a Division I
football team and played on a club lacrosse team that won a national
championship. The third is the only one to break through to D-1, playing rugby,
though he will be in that “three-fourth’s” participation category.
However, this Saturday will be the
first time in 18 years in which I’m not on a field somewhere, enjoying the
athleticism and sweat and rugged American competition. And,
yes, the adversity. That’s because exactly one-half of the millions of young
people on the fields today will be on the south side of the final score.
But that doesn’t really matter. They’re out there, being judged, even if it isn’t
a make-or-break season.