Balancing Tradition and Ambition: The True Purpose of High School Sports

Sometime in the middle of the 19th Century, Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson (I don’t remember which, and I didn’t look it up) suggested that one factor preventing society from moving forward is that the people leading our most important and influential institutions will always begin to desire something different than the people those institutions were created to serve.

Government, schools, business, and religion are all organized around institutions with a specific positive purpose, and all have become sidetracked from that purpose.

Is this also true of sports?

I’ve been fortunate this summer. I am the head cross-country coach at a school with a tradition and expectation of athletic success. The just-completed school year was particularly successful: A state title, numerous state meet and state tournament appearances, and several records were broken on the track. It was a good year.

I have also been blessed with two passionate and committed co-coaches, and we’ve had an average of more than 30 kids show up at 8:00 a.m. four days a week to train for the coming cross-country season. So, here are the questions I have to ask myself every day:

1. Why are these kids showing up in such numbers?

And…

2. What responsibility do I and my co-coaches have in making sure the time they are sacrificing and the effort they are putting forth are being invested profitably? In other words, do the aims and desires of the coaches and the program align with the aims and desires of the kids?

There are a couple of caveats. This is a school-sponsored program, so we have to be cognizant of the assumed educational function of high school sports. We also have to live within the small slew of regulations and necessary accountability measures that come with the territory of bureaucratized sports. We have to be organized enough to ensure we operate within those, mostly generous, parameters.

Once we accept the fact that the high school sports bureaucracy’s purpose is to create an environment in which young athletes can both thrive and be safe, then it is up to us to make sure that the actions we take and the policies we enforce are serving the desires and ambitions of the kids who show up while their less ambitious peers are still snoozing off the effects of a late night of… of whatever kids spend their late nights doing these days. I am far enough removed from the daily life of America’s “typical” teens that I am not exactly sure how they spend their time.

Clearly, the kids who show up at 8:00 a.m. to train are not typical. But neither were the several hundred football campers from a half dozen high schools we shared our facility with last week. They were there for skills instruction and simulated games in full pads. Not typical. And neither were the dozens of kids participating in an all-sports athletic development program working out in the gym and the stadium while our cross-country runners were warming up on the track. Again, not typical.

And that is the point.

I hear from teachers all the time that post-COVID kids have become distracted, disengaged, and disinterested. I have no doubt these professional educators accurately relate their daily lived experiences. The kids they deal with from day to day are too often too typical.

I am just as sure that some of the cross-country kids, the football players, and the kids running sprints on the grass and lifting weights in the gym behave more typically—just as distracted, disengaged, and disinterested—when they are in the classroom. In other words, they are likely pretty typical in a different context.

They get up early to work toward an athletic ambition that, at some point in the future, will require them to demonstrate their progress in the direction of that ambition. To perform. Publicly.

That is the point.

Cross country, football, and whatever other sports those kids sprinting on the grass and working out in the gym will participate in are only the vehicles. The point is performance.

So, back to where I started.

1. Why do these kids show up in such numbers? Because for a broad range of reasons and a wide variety of motivations, they are willing to put themselves in the most vulnerable position a typical adolescent can imagine: To perform -- to demonstrate their competence or lack of competence in public. To put themselves out there to be judged and evaluated.

2. …do the aims and desires of the coaches in particular and the program in general align with the aims and desires of the kids? I can’t answer that. But I hope so. And I have that end in mind every day.

I hope so because nothing is more beneficial to the development of a young person’s character than performance, whether the medium is sport, music, drama, or anything else that requires a kid to prepare and then get up in front of strangers and their peers and show what they’ve got.

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