Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1. Munsingwear. Watching the Scottish and British Opens and noting the return of the penguin logo on a few of the golfers shirts. Once ubiquitous (didn’t Arnie start off wearing Munsingwear before launching his own umbrella logo’d line) the penguin seemed to be extinct.

Seems you just can’t kill a great logo.

2. Nike. Simultaneously watching the Wimbledon men’s finals (gotta love that “last”, as in channel, button on the remote) and noting that both Alcatraz and Sinner are sponsored by Nike and are wearing shirts festooned with the same rather pretentious logo on their left breast. Seems that Nike has succumbed to the pretentiousness of the venue. A bit of a surprise, at least for me.

I just can’t think of a better logo in sports than that plain, unadorned swoosh, especially on a plain white tee shirt.

3. Billboard. If I was a bit more ambitious I would make an effort to find and watch the Tour de France, too. With the Sunday papers taking up residence in my lap I just ran out of brainspace. Shame, because I always enjoy the blatant commercialization of the wearable real estate on the riders. Seriously, perhaps only race car drivers (and their vehicles) can lay claim to making more productive use of the marketability of being on air. Golfers have only their bag, hat, and shirts; tennis players shirts and hats. Only recently have other sports (NBA, MLB) started to fill their mobile billboards.

I think my favorites might actually be those bikers. Might have to surf over to France and check ’em out.

4. Reading. I love to read. Almost all kinds of reading. I prefer what one might call legacy reading. You know, books and magazines and newspapers printed on paper. Sure, if the timing is right I’m quite content to read stuff on a computer or a tablet, but the whole read it on a phone thing just never grabbed me.

Except social media.

Last night I had some trouble falling asleep. Worked out pretty well for Beth, at least in the beginning of the night because she was able to fall asleep before I started snoring. Despite the presence of a book I am enjoying right their on my nightstand (“How I Won the Nobel Prize”) I picked up my phone and started surfing Twitter and Facebook. Every now and again I will come across something worthwhile doing this, but not last night. No interesting or challenging lines of thought. Nothing to do further research on. Not even anything that I might like to buy.

Bupkis.

To be sure I achieved my ultimate goal of becoming tired enough to quickly fall asleep, but it was just a silly waste of time. Do I need to be on any of these sites? Nah. Not really. Sure, some folks have found my little bits of written drivel there, and I have to admit that it’s more than a little bit of fun to have folks read and comment. But I can accomplish all of that without spending time looking at fake stories about benevolent pachyderms hosing down overheated infant ungulates. Once or twice a day on a laptop, business focus engaged, is all I really need.

Time to clear up some memory and screen real estate on my phone.

5. Pro. As in going pro. Two brilliant athletes in their early 20’s have concluded this year’s Wimbledon. A couple of PGA tournament winners are barely out of college. Sitting in second place in the British Open is a golfer who turned pro at age 15. Countless youngsters barely weeks removed from their senior prom sat with their families hoping to hear their names called in last Sunday’s Major League Baseball draft. The newspaper brought the story of JoJo and Jacob Parker, fraternal twins who were both expected to be selected in the early rounds the draft. They are the sons of a father who was by all accounts an extraordinary, pro-caliber athlete whose entire life was turned upside down by an injury on the football field that left him paralyzed from the neck down but did not keep him from coaching his gifted sons (more in a moment).

And of course all of the “one and done’s” in the recent NBA draft, rising college sophomores who will leave college behind led by Maine native Cooper Flagg.

What’s got me thinking about these boys is how very few kids actually go on to play a sport beyond high school. I’ve thought and written about this before, that time in response to a slew of articles one weekend about parents (and youth coaches) pushing children to specialize in a single sport as early as 5 years of age. Rather than playing sports for the love of the games and the healthy interactions with neighborhood friends, kids compete to play for regional “travel teams” or are recruited away from their local schools to play for “power” schools. While this usually actually happens at the junior high school/high school transition year it still means that adults are making decisions for kids which are often based on the notion that putting all of your athletic eggs in one basket is going to result in either a college scholarship or a pro contract.

