Let’s ramble about the privileges of playing sports in high school in America

So I saw this posted on tumblr and asked: “Do schools abroad not have posters of their student athletes? Not even the football players?” Mine had them in every room. It’s always weird explaining American school sport culture to people abroad. They don’t get things like “I was a starting linebacker, so I skipped the entirety of history class and got a B+”
I mean, I know it was a D, Mr Hayes told me it was a D. But those sacks & fumbles curved the grade up to a B in spite of the times I fought our qb for talking shit everyone pretends didn’t happen. Including one time right in the middle of a pep rally. What were they gonna do? Suspend me? Then I couldn’t play. That’s why I whooped John’s ass right then, and to this day goddamnit I’ll do it again.

Ok wait let me calm down.

That’s how high school sports work. In college they even have fake classes athletes can take to keep their GPA up while focusing on training.

Let me start from the beginning. Now every school is different, some don’t allow favoritism towards athletes and some are even more crazy, like in the south and rural areas. Some get so drunk off the power you have shit like what happened in Stubenville where members of the football team transported, undressed, photographed, and sexually assaulted a girl posting all of it on social media and STILL had people defending them. With three other adults having been indicted for obstructing the investigation into the rape, while Steubenville’s superintendent of schools has been charged with hindering the investigation.

So how does shit get that wild? Most of the young men on the team are never told ‘No’ and were culturally given the right to do whatever they wanted in exception to practice and game time.

If I felt like I’d rather sleep in, come late, hit the gym instead of history for some freeweights, go for a swim, leave early, have lunch where I want, bring people with me, hell go to other schools to meet and hang out with friends during school hours I would.

The way you learn to live and how life works is pretty much my performance > everything else about me as a human being. I never raped anybody…because I didn’t want to. I didn’t take steroids…because I didn’t want to. Not because I didn’t feel these things weren’t available or I would be stopped for doing so.

That’s kind of a messed up thing for a 14, 15, year old boy to be thinking about themselves.

Girls aren’t excluded though, Snowball actually got kicked out because she would skip like a month straight and not even make it to count day or test days.

For people abroad count day is how they figure out how much to pay the school based on how many students are there. They usually aren’t even real days of school, there’s free breakfast(with food from somewhere else not school food), lunch, givaways for gift cards, computers, sometimes they have some kind of a concert or show.

Test days are the days you take standardized tests. I usually did pretty well on these too affording me even more privilege, and Snowball did well. But overextended those privileges.

As long as we make it in and deliver on those days, plus my football nobody is going to care if I come into class smelling like weed, with my pants unzipped and her putting on chapstick with a bag of takeout from Panera Bread.

Well my boys in the back will hollar but it’s all good. Our physics teacher, a young cool guy even fucked with us and an administrator one time by having us talk to the principal and administrator while we were red-eyed stoned to see if they would do anything. Everybody knew but what were they gonna do?

Suspend us? Call the Police? During playoffs?

That’s crazy to me. Now for our friends abroad that might be the case but in the US we have a saying “Boys will be boys”.
So of course with that kind of attitude bullying becomes a problem.

You have one group of kids that know they are a protected class exempt from the rules those..plebs have to follow.
I’m not proud of the person I was at that time and if anyone from back then is reading this, I deeply apologize. Except John.

Most of me and one of my friends and Snowball’s behavior was modeled by the relationship between HHH, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and Stephanie, with our principal being our Mr McMahon.

Like I said not proud of it. One of the worst things we did was this idea called “The Pecking Order.” We basically decided we didn’t like waiting in line at lunch. So to alleviate that situation we decided nobody could get food or eat before us.
Even if your class was right next to the lunchroom, and we were across campus, you wait. Anybody in violation ran the risk of having the food taken or getting a beatdown.

If a parent heard about what happened, our principal would smooth it out, ya know say some things to them, tell us we’re not supposed to do that like we didn’t know but it would be back to business. Back to what I’ve been saying what do you do? Punish those kids and risk losing? Have all these parents and fans mad at you? Blaming you? Boys will be boys.

I pray things are different now, with the strong emphasis on anti bullying, if people are pulling this kind of shit at your school or your friends school I would be happy to arrange some time in a ring with someone to remind them of their actual place in the universe like we so desperately needed but that’s what it was then and the kind of privileges I see in stories now.

Then you have those people, they go on to colleges where they’ll put you in fake classes, and bad behavior continues until they are in the pros and people wonder where it came from…

But that’s only 1%. Statistically speaking even the baddest dudes in town don’t make it to the pros. There’s like 8 million high school athletes, only 480,000 of them will compete at NCAA schools. And of that group, only a fraction 251ish will realize their goal of becoming a professional or Olympic athlete.

This is a long way of telling you I’m a grown ass college educated man that doesn’t know the difference between congress and the senate or could tell you how a bill becomes a law without singing the schoolhouse rock song.

Sooner or later knowing these things is going to be more important than a damn pass or blitz. Knowing how to keep to a schedule, knowing how to not hit people because you’re mad at them, or just take shit because you feel like it.

I feel lucky now, because I had a Grandmother that did not play that shit. Her nickname around the hood was “The Law”, as in the fuckery stopped when she came around, didn’t matter if you played ball, sold drugs, gangs whatever you were into. She’d poke Superman in the chest at the end of Man of Steel and say “Excuse me Mr. Superman, thank you for saving our planet but who do you think is going to pick all this shit up? It’s not ‘up up and away’ time yet. Grab a broom. We welcome you kryptonians to the neighborhood but please don’t ever do this again, take it to the moon.”

She didn’t know what I did at school, but when I came home, homework was to be done and I had to speak about the lessons in a way that convinced her I’d learned something that day, so really all the side bullshit was doubling my work. Hell she told people they could whoop my ass if I was fuckin up, I’d have known better than to go home and tell her if I was clearly in the wrong but only Sister Oliver ever took her up on it. Probably because she would have had no problem cutting me off from football. Her priorities were different than seemingly everyone else in the universe.

So I could attend college on my own merit(except civics and history…probably writing). A lot of those guys now, Yeah they big as hell and sometimes I regret not getting into juicing(steroids). But they are also bouncers and one of them is dealing with heart failure in his 20's because he took “lift weights eat steaks” as the only fitness tip he needed.

Hell, I was so dysmorphic from those guys I tried consuming nothing but 300g of protein shakes for four months while training until I got sick. I am not a small man. But that’s another article.

That’s pretty much American sports if you’re unfamiliar with them. If you are an American and your kids in sports I hope the best for them. But be realistic too, look at the chart above, make sure they are learning academically, actual sportsmanship, citizenship and not to be such a cheater Earl wouldn’t even play NFL Blitz or NBA Street without turning the cheat codes on only he knew because he wouldn’t let other people see the book.
These things are short term benefits for no one’s gain.