So you are joining an athletic team (or perhaps your daughter or son is doing so). Enough has been written about the human need for exercise in order to achieve both a physically and a mentally healthy lifestyle. That’s one reason why so many adults trot around the neighborhood, play golf, tennis or join a gym, but what, if anything, should you expect from high school or middle school interscholastic athletics?
First, you will have the opportunity to show up everyday for practice to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you have made a “reliable commitment.”
Second, you will have the opportunity to be prepared everyday with everything that you are supposed to have to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you are “organized.”
Third, you will have the opportunity to work harder each day than you did the day before to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you are “industrious.”
Fourth, you will have the opportunity to face daunting challenges to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you have “courage.”
Fifth, you will have the opportunity to get back into competition after setbacks and losses to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you are persistent and will “persevere through hard times” to reach success.
Sixth, you will have the opportunity to strive together with others to achieve difficult worthy goals to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you understand the power and the virtue of “teamwork.”
Seventh, you will have the opportunity to succeed graciously and to fail with dignity, both with an aura of good sportsmanship, as you demonstrate to yourself and to others that you act with “honor and respect” toward yourself and toward others. You can come away with faith in yourself and the feeling that others have faith in you too, the foundation of “self-confidence.”
So often it has been said and written that athletics builds character. Perhaps more to the point, athletics reveals our character, and from that point forward competitive athletics provides to us the opportunity to refine and to strengthen those traits within us which can enable us to ascend to the highest level of our potential.
No one is entitled to success. Perhaps writer Jack London wrote it best in his novel “The Sea Wolf” when his character, ship’s captain Wolf Larson, said in effect that the World is filled with amoebas and that the big ones eat the little ones. Social Darwinism? Sure, and seemingly pretty perceptive. So we enroll in extra SAT courses to become bigger amoeba. We try to attend a prestigious college to become a bigger amoeba. We have after-hours tutors to become a bigger amoeba. We join a gym to become a bigger amoeba. The list goes on.
Learning how to overcome obstacles is a major league key to achieving success, especially entrepreneurial success, but to be able to develop the self-confidence that you can overcome obstacles you have to actually face them. Just how do you know that you faced an obstacle? Probably because you did not get something that you wanted, you lost, you got knocked down. It is precisely at that point that your character is revealed.
You could choose to react like Aesop’s fox who did not reach the grapes that he craved. He quit trying and concluded that they were probably sour anyway (sour grapes). Or you could get back to work and apply yourself with greater energy and creativity to find a way to achieve your goals like The Little Engine That Could.
So many of life’s valuable lessons were couched in classic bedtime stories and fairy tales, which, unfortunately are seldom read these days by parents to their children. We have swapped them for television, X-Boxes, and iPods, and have thereby generally substituted entertainment for lessons in ethics. Yet, these valuable lessons can still be learned through properly supervised interscholastic athletic competition.
In the classroom we have driven the curriculum to teach to the standardized test, whether that is a Regents exam, PSAT or SAT, but what does a high score on any of these exams really prepare us for?
Perhaps we should conduct a nation-wide search to find a high school somewhere in this land of the free and home of the brave that teaches to the tests that so many of us are actually compelled to take.
You know, the how to buy a house test, the get your kids through their teen years test, the finance your kids college education test, the how to pick a spouse test, the how to keep a marriage together test (or how to survive the breakup test), the how to keep your business solvent during hard times test, the how to care for an aging senior family member test. There are all sorts of real tests for which middle schools, high schools and colleges make no attempt to address.
The common denominator for all tests is that they are challenges for which the outcome is uncertain yet important.
Learning how to face such situations is precisely what interscholastic competitive athletics prepares us to do by bringing us face-to-face with our limitations, encouraging us to overcome those limitations, and showing us how to go about doing that. The beauty of it is that these lessons can be learned while we are young, and while we are playing a game, where setbacks do not have anywhere near the impact that setbacks will have for us as adults.
There are those, who during these trying times would have us cut out or eliminate interscholastic athletics. There are those who find the demands to be more than were bargained for up front, so they quit. Yet the values of participation in a well-run competitive interscholastic athletic program are real, they are essential to achievement, and they are life-long.
