What is the purpose of interscholastic athletics? It seems silly to even pose the question.
I bring it up because within the word purpose lies the problem — a poisonous problem, brought on by our own lack of vision.
Must I say it?
The original purpose behind high school sports was the teaching of teamwork, work ethic, sacrifice, respecting authority, overcoming adversity and accepting discipline.
Sports taught our kids that the world wasn’t perfect. It taught our kids that there would be disappointments to endure. It taught them the benefits of hard work and we hired our coaches accordingly.
Somewhere along the line we injected winning into the mix and it has resulted in something truly ugly.
Winning is the goal of every high school team, but it is not their purpose. There’s an important distinction there that many people simply can’t understand. And if you’re like me, you’re getting fed up with it.
Once you allow winning to become the purpose at the high school level, you open the door for a myriad of things that have no place in prep athletics — coaches fired prematurely, athletes switching schools for more playing time, crude statements shouted from the stands during games or even outright cheating. And that’s just scratching the surface.
At a recent game that I covered from the sidelines, the torrent of abuse coming from the stands aimed at the coaches and players defied description. It didn’t matter that the coach’s family was in the stands. It didn’t matter that the quarterback’s parents were in attendance. The insults flew anyway.
The behavior was ridiculous from the outset. But by night’s end, it had become sickening.
“Yeah, but we’ve got the talent to win and if we did this or that with another coach, we’d be winning,” says every complainer from every school in Texas every year. “We need to get rid of this guy.”
Do you really?
Funny how many talent scouts appear in the stands once a team dips under .500.
The irony is, some of the current area coaches who are now under fire are the very people selected by a group of complainers only a few years ago. Now, the grass is looking greener on the opposing sideline again.
In the meantime, our lack of loyalty to our coaches has led many of them to jump ship in anticipation of “thin” classes that would be difficult to win with. They know the program will be down for a year or two, they know the public won’t support it, so they bolt — leaving the next guy in line to incur our wrath when the losing starts.
That’s not the coaches’ fault. That’s our fault for turning high school athletics, football in particular, into a religion — a religion that destroys careers without conscience.
I’ve seen good coaches let go because a school board member didn’t like the offense they were running. I’ve seen good coaches let go because they didn’t play the child of an influential booster. Another was let go because he had the audacity to discipline team members.
In the worst of cases, we can sell our soul and hire the wrong type of person, all in the quest of Ws. I’ve seen one area school hire a reprehensible character who within a year, had run off nearly every other coach on campus because they didn’t have a son who could help his football team. He then set about hiring baseball, basketball and softball coaches with offspring he could pad up.
He has since been let go. But before he left, he had uprooted the lives of some very good people —all in the name of winning. And who’s to blame? We are. His hiring and subsequent behavior were direct byproducts of what we’ve allowed high school sports to become.
“We can’t teach our kids not to care about winning, Mr. Ren. It defeats the whole purpose.”
My point exactly.