Nancy Reno, an athlete so gifted she was honored as The Tribune`s Athlete of the Year two years ago as a senior at Glen Ellyn`s Glenbard West High School, fought the steadily mounting pressures that are forcing athletes to specialize in one sport at younger ages.
She lost.
In her senior year Reno was told by Glenbard West girls` basketball coach Karen Judge that she could not simultaneously be on the school basketball team and play open volleyball for a club team in Glen Ellyn.
”Nancy is the type of person who always has to give 100 percent,” Judge says. ”And for her not to do that would have been unfair to her and unfair to the team. She couldn`t push herself any harder. I would have loved her to play basketball, but you can`t allow a child to be split in so many directions.”
Reno had played basketball the three previous years and was considered to be of all-state caliber in that sport. She also had played volleyball all four years at Glenbard West, earning all-state and All-America honors as a senior. She had accepted a scholarship to Stanford University for volleyball, a sport which just the year before had surpassed basketball as her favorite. The margin remained narrow, so much so that she still entertained thoughts of playing both in college.
In the end, Reno had to choose between staying with a sport she knew she would be playing in college and playing another sport she dearly loved and which, she realized, she might never have an opportunity to play competitively again. In her mind, there was no way she could drop volleyball for four months.
”I didn`t choose to specialize, I had to,” says Reno, 20, a sophomore at Stanford, where she is on the volleyball team. ”I think it`s unfortunate so much pressure is put on the high school student. It`s a pretty important decision for someone that young.
”When I think back on my athletic career at Glenbard West, I have, unfortunately, negative connotations because of the whole ordeal it turned into. It was a very traumatic thing. When anyone mentions high school, it`s the first thing that comes to my mind. It went from a game to a war.”
Says coach Judge: ””For Nancy and the program, I think it was the best decision.”
Reno`s is not an isolated case. Hers is a story being repeated in high schools across the country, as talented athletes bow to societal pressures to harness their skills at an early age and hone them for some future payoff.
Sports in our schools, once a symbol of youthful fun and character development, apparently is not immune from the dictates of a society that stresses and rewards specialization. The fear of failing to reach one`s potential, the specter of being left behind by others willing to sacrifice all other interests to meet a goal is, sadly, all too real among today`s high school athletes.
As near as anyone can pinpoint, specialization first began to appear in high school athletics in the mid- to late-1970s. It is not a coincidence that the physical fitness boom exploded across America at about the same time, bringing technological advancements in training and conditioning.
Karen Huff, formerly the girls` track coach at Evanston Township High School and now an assistant coach of the women`s track team at Northwestern University, recalls that when she first started coaching in the early 1970s, the girls would routinely go from one sport to another. That began to change after Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 became federal law. Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools and colleges receiving federal funding, led to a flood of college athletic scholarships for women, which in turn altered perceptions of the goals of high school athletic participation.
”If it is connected in some way with some future payoff, the pressure to specialize and meet higher norms is heightened,” says Jim Pitts, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. ”The kids aren`t just imitating society, it`s just that some of the same pressures that bring specialization in medicine and law are also encouraging it in amateur sports.”
As a result, the three-sport athlete, long extinct at the collegiate level, has become rarer in high schools. The pressures not only to win but to excel have created a pervasive atmosphere of intense competition that increasingly is tipping the scales toward the business side of sports.
”Across the country the standards of excellence (in sports) performance have been going up,” says Pitts, who was an all-Big 10 basketball player at Northwestern in 1966. ”In order to be competitive in a given sport, a person must invest more time to bring about the desired performance level.
”And the ante keeps going up.”
The stakes have risen because the athletes have increasingly desired to be rewarded in some tangible form, usually through college scholarships, and the coaches in turn tend to fuel those desires in order to improve their programs. Everyone involved is ensnared in a philosophy that pushes the minimum standards for achieving success higher and higher.
