Challenging Change
January 2, 2014
Everywhere we turn, we hear or read that things ought to change because, well . . . “The times are changing.”
How we raise children, how we educate students, how we work and worship . . . everything is subject to change, we’re told, because “times change.”
I suppose if we had evidence that the changes made in previous decades, because “It’s the 80s” or “It’s the New Millennium,” had really improved our world, I might be more taken with change for change’s sake today. But I see little evidence of stronger families, better schools, more fulfilling work or more faithful congregations today than in previous decades. Rather, I see a world in worse shape in many ways, even in the only part of that world where I have any expertise: sports.
One of the problems of youth sports today is the over-programming of our kids. A superficial comparison with youth sports of 2014 vs. 1964 reveals that today we have many more well-organized leagues in many more sports for many more kids than 50 years ago. They have better facilities, equipment and uniforms. They have coaches and officials and even boards of directors to hear the complaints and protests.
By contrast, in the 1960s there were just a few organized leagues in a few sports for a few kids; but even those kids spent most of their playing time in pickup games where they chose up sides, set the ground rules, and made the calls themselves. They settled arguments on the spot. They had to bring their own equipment, and take care of it. And if the ball went out of play, they had to hunt for it until they found it; because a lost ball meant not only that the game was over, it might also have meant the entire season was over.
When did kids learn more from youth sports: in the 1960s world of pickup games they managed for themselves, or in the more recent world of adult-directed travel teams and tournaments and trophies? Just because “times are changing,” should we program out all that was good about youth sports 50 years ago?
Of course not. Which is why those in our schools who want more and more contests for younger and younger grade levels must be cautious. It is possible to get too much of a good thing, and to get a good thing too soon.
Guarding Secrets
February 8, 2013
January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.
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Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine. Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
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After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
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A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed. From duped to duplicitous.
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And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.
How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.
How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often. There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail.
The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. No secret is beyond discovery.