Reality Check: A High School Sports "Career"

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Two of my favorite people in the world are Tom Chattel,
columnists for the Omaha World Herald, and Steve Warren, the
former Husker standout and high school football coach. Tom and
Steve had coffee to discuss the dramatic golf that has
formed between the top high school programs and the rest
of us, underlined by Millard South's seventy seven to nothing

(00:21):
defeat of Lincoln Southeast, a powerhouse for most of sixty years.
Tom then wrote about it in the Sunday paper, Wish
they had invited me. Their solution is to surrender to
the forces of sports, balkanize our schools based on how
good they are or could be in sports, specifically football.

(00:41):
Forget about high school as an institution. Forget about how
a great school is the foundation of a thriving neighborhood,
or the value of growing up in the same neighborhood
and attending those schools. Forget about how good the teachers
or the counselors may be. Forget about loyalty. Forget about
the life lessons that high school teaches like Sometimes you
don't get everything you want, so you make the most

(01:04):
of what you do. Have. No, no, no, this is
about what's best for my kids sports career career. There
is no such thing as a sports career for a
high school kid, but too many kids, parents and influencers
today either don't know that, have forgotten it, or reject it.

(01:25):
But jim my kid is special. The skills coach, I'm
paying one hundred and fifty dollars an hour, says so
right here, right, how about a little straight talk between friends.
These were the members of the twenty fifteen USA Today
Nebraska All State Baseball team, Cole Stoby, Jacob Ewing, Joey Machado,

(01:48):
Jonah Yulaine, Nick Nelson, Drew Smith, Brett Vasik, Spencer Lear,
Logan Foster, Brandon Benya, Mojo Haggee. In the ten years since,
what happened to them? Of those eleven, Stoby made it
drafted by the Phillies in the third round. They paid
him one point one million dollars in signing bonus money,

(02:10):
but as a pro, Cole never got higher than single A.
Of the rest, only five played major college baseball, and
none of them ever played an inning in the miners,
let alone the majors. That's one out of eleven. The
top eleven players in the state. Now, how many of
those kids were told your kid is special? And yet

(02:34):
more and more families are sending their kids onhealthy life
messages in this chase for sports rainbows. Now, some of
you know the story of my son Jackson. He was
a little used pitcher on West Side's record setting team
in twenty fourteen, hung in there, made it to college
ball and was the winning pitcher in the NCAA regional
title game for Minnesota. It was drafted and played six

(02:57):
years in the Marlins organization, made it all the way
to Triple An. Didn't the Roses chase that rainbow? No,
we sure didn't. Jackson played rec baseball until his freshman year.
He grew up with the kids on his high school team,
overcame arm injuries, developed at Minnesota, and worked really hard.
If playing time and exposure were the objectives in high school,

(03:18):
he would have transferred. His Westside team was loaded. Two
of those pitchers are in the majors today. Before practice,
he had great teachers, tremendous support system, and neighborhood families
at Westside High which became an are our best friends.
He wasn't going anywhere. Youth sports is an industry fifteen

(03:40):
billion a year. That's a lot of money mom and
Dad could put into their four oh one K or
redo the kitchen. But when you're spending it on junior here,
it tends to crowd out academics, culture, staff, geography in
picking a high school. Tom and Steve's solution is to
have some schools leave Nebraska altogether, play a red schedule

(04:00):
against other public school powerhouses, and then classify the rest
of us according to financial commitment commitment to sports. See
anything wrong with that picture. Sure, the inner city districts
need to pull even with the sports factories, facilities, coaches, resources,
but to give up on competition means you've given up

(04:22):
on the kids and the neighborhood that produces them. Extra
curricular activities, sports, music, art, drama are critically important to
our kids, but they should remain secondary to the much
more vitally important things that happened before practice each day.
We should be building schools of which our teams can
be proud, not the inverse.