Another year has just about passed us by in high school sports.
In this space, as we typically do, we’ve discussed controversy. We’ve discussed the archaic, mundane, important and all points in between. We’ve agreed and disagreed in a (by and large) healthy discourse.
But as another year closes, I’d like to finish in this weekly platform a little outside the box.
The last couple years, I’ve tried to do that connecting my first weekly high school sports opinion column of the year in August and the last in June with similar themes of positivity.
Here, we’re going to keep it positive. But not with connective themes.
Rather, it’s a wish for student-athletes past and present.
If you frequent this space, you have heard me make the point about the dynamic between my coverage area student-athletes and I in soccer, hockey, swimming and diving and track and field.
It’s such a rewarding and humbling opportunity year after year to serve my community by capturing these formative years through detail and perspective that will be preserved. But at the same time, the reality is it’s also a bit of a transactional dynamic on both sides. Not in a bad way.
For the better part of four years, I cover athletic performance. You discuss it. We each, in our own way, benefit from those conversations as spotlight is afforded.
Then, after your senior year, it’s basically over for us — understandably so — as you transition to the next chapter. Life goes on. So be it.
For the majority of student-athletes, there comes a time at which that chapter does not involve sports as an athlete. That time may come as you exit high school — or perhaps, if you’re fortunate, college. But it does arrive.
For every breakthrough or state championship, I probably get as much joy out of hearing about my former student-athletes outside of sports as adults.
Hearing about life breakthroughs instead. Work. Marriage. Children.
I’ve told the story before, but it’s worth sharing again. A couple years back, I was walking out of Day 2 of the Division II Austintown-Fitch Regional track and field, the end of what I call on X, “#4daysatFitch.”
I ran into the mother of Mia Knight, one of my all-time favorite student-athletes and 2018 Beachwood graduate who continues to hold the all-time coverage area record in the girls 100-meter dash.
Time caught up on us pretty quickly when her mom relayed how she had graduated from college and was working for Google in Atlanta.
You forget sometimes how years kind of run together and then, suddenly, that happens.
Or this past fall, I was finishing up after a Lake Catholic boys soccer home match when Nick Rieple approached to say hello. The 2010s News-Herald boys soccer player of the decade noted how he and some of his teammates were back in town for another teammate’s wedding.
I don’t expect to stay in touch with every coverage area student-athlete across every sport and season. Let’s be honest: For the most part, high school student-athletes forget our dynamic the moment it’s over.
But it’s special when that bond never fully disappears. And when you hear about their new normal as adults, your pride in their accomplishments is as high, if not more so, than anything they achieved in high school sports.
With that in mind, instead of getting into it over divisional expansion, a controversy several states away or the like, let me close the year with this wish for all my coverage area student-athletes, past or, when you reach this point in your lives, present.
May your career path as a professional be limitless in your calling.
May the athletic prowess that helped get you into college be the springboard into the four-year or master’s degree or better that is life-altering for you and your family.
May your kinship with teammates in high school become lifelong friendships, the type of people who never leave your side through thick and thin.
May that missed opportunity as a high school student-athlete teach and reinforce that all-too-vital lesson of how to deal with adversity as an adult. May it give you the perspective, patience and grace to figure it all out.
May the peaks of your athletic career and the thrill and elation that accompanied them never leave your mind and soul, particularly as the years pass and it becomes more about journey than singular moments.
May that peak feel the same whatever your role was, and may you teach that selflessness about contributing to a collective cause to others.
May those days of community service as a student-athlete spur a lifelong commitment to the same as you age — perhaps, should circumstances allow, in an even more impactful way.
May that faint sound of the band pregame for Friday night football across town raise your heartrate almost like it once did, even if the connection may be indirect these days.
May that feeling of wanting to see rival schools face defeat, while affiliation may change, remain constant on your own children’s behalf.
May the passion of being a student-athlete be motivational toward giving back to the next generation as a coach, for as long and as much as you see fit.
May your children also know what sports can provide beyond a win or a loss, beyond improvement or not.
May those moments playing catch with your son in the backyard or kicking a soccer ball around at a local park with your daughter be as fulfilling as it was for you with your parents when you did the same at their age.
Above all, may you know a better version of life’s journey because you took the time in your formative years to pursue sports and pursue being a student-athlete and learned plenty about yourself outside of a classroom.
That wish may end our year here.
But from me to you, it endures. Always.
发表回复