Private schools have an advantage — so what?
April 28th, 2009, 4:03 pm · Post a Comment · posted by kylew
The panhandle’s rural public schools recently held a meeting in Graceville with the FHSAA executive director to voice their concerns about the difficulty they have competing at the state level in FHSAA-sponsored sports.
Our sports editor, Randy Dickson, has thorough coverage of the meeting in the April 29 edition of the Crestview News Bulletin.
Randy also wrote a column concluding, “In the long run Baker, Laurel Hill and their small school partners across the panhandle need to feel they have a real opportunity to compete” and “It’s past time to make it happen.”
Randy writes that the rural public schools are not on a level playing field with small private schools, that the private schools have all kinds of advantages, maybe even unfair advantages.
Randy is absolutely correct.
Here’s my response: So what?
Life is not a level playing field. Life is not always fair.
What better place to learn those realities — and more importantly, how to respond to those realities — than through athletics?
For those thinking, ‘Oh, you must have graduated from a private high school’ … think again. My high school was very public and very rural. About the size of Baker, actually. The only difference is my school was surrounded by the corn and soybean fields of Indiana instead of the strawberry and cotton fields of northwest Florida. Also, when I played high school sports, Indiana had just one enrollment class. Our Baker-size school had to play Crestview-sized schools to win postseason championships at any level.
So I understand what it is like to have the odds seemingly stacked against you in an athletic competition.
A big reason this country has gone off track is we have created a generation of Americans who think the proper response to adversity is to fight — not to get better, but to get the rules changed.
Call me crazy, but I believe when you get your tail kicked in a sport, the proper response is not to complain that playing field isn’t level, but to work that much harder to get that much better.
Does that mean you’ll catch up? Maybe not. In fact, probably not. There’s a reason state championships are called “once in a lifetime” experiences.
The real lesson is in learning to compete when the odds seem stacked against you. That lesson is more infinitely more valuable than a state championship medal.
