Youth Movement

By BJ Bennett
SouthernPigskin.com

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For a college football player, the summer before college is much more than a highway road trip, it’s the fast track into the public forum.

We analyze them, project them, rank and measure them. We laud them, praise them, direct, then follow them. We treat them like adults and grade them as something even more. We set the bar, demand it be reached, then move on when the potential we quantified isn’t fully realized.

Every parent, admittedly or internally, dreams of their child one day receiving a college athletic scholarship. With years of travel, expenses, time and energy trailing in the rear-view, signing day is a celebration for the entire family. That moment, the opportunity is what aspiring athletes stay up at night dreaming of. The possibilities keep parents up late as well. Full college tuition and expenses, which is what many major college scholarships offer, is the chance of the lifetime for young adults. A secondary education coupled with the cultural and social expansions college presents is an experience and progression that cannot be duplicated. There’s a reason an entire sub-culture of youth athletic training has developed designed solely to help teenagers be more appealing to recruiters.

The sport most prominently in the spotlight is football. High school football recruiting has become a phenomenon, a business with a disposition as competitive and conspicuous as what you will find in the downtown economic sectors of America’s largest cities. Recruiting has become a ruthless feeder-system to the big programs and thus the big dollars those schools chase. The process isn’t inherently evil, rather misinterpreted and in some ways quite dramatized. With high-profile freshmen reporting to campus this summer and college football taking a long look at itself in the mirror, the timing and background for discussion seems fitting.

Lost in the shuffle of proverbial puzzle pieces fitting together on a depth chart and the fact that the numbers associated with these players supersede their names and background are high school upperclassmen who are getting their first glimpse of the real world and responsibility in a rapid-fire three-month crash course. Media members fight for their insight, fans crave their favoritism, their peers position for friendship, their community interjects opinion. Suffocated by the hyperbole of it all is a decision that will largely impact the remainder of a player’s life.

On National Signing Day, young athletes fortify their previously verbal commitment to their school of choice. As they sign to accept the scholarship, these future college football players also sign away their ambiguity. Their John Hancock is official closure to living life as John Q. Public.

The transition from high school to college, culturally, is the most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of recruiting. Pundits, basing their projections largely on specific measurables, literally position incoming players for competition with their evaluations. Much like the college football media in many ways pre-determines championship contention before the season ever begins, preconceived athletic summaries provide a playing-time pecking order for incoming freshmen.

Prep school exposure and the directly-related and quite natural preferential treatment that comes with it also predisposes players previously completely dependent on their families for life guidance to adult decision-making and a hurried life of cynosure. As a freshman thrust into the starting lineup lacks lucidity in the open field, the same premise applies here. When college players then make mistakes, we question their motives, direction and foresight. Considering the realities of recruiting, perhaps those aren’t the only questions we should be asking.

Athletics, football specifically, offers a unique dynamic that very few other avenues of life present. Maybe it’s the focus on the position and performance as opposed to the person or the fact that the extensive uniform makes competitors seem impersonal. The traits that describe good football players, strength, persistence and fearlessness, dehumanize the athlete and force each player into a chimerical set of parameters and thus an unrealistic set of expectations.

At the major college level, where branding, marketing and positioning are just as important as winning, kids not legally old enough to buy a Budweiser are cast as grand, stoic figures. Under pounds of pads and helmets that hide their youth, they are the faces of 12-year, $2.7 billion deals like the Pac Ten just signed with ESPN and Fox. Players grace magazine covers, billboards and website front pages. Their every move is celebrated by their home communities, their every decision analyzed, even criticized, by millions of people they will never meet. Right decisions on the field can turn a young man into an icon. Wide left offers a much different outcome.

Four months before their first collegiate game, these same high school seniors were asking for permission from their teachers to use the restroom during class. For a college football player, the summer before college is much more than a highway road trip, it’s the fast track into the public forum. For we as fans, those 120 days between senior week and freshman semester are the official transition from calling a player son to excitedly introducing him to yours’.

Athletes step on campus and before they can find their classrooms or the library, fans have found and chronicled their personal exploits from grade school to grading-out.

“Every class you go in, every club or restaurant, people are looking at you. Anything that you do, there is an eye on you. It’s not necessarily that you sign up for that like a pro athlete does. At the same time, the NCAA and you sign a contract saying you are going to get an education. I feel like the education is definitely the most important part,” explained former Georgia Tech and Tennessee starting quarterback A.J. Suggs. “It’s very overwhelming to say the least. I graduated early from McEachern High School in Powder Springs, went up early and participated in the spring game. By the time I got to the game, those fans knew everything about me: the size of my shoes, my parents names, my brothers and sisters names, more than I knew about me. It was very challenging to say the least.”

The whirlwind of it all can have young men, experiencing this for the first time, on unstable ground.

“You’re 18 to 22 years old typically and you have got so many fans. Think about a place like Knoxville, Tennessee. Every place I went into, people recognized who I was. People were coming up, patting you on the back and taking pictures,” Suggs recalled. “If people are coming up trying to give you things, at that point as an 18-19 year old kid you don’t think a lot about that. Your head is spinning. When you see people walking around wearing your jersey, taking your picture and asking for your autograph, it’s overwhelming”

Forgotten in the jumble of the national rankings is the fact that most of these players are fighting the rigors of a grueling schedule and extreme restrictions that most of us, in college, could never have managed. All the while, our entire week is spent dissecting two hours of their Saturday afternoon.

“It’s very difficult. You go to a place like UGA and you see a 6’3” or 6’4”, 300 pound guy in your classroom and you automatically assume the guy is a football player. You have a red flag or a target on your back, they are always watching every move and know everything that you do. They can tell you where you ate last night or if you were downtown at a bar,” explained former Bulldog All-SEC defensive lineman Gerald Anderson. “People are watching and that’s why it is vitally important that they maintain a certain attitude out in the public. You are in the spotlight every Saturday and they see that. They saw you in the halls or on campus and they target you already as a troublemaker or someone to talk to. It’s a big responsibility being a student-athlete at a high profile school.”

Players undoubtedly benefit from the spotlight, from the education and fanfare to health and nutritional training to the name recognition and treatment they receive years after their careers. College football asks a lot of a young man, gives a lot in return. Sympathy isn’t needed. Sometimes, however, a proper outlook is. The high-stakes functionality of college football and the platform that it brings places an unrealistic presumption of perfection on the players. Post-game reactions can be harsh and myopic. Our responses might be be fair for grizzled pro veterans, but are blunt and crude for teenage student-athletes. We should be hesitant to let the venue define the participant.

Observations like these, along with the intricacies of college football, should be kept in context. The personal plights of young athletes stand no comparison to young men and women in the military and various realms of public service. Football is a game. That said, we need not forget who plays it.

No party is at fault, no vilification is being suggested. College football is a magical game that links communities and small towns, friends and family and past to present. The game, the settings that make up many of our best memories deserve a certain reverence and appreciation. As do those on the field. For the attention we give, the applause we offer, perspective would be the most fitting appraisal.