It’s playoff season in high school sports and we’ve been having fun reporting the successes of our local athletes.
In the last couple of weeks our golf team won its first district title ever, our very young softball team made it to the playoffs and hopefully will come back next year more seasoned and ready to go deeper in the post season, we had several equestrians qualify for state and now we have 12 track and field athletes and two relay teams headed for Hayward Field in Eugene to get a taste of the big time before the Olympic Trials take over that venue.
The only thing that bothers me is how relatively few kids are enjoying this.
A couple of months ago – Spring Break to be exact – I spent most of a Friday and Saturday standing in sharply alternating rain, snow, sleet, hail and wind, with occasional breaks of icy sunshine.
I was at Husky Field, watching athletes from all over the state of Oregon mix it up on the track as they competed in the annual Sweet Home Decathlon and Heptathlon.
If you’re not familiar with the decathlon, it is a combination of 10 events that incorporate many aspects of track and field – running, jumping, hurdling, vaulting, and throwing. The heptathlon, for girls, is a slightly abbreviated seven-event version.
The conditions were less than optimal for the event, but that didn’t stop anybody. The kids were there to compete and they had fun doing it.
I was only sorry that just nine Sweet Home boys and two girls were there. What were the other teens in town doing that day? Video games? Watching TV? Hanging out? Shopping?
OK, I’m not suggesting that all the teens in town should have been at a track meet in nasty weather. But I start thinking about how good sports are for kids.
Since arriving in Sweet Home three years ago, I’ve become more convinced of that.
I haven’t always felt this strongly about the value of sports.
Before I get too far into raving about the pros of sports, I’ve seen sports, like everything else in life, get out of balance. They can easily become too dominant in a young person’s life.
I’ve experienced the Southern California club soccer scene, which produces great young soccer players at a high price in financial costs, excessive obsession on a single sport, injury and burnout. They have plenty of other club sports there – basketball, volleyball, softball, baseball, and even track, which carry some of the same risks.
But despite the threat of overkill in sports, I think more local kids should be participating in them.
When I arrived in Sweet Home three years ago, after having lived and worked as a journalist in a variety of communities, large and small, in Oregon and California, I was struck by the fact that sports here were fun for kids. I know a lot of kids in Southern California have fun playing sports, even if their parents’ agenda for them includes sports taking their youngster to college or the pros.
But here a lot of kids don’t have parents hovering in the background, watching coaches’ every move, hoping to cash in some day. They play because they enjoy it, because their friends are playing, or maybe because they need something to do. A lot of kids play three sports, some very well.
Sports can be an excellent way to develop skills and self-control. They give youngsters an opportunity to learn how to be persistent, to learn discipline, to make things happen when circumstances aren’t optimal, to learn how to deal with adversity. They also can be a lot of fun.
It’s fun to win. It’s fun to achieve things, and there are plenty of kids around Sweet Home who aren’t achieving much.
I had finished photographing track team members in the high school gym a couple of years ago when a few boys walked in wearing street shoes and jeans. One of them, in an apparent moment of youthful enthusiasm, did a backflip right there on the gym floor, landing perfectly.
Since I’ve covered track and field for years and I really enjoy it, I know talent when I see it.
“Hey, how come you aren’t out for the track team?” I asked.
“I don’t have the grades,” he mumbled back, sheepishly.
What a pity. Here’s a kid who probably has too much free time on his hands, who has obvious talent (the track team ALWAYS needs jumpers), who just walked out the door because he can’t get it together.
What if he had gotten his grades up and had gone out and been diligent and placed in the state meet?
What if that success had led to more diligent effort, and success, in life?
Let’s say you’re an employer and you have a pile of resumes from people who want to fill a vacancy for you. You winnow the pile down to three people who you believe have the skills for the job. Otherwise, you see little that really stands out about two resumes. But the third one notes that the applicant spent four years playing basketball. Or volleyball. Or they swam for four years. Or they competed in track and field. Or they did some combination of more than one of those. What’s that tell you?
One, it tells you they were dedicated to improving themselves because they would probably not have made it through four years in athletics if they hadn’t. Two, you can tell they know how to take directions from a coach (they didn’t get kicked off the team), they were probably reasonably punctual, they could pursue a goal successfully.
Given that knowledge, whom would you hire if you’re looking for someone who is responsible, who is punctual, who can overcome adversity?
The point is, it would be great to see more Sweet Home youngsters try sports.
When I was at the decathlon/heptathlon, I spoke to the father of an athlete from Crane, a little 1A school way out in eastern Oregon. He told me that at Crane there are about 80 boys in the high school, two-thirds of whom are involved in sports.
Now, I’m thinking Crane’s socio-economic makeup must not be that different from Sweet Home’s. Unlike Sisters or Cascade high schools, which have higher rates of participation in sports by their students than Sweet Home, many of Crane’s students come from blue-collar, hard-working, not-necessarily-well-off families. Many, he said, are immigrants come to work in agriculture.
So I asked the dad, “How do you get them to participate?”
“We start in fifth grade,” he said. “We expose them to sports and a lot of them stay interested.”
The good news is that we have a chance to do something like this in Sweet Home.
As we reported a few weeks ago, next year’s schools budget includes funding for two full-time and one part-time physical education teachers for Sweet Home’s elementary schools. Local children, whose exposure to athletics and exercise has been limited to what their classroom teachers or the Boys and Girls Club could provide, will have the opportunity to get more regular exposure to exercise and competition, particularly the simpler forms such as running and jumping and throwing, and maybe they’ll realize that they like it.
Nobody gets cut in sports like cross-country or swimming or track because they lack size or because they lack talent. If they lack those things they can still compete just as hard – against themselves.
Oak Heights School has had a track meet each spring for years and it’s no accident that Sweet Home High School track and field coach Billy Snow believes that’s the reason why he sees more Oak Heights graduates on his team than any other school’s. Those elementary school kids realize that it’s fun to run and jump and throw, and to see if you can do it farther or faster next time. When they get to high school and the sun comes out in the spring, they remember how much fun that was.
I’m told that all the local grade schools once competed in a yearly track meet. It would be great to see that again. With a coordinated P.E. program, it’s not an impossibility.
But we’re not talking just about track and field or swimming here. We’re talking about volleyball and basketball and wrestling and baseball and football.
We’re not even, really, just talking about sports. On Monday evening I was at Sweet Home High School for freshman orientation and I heard school administrators urging kids (and parents) to get involved. If they don’t like sports, there’s forestry club, art club, technology club, drama club and more. They’re all ways kids can learn and grow in positive ways. Ways that might make some employer more eager to hire them some day.