Thoughts on sports

I have spent dozens of hours driving across the state of Illinois, between my home in the north suburbs of Chicago and Rock Island. It's not a very exciting drive, but I always enjoy it immensely. You see, it's not often we get to spend some serious, quality time with just ourselves. In the car, there's nobody to talk to or entertain, no TV to watch, no internet to surf, and no guilt about time that could be spent studying. When the radio's off, all the possible distractions or reasons not to have alone time at school or home melt away. And I can only really think in silent solitude. Mostly, I take the time to think about what I'm doing and how the smaller picture - what I'm doing this week, or this summer, or this school year - relates to the big picture - what I'm doing with my life. I think about why I've put myself on this demanding pre-med track, whether I want to apply into M.D./Ph.D. programs, and how those decisions will affect and are affecting my everyday life.

Yesterday specifically, I was thinking aloud through the answer to the obvious question (Why medicine?) and interestingly, my answer kept coming back to sports and track. While my participation in athletics has waxed and waned even over the short course of my life thus far, my interest in the physical limits of the human body has been constant. We love watching professional sports because pro athletes can do things with their bodies that normal people can only dream of. Whether we most admire a tomahawk dunk, a bending corner kick, or a diving catch is largely cultural, but the principle is universal. It also explains why we have no interest in women's sports, but that's another story.

But at some point early in our lives, most of us realize that other people can also do the things we can do with our bodies - i.e. that we're not world-class athletes. Nevertheless, millions of kids worldwide throw themselves into sports with more vigor than they do any other endeavor. And the potential benefits of youth athletics are many. Through sports, we learn how to be part of a team. We learn how to share. We learn how to accept victory, and how to lose with grace. We learn how to get more out of ourselves than we thought possible, or at the very least we learn how crucial attitude and mental determination is for success. The court, and the field, and the track - all are microcosms of the real world. Mastery of the one often foreshadows success in the other.

I think, though, that we've turned the paradigm on its head within the last decade or so. With the rise of hypercompetitive youth athletics in the U.S. (witness the preponderance of club/traveling squads in virtually every sport from increasingly decreasing ages on), kids are being pushed to achieve their "athletic potential" at any costs. We all know the kid(s) who were great at sports but abruptly quit, burned out at 14. And to reach the elite level in any sport, training at this hypercompetitive level of intensity is increasingly necessary. But putting the focus on "achieving athletic potential" sacrifices all the life lessons that sports as a microcosm of the real world have to offer. For most of us, whether or not we achieve our athletic potential is irrelevant: either way, we're not going to the Olympics. But whether or not we learn how to properly interact with people is crucial, and perhaps the single best indicator of future success in life. Once upon a time, participating in youth sports was a means to an end - a set of lessons just as important as those learned in the classroom. Division I football coaches especially still pay lip service to this notion, claiming that their graduates are well-rounded people and that the lessons they've instilled on the football field will transfer to their careers, even if they aren't in pro sports. Unfortunately, in a culture where winning means money from the boosters and job security is nonexistent, character development is low on the priority list. No, nowadays athletics are their own end, to be pursued for their own sake and to be placed at the top of the young athlete's hierarchy of priorities.

Thank God this is not true everywhere. It's my experience in track at Augustana that kept coming to my head when I was thinking about why I want to be a doctor, and it's not because of all the minor (luckily) injuries I've sustained in the sport. It's because the lessons we learn in Augustana track, the ones that fill Ols' speeches, the ones on our T-shirts, aren't "Increase your stride frequency" or "Knee drive" or "Attack the hurdle". They're mantras like "A celebration of life," "The journey is the goal," and "Reckless, aggressive, & enthusiastic." Ols' never loses sight of the big picture. He knows why we run: because we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be the best we can be, and we want to see where the journey to become the best takes us. If I can spend all summer deadlifting and drop my time in the 100 meters lower than I ever thought possible, who can say what I can do in the lives of countless patients as a doctor? What's the limit to what my biochemistry research can accomplish? It seems like a stretch, but sports aren't anything else than a simplified, clarified microcosm of real life.

Thanks, Ols, for keeping athletics a means to an end.

MCP 7/28/08