In reality the odds of sustaining an over-use injury due to the concentration on a single set of repetitive movements is actually dramatically higher than the likelihood of playing a sport beyond high school. Recent data for baseball players shows that ~30% of high school baseball pitchers undergo ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) or Tommy John surgery over their career; 8.1% will go on to play college baseball at any level, 2% in Division 1. 18% of high school girls soccer players will suffer an ACL tear over their soccer career, 82% of which will be a complete tear; 7.9% will play soccer in college, again roughly 2% in Division 1 (data via ChatGPTo4). Overall, 7.5% of high school athletes go on to play a sport in college at any level, and less than 2% will receive any scholarship money to play in Division 1.

More likely to have surgery for a sport-related injury than to play in college.

And yet parents continue to find the Siren song of college scholarships and pro contracts sung by youth coaches, if only they will commit their child to 12 months of playing and training for a single sport. To have their kids play with other gifted athletes on elite regional teams or for schools far away from home where they are told the kids will get “better competition”. Do they, indeed, get better at their sport if they do so? Almost certainly, yes. Does it matter? Again, <2% will get a scholarship, and less than 1% will play a single minute in any professional event. 0.05% of high school baseball players will get the proverbial “cup of coffee” in the majors.

To be sure, if we add back in non-scholarship schools such as the Ivies and highly selective Division 3 schools such as those in the NESCAC conference in the Northeast, historically all of which place an emphasis on high caliber athletes in the admission office, some kids will parlay a level of athletic skill into a step up the collegiate reputational ladder. The boy who played baseball for his hometown high school and is not quite good enough to start at Vanderbilt may be just what they are looking for at Yale, even though his grades and scores place him in the lower half of accepted students. Or the girl with above average grades and scores who was a second team All-State field hockey player, not quite good enough to get a scholarship from North Carolina but gets into Middlebury and has a stellar 4-year career as a starter on a perennial D3 power team. Some kids do leverage sports in non-financial ways.

My kids are all in their 30’s, each a talented athlete in their own way. Megan, the equestrian, played her sport in college. My nephews and nieces are in their late 20’s and early 30’s. Many of them played sports in college, two of them in D1, one on scholarship. All of them played at home, for their local high school or local parochial school (3 did a PG year before college). Whether or not they played in college, each one played their sports (often more than one) with the kids they grew up with (the hockey players were often on travel teams during the “off-season”). So many of the kids here in NE Ohio who would be legit stars at their home town schools leave them to play a sport in one of the larger regional powerhouse schools, only to find themselves mired on the bench or peaking on a JV team. At home they would have shined, perhaps in more than one sport, and gotten to do so with their neighborhood buddies.

Everybody loses a little bit when that happens.

Cooper Flagg and his twin brother are examples of the good that can come from following the Sirens. After a stellar freshman year at Nokomis Regional High school is his Maine hometown in which he was named Gatorade player of the year in Maine, Cooper and his twin brother Ace decamped to national powerhouse Montverde Academy in Florida. Cooper was the number 1 pick in the NBA draft, taken by the Dallas Mavericks, and Ace accepted a scholarship to play basketball at the University of Maine.

How about our other set of twins, the Parker boys Jojo and Jacob? They stayed home and played baseball for their hometown school, Purvis High School in Purvis, Mississippi. They pulled up their high stirrups and laced up their cleats next to the same kids with whom they played Little League ball and went to school with since kindergarten. Drafted 8th in the first round by the Toronto Blue Jays JoJo will begin his pro career this summer, while Jacob (19th round by Arizona) will accept a scholarship offer to play at Mississippi State. You CAN play for your hometown school and go on to play at a higher level.

Like all of the athletes in the next generation of my extended family, neither Ace Flagg nor Jacob Parker are likely to sign a professional contract to play their sports for a living. All of the family’s parents in my generation at one point or another echoed what my brother told his boys, multi-sport athletes in both high school and college, about their footwear in future employment opportunities: don’t plan on wearing sneakers, cleats, or skates; you will be wearing leather soles or heels to whatever job you take. Early sport specialization, especially if it involves leaving your childhood friends in order to pursue the Siren song of pay to play, costs much more in what is lost from childhood than is likely gained, even without injuries.

For all but the very, very few, what remains at the end are the memories, and those memories always seem to me to shine more brightly if they were made together, at home, with the friends you grew up with.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2025 at 9:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.