Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Susurrus. A soft rustling, murmuring, or whispering sound. At the moment emanating from my inland ocean and surrounding me in a cocoon of calm.

2) Verbivore. One who consumes literature. Found in “Theo of Golden”, a self-published novel eventually picked up by a traditional publisher after wracking up some 250,000 or so sales while being publicized by the author’s niece. If memory serves, wordsmithing that produced the term “verbivore” has led to 2.5 million books sold and counting. Gives hacks like me some hope.

Anyway, should be a word.

3) Dessert. Fortified wines like Port, and other sweet wines such as the French gem Sauternes need to talk to the author’s niece above. I mean, I’m all for a nip of something brown and smoky following a worthy meal, but why not tickle your sweet tooth and your sense of special by having something that less than 1% of post-dinner tipplers would choose.

You’ll thank me for this.

4) Goals. What do you do when you have reached a major goal, maybe your ultimate goal, and you discover that you underestimated your “top line”? You know, maybe you were being modest about your ceiling, or perhaps you got started so late in life that you just reasonably figured that you would run out of room to improve, or maybe bump up against the limits of your skill or strength or fortitude before the game clock ran out.

But what if you find yourself in a place doing a thing that you have become really good at doing, and you keep getting better at it? Maybe keep getting better when your peers are getting out?

It doesn’t really matter what that thing is. Beth and I were chatting about a major life change we underwent in our mid-40’s and we casually wondered whether we would have taken on some of the things that have brought us some success and quite a bit of happiness over the last 20 or so years if we hadn’t made that big change. Now, I know, I’m the no regrets guy, and no, this is not a “would we be happier if?” line of thought. I’m/we’re still all of that and more. The topic came up mostly as a wondering if I would have done “Y” and Beth “Z” at all. What came next was the conversation about goals, and how do you push on once even your most ambitious goals might have been met.

What do you think? Ride the peak, or peek around the corner and see if there’s more there to climb?

5) Youth Sports. This year’s World Cup introduced North America to the Norwegian soccer star Erling Haaland. We learned his backstory, including the altogether delightful education about how youth sports are conducted in his hometown of Byrne, and presumably all of Norway. Like the rest of Europe, Norway is a soccer-crazed country. The emergence of a credible national side capable of going deep in the World Cup draw was the source of great national joy.

What struck me the most, other than the Norwegian “ROW!” cheer of course, was the amazingly healthy way Haaland grew up to become a world-class Futboller. If memory serves his local soccer club did not begin tryouts for higher level teams until the kids were 13 years old. Not only that, there was (is) no alternate universe of clubs geared toward cultivating the skills of the more talented kids prior to the age of 13. No weekend tournaments hours away; almost all competition occurs between teams made up from the population of kids in Byrne, or whatever town or city you look at. Out of town games are with the surrounding towns only, if they occur at all. Sports as a healthy outlet for energy and as a complementary avenue for learning the kinds of stuff you need to grow up well but might not get enough of in school.

Honestly, once the USMNT was bounced I was all in for the Norwegians just for this.

Contrast this with the toxic, irrational money-grab that is youth sports in the U.S. American kids and their families being convinced that single-sport specialization should begin as early as 10, or 8, or even 6 years old. For almost everything. Soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf, figure skating, you name it. Perhaps the only sports that don’t stoop this low are sports that just don’t have these early avenues available. Think field hockey, for example, which really doesn’t have much of an outlet until girls reach high school, and which doesn’t really have a professional league to which they might aspire.

Grown men and women make a living coaching youth sports, in some cases for teams filled with grade schoolers. Parents buy in, literally. Have you stumbled onto a Little League age baseball tournament? Little boys segregated on teams by birth year wearing tailored uniforms and carrying bat bags filled with 2 or 3 bats that cost a couple hundred bucks. Each. Like it’s gonna matter to their batting average, which their parents have memorized to the 8th decimal point. Reminds me of the 8 year old golf progeny with custom made clubs and a fitted putter.

Gotta support that kid’s dream. How else is he/she gonna get a scholarship and an NIL deal?

