A standout product

I had another one of those discussions with one of the Sports guys I work with the other day. Well, it wasn't a discussion as much as it was me talking at him and he, being polite, staring at me like I was some ogre of an idiot.

The Sentinel sports section again ran a bunch of stories of athletes choosing which schools they will attend. This time it was swimming. Usually, it's football and basketball.

These stories trot out the athlete's high school accomplishments in their sport, have a quote from their coach about how great said athlete was in school (the word "standout" will be used at least 2,500 times. If there are so many standouts, is anyone really standing out?) and why they chose to attend this pimple on the butt of this dog, say, over another pimple on the butt of another lesser dog.

Nowhere does it talk about the athlete's other accomplishments -- academics, family, community -- the things that make a person whole or what makes a story more than just a billboard of meaningless accomplishments (Do you want to be like Al Bundy and relive your touchdowns at Polk High School for the rest of your life?).

What drives me crazy about these stories about high school graduates is that they are kids and the newspaper is already treating them like a commodity. They are to be traded, sold, like a car off the assemly line. In fact, sports actually calls athletes "products." Really. A pitcher on the local baseball team is called a "Holland Christian product."

Can you imagine if news wrote stories about the valedictorians as if they were an investment? We could focus on the wage-earning potential of a "West Ottawa product" who is going to Grand Valley State University for business. We'd say they chose GVSU over Hope College because, after graduation, she'd be able to haul in higher five-figures and anticipates being a corporate VP by age 28, and a CEO by 35 with six-figure salary. And they expect to have a lake-front condo with a summer cottage in the U.P. with three cars (one an SUV and other a more sensible BMW or Cadillac with the last being a sports car).

Please.

I'll end this ramble this way: The number of local graduates who go on to make a living solely from athletics is zero. Athletics is a small part of a human's existence. These graduates are humans, they focus on family and community, they are not a product in and of themselves, like a car, even though capitalism treats their labor as such.

Consider this: When one of our local "standouts" is on his or her death bed, are they going to say they were so happy they chose Olivet over Western for swimming when they were 18 years old, or are they going to think of family, community and spirit?

Thought: If I'm a Frontier Central Senior High School product, then I hope my parents kept the receipt.