Athletics don’t last forever; however, the mind is the greatest muscle we can work and make strong for a lifetime.
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As a college professor, there is nothing better than assisting students pursuing their dream of obtaining a college degree. Although to be honest, it was not always the dream of some young males I meet to complete a college degree program. Some young men had dreams of being successful athletically, just like I did. There are not too many young boys I knew of who didn’t grow up watching, loving, and playing different sports. Whatever the sport was, it brought a sense of hard work, passion and pride that helped us young boys grow up and feel successful. At times, academics are not always the main focus when it comes to young boys and dreams. Unfortunately, this can become more of a hindrance down the line then they realize. Academic success sometimes to young boys is not celebrated as being as great as athletic success.
Educators are tasked to remind young boys why they are in school; and, this is to succeed academically, while gaining knowledge from their courses and becoming successful in life’s the real world. One of the NCAA’s greatest taglines is that their athletes “will be going PRO in something other than sports.” There are some people who push the wrong idea of what young boys are in school to do and when that happens, focus sometimes is placed too much on playing sports and not achieving academically. I have talked to current and past college athletes who were told while at college by both coaches and administrators that the reason for their being at the higher education institution was simply that they were at that school to play the individual sport they were at the school to play and that’s it. I believe this is a truly wrong intent and false in nature. We need young boys to realize that in order to even play the sports they desire to play at an academic institution, the focus of success has to on being the best academically that they can be.
In my book, The Art Form of P.A.S.S.I.O.N., I talk about how people need to have a “Hustle Mindset.” When I was in high school, I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay as much attention to my academics as I did playing high school football. When I got to college, I had an amazing English composition teacher, Mr Kelty, who was a coach at heart. With the passion he had for athletics, he taught me how to put that same passion towards my own academics. As hard as I prepared to play for the high school football game, I took that determination and hard work and put those extreme efforts into my college academics. The lifting weights, running and training, practices and film study turned to library studying hours, attending after class study sessions, and meeting with professors one on one. I strived to reach very high levels in college just by taking my “Hustle Mindset” that I had towards athletics and put it towards my studies. We need to teach our young boys that all the efforts we put into our athletics should be equal to or even placed harder into our academics.
Sometimes as boys, we feel invincible when we are playing sports in our youth. We feel that there is nothing we can’t do and by far we are the very best athlete in the world. It’s not until things like injuries or seeing that there are other boys just as good (if not better) at athletics as we are that we start to realize, maybe being an athlete isn’t always going to work out. In guiding our youth, we need to make sure we create a culture that is focused on the success of our young boys’ academic strength as much as their strength academically.
A lot of young boys have dreams of playing big time college sports or being a professional athlete. My dream was to go to Notre Dame and play football. I was good at football, but not good enough to get on Notre Dame’s radar. It wasn’t that my football skills were not good enough to get noticed, my grades were not even comparable to what would be considered acceptable to get into such a prestigious academic institution. We must instill in our young boys that just because you may be the fastest runner, shoot the best shot, or jump the highest, it doesn’t mean it will get you into a college.
Every year, amazing high school athletes learn way too late even as they gain recognition for their athletics, they are not eligible for a lot of colleges because of their poor grades. Parents, mentors, role models of young boys, can help by getting them the help in they may need! And for the athletic coaches with young boys playing sports; they may be able to score all kinds of points for your teams, but if they are not getting the points they need from their teachers in the classroom, maybe they need to stop scoring team points until they can get their grade points up. We need not be afraid to sit down with our kids if they are not performing in the classrooms as they need to be. I remember in middle school my mother did not allow me to play 8th grade football because my grades were not good. It hurt me to not be out there with my friends, but it made me focus on my grades so that I was ready to play again once I got to high school.
Once a boy gets older, we ask what is next for that young man? Athletics don’t last forever, but the mind is the greatest muscle we can work out and make stronger. Educators, and parents alike can do our very best to keep our young boys learning and studying. By doing so, they will be able to not just look good on the fields they play, but make positive moves to make our world a better place with their mind, ideas, and hard work.
Photo: Brian J. McDermott/Flickr
As long as the Football/Basketball industrial complexes reign on college campuses in America, bringing in billions per annum, NOTHING will change in K-12 public schools in terms of sports programs. As long as the persistent anti-intellectual streak, which is shot through our culture like green mold, continues to exist, nothing will change. It’s virtually intractable. Colleges are addicted to the money that their sports programs bring in for them, because it allows them to fund new construction, new research projects in emerging tech and medical fields (it’s almost always in those), they will not seek to shift their laudatory language… Read more »