The Demise of the Team

 

You might have figured out that I’m a sports fan. Not like, always watching it on TV or knowing the statistics of favorite players. Like, I believe in the value of sports and how important they can be in personal development.

Oh, I’ll watch my Clemson Tigers when they’re on TV and I like to keep up with how my friend Alan Hardin’s Texas Longhorns are doing. Or Randall Cobb’s team when he was playing.

I can’t tell you who all the players are on any team and goodness knows I’m not going to be listening to sports radio shows.  But I believe in the value of sports. 

I wanted my kids to be athletes yet I never cared much what games they played—they just had to play something.  That’s pretty much the same thing with their kids. 

You’ve heard it before—lessons learned on the fields of strife and all that.  Life lessons.  Lessons about how to be coached.  Lessons learned from seeing the results of good effort.

Lessons learned from being on a team.

Anybody that knows me knows that I’m an especially huge fan of high school sports, particularly football.  There is really nothing like it.  Playing for the love of the game. Representing your school, your community.

At a lot of places, your high school team is made up of kids that you grew up with.  Friends that you’ve had since t-ball or biddy league.  That sort of thing.

That makes it extra special. There is a different kind of love in the love for your teammates.  I still have friends from high school football. Lonnie Hawkins. Mike Bivens. Greg Cagle. Ricky Alexander. Gordo Watson. I visited with JL Millsaps the Tuesday before he died on Saturday of ALS.  People that I might not see often but that I still feel a closeness, a brotherhood if you will.

But sports are changing. NIL money. The portal. The money seems to be driving everything.  The best team money can buy.

Yeah, that’s the college game right now, but it’s just a matter of time until it hits the high schools (and yes, I do know that some high school athletes get NIL money).

Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not against college players getting paid something. I can remember one of my son’s teammates at Clemson. We saw him coming out of a store empty handed once and asked him if everything was OK.  He said he was just inside paying on the lay-away on a computer.

I remember lay-away. That was what you did when you wanted to buy something but didn’t have enough to pay for it. You would pay a bit at a time until you had paid enough in that they let you take it home.

Nick had it better than most. I always made sure he had spending money. Many of his teammates didn’t have that kind of support system. They couldn’t afford to go out to eat with their buddies.

So yes, pay them.

But millions?  And the opportunity to leave a school at any time and transfer to the highest bidder? It’s gonna kill the game as we know it. 

And one of the things that is suffering?  The team. When TV announcers need a scoresheet to list all the places somebody has played, it’s sad to me. No loyalty. No team. A sad day indeed.