The other day I was at a golf tournament talking to Española Valley junior Jacob Serrano.
Serrano plays both golf and basketball for the Sundevils. He plays basketball with a lot of heart — he broke his collarbone last season while fighting for a rebound. He’s also a pretty good golfer.
In the course of our conversation, he said something along the lines that golf was something he could play the rest of his life, whereas the length of time he would be playing basketball was much more limited.
Basketball is so big here in Northern New Mexico it was refreshing to hear a young athlete express those thoughts, but I wish I would hear them say it more often and about things other than sports.
There’s too much emphasis placed on high school basketball and on winning high school basketball games. Just as good teachers should not become too focused on getting their students to pass a battery of standardized tests, coaches should not become too focused on just winning basketball games. The important thing should be overall athletic development of the player for coaches and the intellectual development of the students for teachers.
The reasons for this are obvious. Only a very few high school basketball players have the skills to play in college; just look at the list of All-State performers in the story on this page. Not one of them has been offered a Division I basketball scholarship. However, there are plenty of athletic activities that can be done throughout one’s lifetime. Likewise, colleges are going to demand more from a student than just being able to pass a series of high school tests. One of the biggest complaints colleges have is so many incoming freshmen have to take remedial courses.
I understand that high school coaches put a lot of time and training into doing their jobs and that one of the measuring sticks of their success is winning, but asking players to give up some of their academic or artistic development so that a high school coach can win more games is just not right.
When you’re at high school your mind and body are still developing. Your horizons should be expanding and developing in many directions, not being constricted to the way that suits a coach’s or teacher’s tunnel vision. Save the specialization for after high school.
The job of a high school coach should be to expand his players’ horizons while teaching them the values of hard work, dedication and cooperation. They should encourage them to experience more, not less.
Teachers and coaches who don’t encourage their students to expand their knowledge or to learn new skills are ultimately being selfish.
Being a better player and winning more games in high school is not going to matter much once you’re not in high school. Maybe that’s part of the problem. The players leave high school, but the coach stays at the high school. A good high school coach or teacher should realize they are just one of many rungs in a ladder and not the top of the hill.