A Salute To High School Athletics and to Fun

My son Henry is not yet two, but he can already dunk on one of those little Nerf hoops.

He travels when he does it, runs across the whole room with the ball stretched out over his head, but I’m still hopeful the recruiting services will rank him as one of the best under-2 basketball prospects in the nation. If I can find the right AAU under-3 team, one with a top outside shooter, he’ll be a lock because he’s tenacious in the paint.

You may think this is silly, but this is where we are headed.

There are already national rankings of the top sixth-grade basketball prospects and the official AAU website lists the Texas Celtics as the top Division II fifth-grade team in the country.

No doubt there will be a lively debate over whether the Banneker Kings out of Maryland can take over the top spot given last year’s strong fourth-grade class. And if little Jimmy from down the street had spent his summer honing his left-handed layup instead of wasting all that time on the Slip-and-Slide, the Pulaski Thunder might have had a chance at the top spot.

All of this should be enough to make a sensible person ill, but then few of us seem to retain our sensibility when it comes to our kids and athletics.

Adults were tasked with creating a framework for our kids to play and we failed miserably, turning an activity designed to promote cooperation, teamwork, physical fitness and, most of all, fun, into a mini-version of adult society where the little Jimmys of the world get cut and take up skateboarding.

The poetic justice comes from the fact that little Jimmy will likely practice his skateboarding tricks at the local outdoor shopping center, where he will annoy the very people who set up the youth athletic complex that cast him aside.

Anyway, there is a tonic for those disillusioned by such things.

Today, the hockey teams at Enfield and East Catholic-Manchester will play outdoor games at Rentschler Field as part of Whalers Fest. Enfield plays Northwest Catholic-West Hartford at 5 p.m. and East Catholic plays Wethersfield at 7 p.m.

The players may not know it yet, but this is something they will remember for the rest of their lives.

When, many years from now, Enfield’s Zach Audet takes his kids to a football game at Rentschler Field he will tell them about the time he played hockey there. Same with East Catholic’s Nick Artikes, Michael Scanlon, Danny DeFilippo and Nick Tallo, who have played together most of their hockey lives.

But it’s not just the lucky few who get to play in a big arena who benefit from high school sports. Most high schools couldn’t compete with the better AAU programs (except most are better coached), but the high school experience is much richer, especially when it gets to state tournament time.

Put another way, Tolland’s Kristen Schatzlein is one of a handful of players who will likely play high-level college basketball somewhere, but she will never again get the chance to compete with her lifelong friends in front of a crowd that so deeply cares about the outcome.

Sport is supposed to be about more than power rankings and a never-ending search for a scholarship. It’s supposed to teach us to compete, to strive for victory and to accept it when we lose. The game is the end not the means. And it’s supposed to be fun, too.

So I hope Audet and Tallo have fun tonight. I hope Schatzlein and her teammates have fun during the state tournament. I hope they all make memories that will sustain them during the days ahead, when they find themselves in the grind of the non-scholastic youth athletic system we have created for them.

Mostly, though, I hope things have changed by the time Henry wants to play ball.