Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The behavior is common in small children: the belief that they are always the one shortchanged, the one who doesn’t get the attention they so desperately seek, or the one who always gets less than the child to their left or right.
It is part of growing up, and most people eventually outgrow this conduct, most but not all.
I’ve been around football for a long time as a fan, player, coach, and writer. I was just a little kid when the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets caught my eye back in fifth grade. Big Ben Davidson slamming Joe Namath to the turf was the image I took from that game. I’ve been a fan of the game ever since.
The game has changed dramatically over the years, some for better, some for worse. The better is on the field. Rules now protect players from concussions, low blocks, and head slaps; things that we all took as part of the game generations ago, but that are now consciously avoided. Player safety is much better than the old days of hard plastic helmets lined with just a few strips of webbed suspension straps. No matter how you hit somebody back in the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s, it hurt. If you were taught to lead with the head, put your facemask in his numbers and drive, it hurt a lot more.
The shell of the helmet always found a way to smash the top of your head. By the end of a game, or the end of practice, headaches were common. A lot of players kept a bottle of aspirin in their lockers. That’s right, ‘aspirin,’ not ibuprofen or acetaminophen. Many of them took handfuls when the headache was bad enough. That seems insane today, but it was the way of the world not that long ago.
Changes in tackling technique and what constitutes a legal block have made the game much safer.
So what is worse about football?
That’s an easy one. The hype. I’ll type this slowly: “It’s. Just. A. Game.”
Hype on Monday Night Football in front of a national audience is one thing. Yes, pro football is the greatest game on the planet along with college football, pro baseball, and local high school sports, but they’re all just a game. The oversized guys on the field are paid big bucks to put their lives literally on the line in every game. The coaches are under tremendous pressure to win.
Since they could hand-pick who plays for them, they had an edge over lower-level programs.
That’s not the case any longer with the advent of NIL, the transfer portal and all the other financial incentives that players get in college, and some, even in high school.
It’s entertaining and annoying simultaneously to hear an announcer stumbling over a college player’s statistics at times. Jones had 1,145 total offensive yards as a redshirt freshman at Mississippi Valley State. He was injured in his third game at SMU and sat out the middle portion of the season but still had 712 yards. As a junior at UCLA, he led the conference in yards per catch. Now he’s the leading receiver for a solid Oregon squad. It gets complicated.
Most high schools don’t get that option. Most, but not all.
We have six high school football teams and nine volleyball teams competing in Fremont County. A handful of these local athletes might go to the next level at small colleges in the region, but none are playing in the NFL or competing on the U.S. Olympic team.
The coaches do the best with what they have. Some coaches adapt a style to their talent. Others adapt their talent to a style. It is their prerogative and an accepted practice.
What is not accepted and never should be is the growing level of parental interference that permeates prep sports.
Social media posts complaining about how your child is getting cheated out of a scholarship by a coach are ridiculous and pathetic at the same time. Staff members openly criticizing players and coaches is equally ludicrous. When it comes to communication, everyone has a right to state their opinion in the proper forum. If that doesn’t get you the results you perceive are needed, you’re just not going to get your way. Get over it. Don’t belabor the point; no one wants to continue listening to you. When staff members openly make statements that hurt a program, the solution is easy: send them down the road.
Free speech is the foundation of our republic, but it doesn’t extend to public attacks at the workplace and was never meant to be used as a weapon against children. When was the last time you kept your job after berating a fellow worker in front of a client or attacked the client’s reputation?
Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. For those not versed in Latin, the definition in this case is arguing until you’re sick of it while arguing forever.
I know this behavior will never change, but everyone can curb it by calling out the perpetrators or just simply walking away without comment.
All the whining, complaining, gesturing, and attempted intimidation do nothing for your child. It’s not going to increase their playing time and they’re not going to get a scholarship through your efforts.
They can get one through hard work by listening to the coach and taking constructive criticism. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
In an era of constant indignation, it is difficult to cut through the fog and see the big picture.
Let the professionals entertain; that’s what they’re paid to do. They’re playing a kids’ game for astronomical sums of money.
The analogy of the gladiators of Imperial Rome isn’t lost in today’s stadiums. It’s not a stretch from actual lions in the arena to the Detroit Lions playing football in a publicly funded stadium.
We live in strange times.
How about enjoying the game?
Fremont County doesn’t have fabulous football teams this season. Why should that matter as much as it does to some? The kids are playing a game they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. The coaches are working harder than they do with more talented teams. Take it for what it is and enjoy your child’s brief moment in the sun. No matter how cloudy that sunshine may seem.
We do have a couple of outstanding swimming teams competing right now in the Lander Lady Tigers and the Lady Wolverines of Riverton. Enjoy their success. Swimming, wrestling, track and field and cross country are true character-building sports. You can’t blame an official, a coach or a teammate. It’s just you, mano a mano against the clock or the person across from you.
As the late Toby Keith sang, “A little less talk and a lot more action.”