Since I am a Freshman in High School, I hear from so many people that they want to be a sports athlete when they are older. So I started thinking, do these people know how disappointed they will be when the scouts don’t even stay past the first inning?
My friend Anthony just barely made the C-team for baseball. Now he is a freshman but to think that he is the next Johan Santana as he says he will be is pure ignorance.
Now it’s okay to have dreams, but that brings me to a quote said in the movie The Rookie.
“It’s okay to think of what you want to do, until it’s time to do what you were meant to do”. I can guarantee you that every child in America that plays a sport will not make it to the professional level, let alone High School Varsity.
Unless you are the best on your High School varsity team as a Freshman or Sophomore, you won’t even be seriously considered by any scout. That’s not the case in every situation but it is for the majority.
Only about one in every 16,000 athletes play in professional level. That is including professional diving so the numbers are even more scarce than that. If we were only talking about baseball, football, soccer, basketball and hockey, I would bet that those numbers are around one in 25,000.
The chances of an athlete starting are somewhere around one in two million, that is four times the population of Alaska. Do athletes seriously think that they have a shot at being better than all the people of Alaska, Montana and Wyoming?
A recent middle school survey stated that around 46% of middle school boys believe that they will be a professional athlete when they are older. So 45.9999375% will be disappointed. That survey also had 14% say that they didn’t know what they believed they would be.
Those statistics are overwhelming!
The youth of this era are heading down a road of serious stress. If your childhood life was all one big let down imagine, how you would feel?...imagine how they will feel.
I have seen friend after friend be in a horrible long term state of mind because they failed to make a Little League All-Star team.
This brings up the moral question? Should we ruin their dreams now to keep the kids from a world of heartache? Or should we let them have a goal and still be in a world of heart ache later?
If we ruin their dreams now they will be sad for a while, but Will Smith thinks differently. In the movie Pursuit of Happiness, Smith tells his son that he probably won’t excel at basketball because Smith didn’t when he was younger.
His son then throws the basketball and starts to pack up after an afternoon with his now hurting father.
Smith turns to his son and tells him that not him or anyone should tell him that he can’t do something.
This is one thing in the world of sports that is our choice and not the players or coaches.
Do we or do we not tell them that their dreams are higher than improbable to happen?
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