The theory goes that maximum achievement in a sport demands a virtually year-round commitment from the athlete, making it extremely difficult for all but the most gifted to perform well–or at all–in more than one sport. Participation in a sport once meant involvement in it only during its season. Now off-season training and conditioning programs run by high schools leave the athlete with no downtime, particularly in the summer, making what was once a break probably the most demanding time of the year. In addition, private week-long summer camps, many of them held on college campuses, have grown in all sports, especially football and basketball.
Jeff Pearson, a senior at St. Laurence High School in Chicago, says the off-season demands placed upon him as a football player increased
significantly during his four years of high school. (He will attend Notre Dame this fall on a football scholarship.)
”At the beginning even I would take a month or so off,” says Pearson, an avid weight lifter. ”Now, after the last game, I take just a week or two off, and then it`s back into the weight room, hitting it. It`s kind of getting like college.”
”Jeff was recruited by everyone out of grammar school for basketball and football,” says Mike O`Neill, Pearson`s football coach at St. Laurence. ”He was outstanding.”
As a freshman, Pearson played basketball and football. After only one week of practice in his sophomore season, Pearson quit the basketball team.
”I thought basketball would interfere,” says Pearson, who stood 6 feet 3 and weighed 210 pounds at the end of the football season of his sophomore year. ”It`s hard to play basketball and work out at the same time. I went down to 190, and that`s when I decided to quit. Coach O`Neill even encouraged me (to play basketball). But I was losing too much weight.” By the end of his sophomore year, Pearson weighed 230 pounds. At present he is 6 feet 4, 255 pounds.
”They`re starting earlier and earlier,” O`Neill says. ”Those are things that never happened 15 years ago. Weight lifting was unheard of in the off-season. They did it the way you`re probably supposed to. You played your sport in season, and after it was over, it was, `See you at the beginning of practice next year.`
”Everyone`s created a monster. But you`ve got to do it. If you have a football program, you have to have a weight program, or you`ll get beat. But you can`t blame all that on a coach with an ego. It`s survival because there are pressures on high school coaches to win. And that creates the monster.”
The last decade also has seen the rise of private clubs devoted to volleyball, gymnastics and swimming, making those sports year-round activities as well. All these developments have forced young athletes to make choices they previously weren`t required to make. A gifted athlete, for example, often is torn between loyalty to school and loyalty to club teammates. Recalling her club volleyball and high school basketball days, Reno says, ”All I heard was that I was bailing out on the basketball team.”
Increased media attention to athletics on all levels means impressionable youngsters can become enamored with the extravagant lifestyles of many of today`s athletic superstars and wish to emulate them. To reach this star status, they are willing to pay a tremendous price, often without questioning the wisdom of their decisions.
Dr. Mark Walker, of the Adolescent Psychiatry Program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, says all children have the same developmental needs and that there is a cost exacted when any of these fundamental needs is neglected. A teenager who concentrates solely on any activity to the exclusion of all others may very well suffer a troubled adulthood.
He says athletic participation allows an adolescent to adjust to the physical changes in his or her body. It also offers relationships with peers and nonparental adults, provides an outlet for tension and an opportunity to develop self-esteem.
”When that gets perverted and they focus on one thing–to become outstanding in one sport–the other needs don`t get attended to,” Dr. Walker says. ”The kid might not realize he`s missing a lot of the building blocks until later on. There`s a big difference between pressuring a 14-year-old and pressuring an 18-year-old. The earlier that pressure starts, the less likely a kid is to have a normal development.”
The situation is so complex that the athletes making decisions are not even sure how or why they make them. And coaches who may realize the implications of the burdens dropped on young shoulders often feel powerless to change things. This is, say many athletes and coaches, the way things are.
”I don`t think we`re talking of an atmosphere that`s destroying young people,” says Bob Basarich, Lockport High School`s basketball coach for 20 years. ”We`re talking of an area where a lot of young people are getting caught in a maze. And maybe they`re trapped and they`re not as successful as they wanted to be and they wish they had made another decision. But that`s really life. Our society`s become specialized. Our society`s become pressurized and hard-nosed. This is just a filtering-down (of the) system.
