SPORTS OPINION: Football players also learning life lessons in summer practices
Every time I get the opportunity to watch one of our local teams practice football this time of year, I’m reminded of one thing – this is the time of year when a lot of young people learn some of the most important lessons they’ll ever learn.
Those lessons don’t have to be necessarily learned on a football practice field, or even in sports at all.
Although sometimes when I’ve watched football practice, I’ve watched other athletes from that school get out and put work in when it was nearly too hot to do so according to the TSSAA.
But I learned a lot of those lessons in my teenage years working in my grandfather’s and uncle’s fields picking corn, potatoes, peas, butter beans, tomatoes and watermelons.
Looking back at all those summers in the late 1980s through the mid-90s, one thing I picked up on was that probably the best thing for my education was the fact that peas was the last thing we picked in the summer.
Those plants are low to the ground, and unless you have just a bad crop, there’s a lot to pick up in a small area of land, so it takes a while to get the job done in an afternoon of picking.
Then once you get done, there’s a whole other group of peas ready to pick the next day.
I hated picking peas so much that in the two weeks we spent picking them, but the time we were done, I was actually wanting school to start.
I don’t know if athletes are being pushed in the morning hours each day to the point where they’re wanting school to start, because I imagine doing the most rudimentary of football drills is still better than picking peas.
But nonetheless, these athletes or any young person doing an outdoors job like cutting grass, landscaping, etc., are learning lessons they won’t know the importance of for a while.
But getting back to the athletes – specifically football players – for a minute, the immediate benefit of the work they’re doing now is simply being in better physical condition.
The short-term benefit is getting them ready for the games that start on Friday nights in about a month and preparing them for four quarters of action involving running, hitting, blocking and doing it all to the best of their ability in the face of adversity.
And while the coaches are preparing these athletes for the games in the fall, the kids won’t know until later in life that pushing themselves to the limit today and then a little further tomorrow isn’t just preparing them for the season. They’re preparing for life too.
Because yes, the coaches are pushing the athletes to their point of failure and quitting because they want a player to quit on them in practice instead of the fourth quarter of the 10th game of the season with a region championship or a playoff berth on the line.
But those athletes are learning to keep pushing now when they want to quit are learning now how to persevere in life even when it’s not going great.
Running a gasser at the end of practice or continuing to go up against a big opponent in the fourth quarter is small potatoes compared to continuing to be an effective leader in a home when a job is lost or a family member gets a terminal diagnosis.
A lot of effective business and political leaders in this area are able to deal with hard things because when they were teenagers they played football for Mickey Marley at University School of Jackson or Jerry Hayes at South Side or Jim Hardegree at Jackson Central-Merry, and those guys are revered now by adults who hated them when they were teenagers because of all they had to do to hope to see the field on Friday nights.
But they’re better for it, and if we sat and analyzed it long enough, we’d see the community is better for it too.
With the exception of Jackson Christian, every football program has changed head coaches since The Jackson Post printed its first edition about 20 months ago. All six of those new coaches said they want to build men along with building a better football team. Jackson Christian’s Darby Palmer has a similar goal.
And they are doing it this time of year four or five mornings a week. The players just don’t know it yet.
Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on X.com @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.
