The High School Athlete

Valley Falls gave the Big Reds a real send-off, lining the sidewalks from one end of Main Street to the other to cheer the red-and-white bus on its way. The school band, one hundred strong, led the way. "Bring it back, gang," Petty shouted. "We'll be waiting up Saturday night!" Then they were on their way, singing and cheering....
—From Pitchers' Duel, A Chip Hilton Sports Story, by Clair Bee

The numbers—and what do sports train us to trust more than numbers?—tell us that high school athletics have never been healthier. Roughly four million boys and three million girls, more than ever before, participate in one or more of some 50 athletic endeavors before kiting off to the rest of their lives. If we believe that nothing is worth doing unless it's done well, sports justify a place in our secondary schools many times over, for kids today seem to have at their disposal every resource, from weight rooms to legions of assistant coaches to a full calendar of competition, to help them become as good as they desire.

But we're not, alas, in Valley Falls anymore. The win-at-all-costs coaches and preprofessional priorities commonplace in college sports have seeped into grades 12, 11, 10 and below. So-called travel teams have toppled Chip Hilton as an adolescent icon, replacing him with Conrad Hilton. As coaches demand year-round proof of dedication, kids spend a greater and greater proportion of time practicing rather than playing, and many state high school federations, which once enforced strict rules on summer activity, throw up their hands, sometimes eliminating those rules altogether.

If there's a common element to what's happening in high school sports, it's a disconnection from community, a nationwide trend in various aspects of American life that Harvard professor Robert Putnam laid out in his 2000 book about social isolation, Bowling Alone. It's no longer enough to play for the greater glory of Valley Falls, as your older siblings and parents did. Nor is it enough to drift leisurely from sport to in-season sport. The National Federation of State High School Associations doesn't track how many high schoolers play a single sport as opposed to two or three, but no one involved in youth sports disputes that there's a marked trend toward specialization. Dr. Lyle Micheli, executive director of the Sports Medicine Clinic at Boston Children's Hospital, says he sees many more instances of overuse injuries, such as tendinitis and stress fractures, than of acute traumatic injuries like ankle sprains, where even 10 years ago the reverse was true. "Overuse injuries are common in individual sports like gymnastics and figure skating and tennis," Micheli says. "But they're becoming more of a factor in team sports because the sports organizations and coaches are saying, 'If you're really serious about soccer, you shouldn't be playing lacrosse in the spring.' "

In some towns cheerleading squads have vanished because so many girls have left the sidelines to get in the game. And while that's hardly something to lament, another gift of Title IX, the college scholarship, has led girls to become as susceptible as boys to year-round specialization, even as pioneers like soccer's Kristine Lilly and Softball's Dot Richardson advise girls to play the field as long as they can.

Coaches recruit across district lines, often mocking the spirit, if not the letter, of rules banning the practice. California law explicitly prohibits transfers for athletic purposes, yet since 1994 that state has also permitted open enrollment—and so the 529 schools in the California Inter-scholastic Federation's Southern Section report that, between September '99 and December 2001, nearly 3,800 kids pulled on the uniform of a different school without changing their address of record. Sometimes teams even reach across national borders for their ringers: Tucson's Amphitheater High did so to get nine Mexican baseball players in '98; Modesto ( Calif.) Christian High did the same to land two English basketball players, who led the school to a 2001 state title game.

Nothing flouts traditional standards of community more than travel teams, which rarely have any formal connection to a local high school. With names that sound like escort services (Gold, Elite, Premier), they serve as catch basins for the most driven athletes from a region, not a town or neighborhood, and go off to play rivals far beyond the crosstown high school. Kids who are forced to choose between a high school team and a travel team often go with the travel team, because that's where the college recruiters look. Small wonder high school coaches, fearful of losing their best players, cave in to kids who want to play on travel teams, even during the high school season. Chicago's Catholic League has long offered ice hockey, but participation has plunged as travel teams have proliferated.

While extensive travel is still largely a summertime phenomenon, secondary schools that can do so are putting together national schedules for their basketball teams, like the one Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary High will play this season with its NBA-ready forward, LeBron James. "It's all about the kids," a St. Vincent-St. Mary official said, straight-faced, after the school announced the Fighting Irish's plan to play arenas in Philadelphia; Chapel Hill, N.C.; and Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. The promoter booking the dates is billing it as the Scholastic Fantastic LeBron James Tour.

As he watches talented classmates pursue sports with a more and more mercenary purpose, it's harder for the typical high school kid to muster the school spirit that marked the Clair Bee era. Mount Carmel, a private school in a misbegotten neighborhood on Chicago's lakefront, would probably no longer exist if not for sports. But because the school has produced such professionals as Chris Chelios of the Detroit Red Wings, Donovan McNabb of the Philadelphia Eagles and Antoine Walker of the Boston Celtics, wannabes make the one-or two-hour round-trip commute from the suburbs.

Indeed, it's often parents who urge kids to cast aside a second or third sport, in hopes of the financial windfall of a scholarship. While this isn't a betrayal of community per se, it's a centrifugal urge that entails setting one's sights on some distant cynosure of celebrity and wealth, and leaving the humble old neighborhood behind. Wisconsin athletic director Pat Richter, a three-year, three-sport letter-man with the Badgers (1960, '61 and '62) who played nine seasons in the NFL, calls this the brass-ring theory. According to the NCAA not even one in 330 high school athletes will land a college grant-in-aid.