The Penalty Box: Sports Should Always Be About Merit
February 22, 2023 at 3:35 a.m.
The Penalty Box: Sports Should Always Be About Merit
By Roger Grossman-
If you think about it, I’m a fan just like you all are. The biggest differences between you all in me is that I am working during the game and my main focus is on people who aren’t sitting in the gym with me.
And I love seeing you in the grocery store, at church or somewhere else where you ask me about the last game or the next one.
But occasionally, I get asked a question or someone poses a question somewhere that furrows my brow.
When that happens I try to be gentle but never shy away from being honest.
There is one thing that has always been true, and I believe still is true, is that sports is a true meritocracy. The players who deserve to play, play. The players who deserve to be the starters, start.
Now I’ll bet you can point to a high school team in your lifetime where the school board member’s son started ahead of someone close to you or the mayor’s daughter played before someone you knew and it was a miscarriage of justice in your opinion.
Those last three words are very important.
We get upset about who starts and who plays and who shoots and who doesn’t, and we forget one very simple principle—you and I aren’t in practice every day.
In my job it’s important for me to have a general knowledge of what is happening in the practices leading up to that game. It’s my responsibility to speak intelligently about it without saying too much and giving away information that I shouldn’t.
But sports has been, and continues to be, about what you do and not who you are or who your parents are.
Obviously, the most difficult of those situations is when the coach has a child on the team.
Most coaches’ kids spent their younger lives in the gym watching practices, getting up shots during the film sessions and absorbing knowledge that, frankly, kids who aren’t coaches’ kids don’t have access to. That’s no one’s fault. It is an advantage, and they don’t have to apologize for that.
One thing you don’t hear about as much any more is the age factor. In other words, choosing who plays based on the number of years they have been in the program.
Experience is a valuable asset to have on your team’s resume, but real experience comes from playing kids before the normal varsity window.
That means playing kids as freshmen and sophomores—a little or lot.
Depending on the roster makeup, that might mean that those 9th and 10th graders are playing ahead of juniors and seniors.
And that rubs some people the wrong way.
We’ve talked about this with you before but let me help you with this.
Varsity coaches at the high school level are held more responsible for winning than coaches of “sub-varsity teams” are. It’s their responsibility to put the best possible team on the field of competition. Again, you can disagree with who they choose, but they are the coach, and you are not.
Never has the quality of play from kids who are ages 14-16 been as high as it is right now.
That means more freshmen and sophomores are worthy of being consideration for playing time than ever before…no matter what sport you are talking about.
So when someone says “X player getting to play before Y isn’t fair because seniors should play before freshmen do,” dump that thinking in the trash.
Sports is about who gives you the best chance to win, and if that’s five freshman like Michigan won the national championship with, then you go with that. If you have a team who has younger kids who are tracking toward being special, you put them in there.
Sports can’t be about only playing people based on how many years they have been on the team. We have senior night to reward kids for that.
Sports is a meritocracy.
Imagine if we went back to only having seniors and juniors on the varsity, sophomores on the junior varsity and freshman were relegated to their own team--no exceptions.
Imagine if you applied that to corporations and office buildings around America—that the only way you could get a promotion would be to the senior member of the group. What if there were three people older than the person who was the best and most innovative executive of that group, but they were stuck waiting for retirements or attrition to get to where they deserved to be.
No one would put up with that in business, and no one would put up with that in sports either.
Sports is about finding out who is the best.
Don’t chain down who that can be.
If you think about it, I’m a fan just like you all are. The biggest differences between you all in me is that I am working during the game and my main focus is on people who aren’t sitting in the gym with me.
And I love seeing you in the grocery store, at church or somewhere else where you ask me about the last game or the next one.
But occasionally, I get asked a question or someone poses a question somewhere that furrows my brow.
When that happens I try to be gentle but never shy away from being honest.
There is one thing that has always been true, and I believe still is true, is that sports is a true meritocracy. The players who deserve to play, play. The players who deserve to be the starters, start.
Now I’ll bet you can point to a high school team in your lifetime where the school board member’s son started ahead of someone close to you or the mayor’s daughter played before someone you knew and it was a miscarriage of justice in your opinion.
Those last three words are very important.
We get upset about who starts and who plays and who shoots and who doesn’t, and we forget one very simple principle—you and I aren’t in practice every day.
In my job it’s important for me to have a general knowledge of what is happening in the practices leading up to that game. It’s my responsibility to speak intelligently about it without saying too much and giving away information that I shouldn’t.
But sports has been, and continues to be, about what you do and not who you are or who your parents are.
Obviously, the most difficult of those situations is when the coach has a child on the team.
Most coaches’ kids spent their younger lives in the gym watching practices, getting up shots during the film sessions and absorbing knowledge that, frankly, kids who aren’t coaches’ kids don’t have access to. That’s no one’s fault. It is an advantage, and they don’t have to apologize for that.
One thing you don’t hear about as much any more is the age factor. In other words, choosing who plays based on the number of years they have been in the program.
Experience is a valuable asset to have on your team’s resume, but real experience comes from playing kids before the normal varsity window.
That means playing kids as freshmen and sophomores—a little or lot.
Depending on the roster makeup, that might mean that those 9th and 10th graders are playing ahead of juniors and seniors.
And that rubs some people the wrong way.
We’ve talked about this with you before but let me help you with this.
Varsity coaches at the high school level are held more responsible for winning than coaches of “sub-varsity teams” are. It’s their responsibility to put the best possible team on the field of competition. Again, you can disagree with who they choose, but they are the coach, and you are not.
Never has the quality of play from kids who are ages 14-16 been as high as it is right now.
That means more freshmen and sophomores are worthy of being consideration for playing time than ever before…no matter what sport you are talking about.
So when someone says “X player getting to play before Y isn’t fair because seniors should play before freshmen do,” dump that thinking in the trash.
Sports is about who gives you the best chance to win, and if that’s five freshman like Michigan won the national championship with, then you go with that. If you have a team who has younger kids who are tracking toward being special, you put them in there.
Sports can’t be about only playing people based on how many years they have been on the team. We have senior night to reward kids for that.
Sports is a meritocracy.
Imagine if we went back to only having seniors and juniors on the varsity, sophomores on the junior varsity and freshman were relegated to their own team--no exceptions.
Imagine if you applied that to corporations and office buildings around America—that the only way you could get a promotion would be to the senior member of the group. What if there were three people older than the person who was the best and most innovative executive of that group, but they were stuck waiting for retirements or attrition to get to where they deserved to be.
No one would put up with that in business, and no one would put up with that in sports either.
Sports is about finding out who is the best.
Don’t chain down who that can be.
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