It makes me feel good that parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles come to me for my take on certain things related to the sports teams I cover. I consider it a compliment.
Unfortunately, too often, those conversations are thinly-vailed attempts to verify their own biased and over-inflated opinions about one particular player (generally a family member). They come to me, in part, because they know I talk to coaches regularly and they are trying to glean information about what coaches are saying about their family member.
And most of the time, those conversations include the phrase “well when they were (insert seventh graders, eighth graders or freshmen), they were undefeated.” They assume that a group that had success before should be destined to enjoy that same success as they get older, and they also (generally) fault the coaches and coaching staffs for that not being the case.
I want to use my space today to try and help you understand why that is a flawed way of thinking.
I will use the Warsaw freshman football team as an example here, but with the understanding that I haven’t heard this from any of the Warsaw freshman football parents and I don’t want you to think that I did. They are just the example I am using here.
The freshman football team from Warsaw went 8-0-1 and finished first in the Northern Lakes Conference. The only blemish on their record was a tie with Plymouth in the first few weeks of the season, which they avenged by beating the Rockies 28-6 Thursday. It’s been a very good season, and when you have a new coach trying to build a new program with a new scheme, that’s pretty encouraging.
Here is where it gets tricky.
Conventional thinking says, “Warsaw football is going to be really good when those freshmen are on the varsity.” That statement may turn out to be true. We might look back on these kids when they are seniors and say that they were a great football class. But there is absolutely, positively no guarantee of that success right now.
Here’s why:
School size. Warsaw is the largest school in the Northern Lakes Conference. They are 1,000 students bigger than Concord, who is 5A. Just based on numbers alone, Warsaw should have a bigger pool to draw from. This year, only four of the eight NLC teams even fielded a freshman team.
Attrition. Injuries and family decisions to end their boys’ football careers in favor of getting jobs or fear of serious injury means the makeup of a football class changes each year.
Sample size. It’s important to remember that ninth graders playing against ninth graders is one thing, but when you are playing varsity football the players who are on the field are the best of all four classes that a school can put out there. Maybe that school only has five quality football players in their top three classes. But that’s 15 guys when you put them together, and that’s enough to be competitive.
Sports are unpredictable. The beauty of sports is that no one can ever know what is going to happen from play-to-play, game-to-game and year-to-year. That is especially true of high school sports. If you are or ever have been the parent of a teenager, you know how their behavior and thought process can change quickly and without notice. Now imagine trying to get 60 teenagers to think the same way and do the same thing at the same time.
I am using a football-based analogy here, but it applies to all sports. And it also applies to schools of all sizes and the conferences they play in.
In the stock market, companies use a common legal disclaimer that says, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
That statement also applies when you are talking about young people and sports teams.
It should also be noted here that a class of kids that does garner high expectations and then meets or exceeds those expectations should receive extra praise for that. They don’t have the luxury of sneaking up on anyone, and they produce anyway – that’s quality.
But that all goes back to a common theme you read from my column on Wednesdays – parental involvement.
Parents must be very careful not to add more pressure to their seventh, eighth and ninth grade athletes by revealing their own expectations for them and the teams they play on. It’s hard enough to be a kid, and a kid who participates in extra-curricular activities, but when you’re a kid and you know your parents expect greatness from you and your teams … that’s tough.
And you certainly would rather have a freshman team that goes undefeated than one that never wins.
One last thing. The low-hanging fruit in this discussion is to blame the varsity coach. “They went undefeated as middle-schoolers and freshmen, so why aren’t they doing better on the varsity level?” Many times, that sentence is followed by “this coach just doesn’t know how to use talent like this.”
I hope if that happens, you’ll keep all the factors I listed above in mind and realize it’s not that simple.