That’s what makes the Byrne, Norway model so lovely and makes it so hard to stomach the willful hypocrisy of Any Town, U.S. These kids aren’t gonna go pro. Almost none of them will get a single penny to play college sports. Heck, the numbers are pretty stark on the prospect of a kid playing a sport at any level of college whatsoever. This week I re-posted a Random Thoughts “classic” with the numbers from 2016 or so. Just for fun I gave the numbers another look, this time 2024 which is the latest year for which participation numbers are available.

Let’s start with some top line, all sports data. The percentage of high school athletes who go on to play a sport in college overall, all sports/all levels is 6-7%. Of this cohort slightly less than 2% receives a scholarship to play a sport. For boys the participation rate ranges from a wrestling and volleyball low (3.0 and 3.6%, respectively) to the high of ice hockey and lacrosse (14.1 and 14.7% respectively). Every other sport is significantly below 10%. For girls ice hockey leads the way at 32.1%, followed by lacrosse (14%) and field hockey (13%). Boys (1.06%) and girls (2.02%) hockey lead the way when it comes to making it to the pros. You’ve got a 10X better chance of getting your son to the big leagues as getting either your son or daughter into the NBA or WNBA: boys will play pro baseball (0.43%), boys or girls will play pro basketball (0.037%).

And what do you lose? Never mind the money involved; your parental ROI from a financial standpoint is microscopic unless the goal was simply to play in college at some level somewhere. But there’s a far bigger loss when you think about what these kids don’t get to experience. For every kid like the pitcher recently featured in Sports Illustrated who is throwing 100+ MPH for his local high school and not some national travel program, there are 500 kids displaced from their hometown and their childhood buddies in pursuit of a nearly unreachable goal. For every Jaylon Brunson whose Dad put him in seasonally appropriate sports until he was 12 or 13 so that he could learn what it meant to NOT be the best kid on the team, there are 500 kids shipped off to some elite academy for a Lord of the Flies experience to prove that they ARE the best kid on the team.

That, and in Brunson’s case, the opportunity to feel what it’s like to lose. A meaningful lesson for any kid on any team.

Even at the local level where kids grow up together and play on their hometown teams there is way too much emphasis on winning. Knowing I was going to write this today I was thinking about my experience as a Dad and as a coach when my kids were younger. Both of my boys saw a majority of their more athletically talented peers forsake their hometown school/team for regional sports powerhouses. The local “big time” if you will. Unfortunately, almost none of them ever saw the field or the court at the private schools; they gave up the chance to stay home and play on teams with the kids they grew up with. Precisely one kid played in college, and he transferred back to the hometown public school to play both his top sport and his second favorite as a senior, and had a ball!

Which brings me to one last point, the absence of the multi-sport high school athlete. Early sport specialization robs kids of the joy found in playing more than one sport. Robs them of the opportunity to expand their circle of athletic friends. To experience the very different things one sees and feels as both the best athlete on a team and perhaps the kid right in the middle of the Bell Curve. There’s a safety thing here, too. Repetitive use injuries are 2 or 3 orders of magnitude higher in single sport youth athletes. Tommy John surgeries for high school juniors. Epidemic rates of non-contact ACL tears in female soccer players. Even more damning than the sheer numbers is the fact that modern training programs and recovery protocols exist that would decrease these traumatic occurrences if they were implemented regardless of their effects on the won/lost column.

A two minute Google search for Jeff and Mikki Martin and the BrandX Method’s results with risk mitigation and injury prevention in girls’ soccer published more than 15 years ago will make you seethe every time you read about some poor girl in a program that does not have a similar program ends up under the knife.

The best job I ever had was being a junior high school football coach. I was the assistant to the assistant backfield coach; my job was to catch the kids doing something right. Great job! A close second was my time as a 5th and 6th grade basketball coach in a league with no tryouts and no cuts and a firm “equal minutes” rule. Man, did those kids have fun! Funny thing: all of those teams I coached were free. No fees for the kids or their families. Fun divided by $0 is infinity. Infinite fun.

Just let the kids play. Like Haaland and his schoolmates. The ROI is infinite.

I’ll see you next week…

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