Is it good enough just to be on a team? Should everybody get to play at the 7th/8th
grade or high school level in a competitive school system?
There comes a time when the whole “participation (everyone
has to play)” agenda has to, and should go out of the preverbal window!
By me officiating a couple of sports, I often times see the
cons of this mind set, especially at lower levels. Kids (and I’ll use this term to describe the
players) enter a game, sometimes with NO concept of what’s going on, or
how to effectively play the chosen sport.
I had a situation not long ago where the coaches were deciding whether
to play everyone, or try to WIN the game.
Granted this was one of their “rival” schools, so I’m sure both sides
wanted to come away with the “W”. One coach
says to the other, “go for it, get a win…we need it” That’s sports people…as one former NFL coach
and now TV personality once said…..”you play to WIN the game”
Definition of
Sports - an athletic
activity requiring
skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature
During the match (volleyball), one of the
parents/grandparents gets up and walks to the table to “discuss” why his
daughter/granddaughter wasn’t playing….Really dude? For those of you know about volleyball, it’s
a very detailed and sometimes tedious task to keep score, etc. at the table,
and you absolutely cannot have someone standing in front of you complaining,
let alone blocking your view for a “valid” reason. I could see the look on the coaches face (he’s
keeping score for the team), so I blew my whistle and motioned for the table to
ask the gentleman to move away from the table.
He turns around and looks at me and mutters something that I couldn’t
decipher (probably a good thing for him…lol), so I wave him away from the table
and state verbally “please do not stand in front of the table during the match
sir…Thank you”. He proceeded to go back
to his seat, stopping along the way to seek support from other parents I guess.
I understand parents/grandparents wanting to support their
children’s athletic endeavors, but also support them by taking some time to
take him/her out on the court/field/ice or what have you, and work with him/her
so that he/she has a chance to get better and EARN playing time.
When I came up, there was no such thing as this “everybody
plays” agenda. If you weren’t good
enough to play, you didn’t
play! Not playing is and has always been
the BEST motivation for kids to work
harder so that they can play. I sat
behind guys coming up, and that made me want to work harder… get in the weight
room, on the court, dribbling the ball at all hours in my basement, shoveling
snow from the courts so that we could play in the winter, etc. so that I could
deservingly be out there. Heck, I
believe we had close to 20 players on my high school Freshman basketball team,
and not one of us “settled” for just getting in the game. I was fortunate to be one that played, but
each one on that team worked hard in practice, and never took for granted that
everybody would play just because they were on the team. Playing football in high school, there were
kids that didn’t have a chance to play when we were in 9th grade,
but by working hard, by the time we were seniors, some of them were out there
also!
Let’s rethink this mind set and make accountability (for
putting in the work) a bigger priority if one chooses to play sports competitively. Hard work pays off!!
#rantcomplete
