Courting the Athlete

My son is a freshman in high school this year.  Oh my God, I can't believe I could even be saying something like that.  Children growing older is a part of the whirlwind of life.  For those of us who have children it is likely hard to conceive any other connection to approximately 20 years of our lives.  They stand like book ends supporting two decades.  When I look back I can't possibly think of how I got here so fast and when I look forward, I shrink in terror as I realize college is only three more short years away.

My son is not athletic.  Okay, truth be told he is far more athletic than I ever was.  He can out skate board anyone in the neighborhood and played soccer.  He has however, never faced the ultimate gym humiliation that I did.  After three unsuccessful attempts at a layup in junior high school the coach placed me on the girls team.  If that had been now, I could have likely sued for enough money to support the next four generations of my family. 

My son's ticket through life will be his brain.  He is an intelligent kid.  Far more intelligent than I ever was.  He studies, he works and he excels.  He is also musical playing the drums and teaching himself the guitar and piano.  As he moves toward post high school education a state of panic progressively amps up.  Where will he go?  How will I possibly be able to afford it?  How much debt will the kid end up saddled with.  When I graduated I owed thirty thousand dollars and it took me ten years to pay it off.  Today that is one year at a modest second rate private liberal arts university.  Noah is not brilliant but he is far above average.  As he approaches the university he will do what most kids his age do, struggle to find a place to go.  They will take tests that stress them and make endless applications paying gobs of money and never knowing if they will be selected or not.

There is however another path.  It is the path of the athlete.  When I was applying for colleges I had a dream university.  I wanted to go there more than anyplace else yet I didn't even bother to apply.  I knew that despite my desire, I would never be accepted.  The school was Georgetown.  Georgetown University, the premier university for anyone wanting a career in the US Diplomatic Service.  Admission there would have changed my life.  There was a sore spot however, Georgetown is also famous for basketball.  The very idea that the university I dreamed of would admit a student with vastly inferior grades to my own and with no ambition beyond an orange bouncing ball still bugs the hell out of me.

I work with a woman who has an athlete for a son.  He is a senior this year and has played football since he could stand.  For years I have watched him walk the academic line of barely making it, his primary motivation simply to keep a C grade point average to permit him to continue to play football.  Starting in his junior year and continuing into his senior year of high school the offers have started to come.  One university after the next is courting him.  They bring him to their campuses wine and dine him and escort him around.  They are not even at the offer stage, simply the get acquainted stage yet the possibility of his athleticism on their team has them giddy.  Eventually one school will offer him a free ride.  They will welcome him with open arms and dreams of collegiate sports glory

Meanwhile as a parent of a bright intelligent young man I have to cross my fingers and hope his academics will get him some consideration.  Maybe some application he makes will get a second look.  Perhaps he can get some loan or grant based on his mind.  He won't receive unsolicited invitations in the mail.  There won't be any schools calling to show him the academics they have to offer.  There will simply be a young man who has studied and worked for twelve years of his academic life to do the best he can making applications to schools more concerned with his tuition than what he brings to them.

I will never understand the obsession with college athletics yet it drives universities like few other things.  I live in University of South Carolina, Gamecock country.  The entire city celebrates the football and baseball teams with parades and parties.  People that never went to the university wear their colors as if they were their own.  It has been that way since I arrived and it will be that way after I leave.  I suspect however if you asked the people that live here the name of a single scholar produced by the university they worship for 99.99% of them, their minds would come up short.  This is a phenomenon unique to America.  There is not a single university in the rest of the world that celebrates athletics over academics.  Not a one.

I have three more years to face this with my son but to all the average and bright kids that will graduate this year I salute you.  You are just about to learn another major lesson about the bizarre nature of the society in which we live.  When you succeed in finding a university to attend and you sit down to write your first essay, the first word you write on the blank page before you should simply be ... debt.