”Times have changed drastically. It`s a new world out there, and that new world isn`t as good as the old one. But it`s the one we`re living in. Some people will make out better with the change of times. But overall they`re getting cheated out of a lot of fun things a teenager should be
experiencing.”
The story of Mary Eggers is poignantly telling. Last year Eggers chose to forgo her senior season of basketball at West Aurora High School to play volleyball for the same club team Reno had played for. Like Reno, Eggers was considered to be of all-state caliber in basketball. She had captained the West Aurora team the previous two seasons. ”Without a doubt, she would have broken all the scoring records at West Aurora,” says West Aurora girls`
basketball coach Mark Proctor.
Unlike Reno, Eggers claims the choice was entirely hers. That, however, didn`t make the decision any easier. ”I thought about it for a real long time. I couldn`t sleep at night,” she says. ”Either I let down the people on the volleyball team or the people on the basketball team. Either way, someone was going to be hurt.”
Eggers was so pained by the decision she felt she had to make and so fearful of the reactions of her peers to it that she could not bring herself to tell any of her basketball teammates. She told her coach only four days before the start of the season. ”I know she was going through tremendous turmoil,” Proctor says. ”She was crying when she told me.”
”The first practice was when they found out,” Eggers says, ”because I couldn`t tell any of them. After that, they kept telling me we could be real good if I came out for the team. They didn`t understand how much I wanted to play volleyball. It was like I was letting down the team, that I didn`t have loyalty to the school.
”But if I had to do it over again, I would have done it the same way. I wanted to be the best volleyball player I could, and that meant full time,”
says Eggers, who went to the University of Illinois and was named freshman volleyball player of the year in the Big 10 this season.
”I certainly can`t say she did not (make the right decision),” Proctor says. ”But it would be very hard to convince me she couldn`t have
accomplished everything she`s accomplished and still been a part of the best team ever at West Aurora.”
Eggers, 18, admits she missed playing basketball but remains convinced that dropping the sport was the only way she could have reached the goals she set for herself in volleyball. ”I haven`t touched a basketball since I quit,” she says.
Lori Vitali, who graduated in 1981 from St. Charles High School, played volleyball, basketball and softball at the school. She wanted to specialize in volleyball. Her father, who coached football for 25 years and is still the golf coach at St. Charles High, wouldn`t allow it.
”She continually told me, `Dad, I want to drop basketball to concentrate on volleyball so I can get a scholarship.` I said no,” Leo Vitali says. ”She had what I call raw talent. As a result, she never got a chance to develop.” And she did not earn a scholarship.
”I should have let her do what she wanted,” Vitali says. ”That was the wrong decision. If everybody`s doing it and you`re not, you fall behind. That wasn`t happening 10 or 12 years ago.”
This year his daughter Lisa, a senior at St. Charles, dropped basketball, which she had played her first three years of high school, to concentrate on volleyball. She has earned a volleyball scholarship to Ohio State University. Leo Vitali, whose son Mark played three sports at St. Charles in the mid- 1970s and earned a football scholarship to Purdue University, still does not agree with specialization. He is confused, both as a coach and as a parent, by the inducements that push athletes like Lisa out of one sport in favor of another.
”They almost take the decision away from the kids,” Vitali says. ”I just think it`s the system that creates specialization, as much as it is the parents, the coaches and the kids.”
”All these people who are dropping a sport, they say it`s specialization. I really wonder,” Stanford`s Reno says. ”For a lot of people, it`s not a choice. They`re almost forced to make that decision. The worst thing about it is it`s starting with younger people, even in junior high.”
The pressures and demands placed on today`s high school athlete did not exist or were so muted as to be insignificant when Dike Eddleman was compiling an astounding athletic resume at Centralia High School in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Eddleman is considered the best all-around athlete the state of Illinois has produced. He graduated in 1942 from Centralia High School, where he was all-state in football and basketball and won the state high-jump title as a senior. He went on to play all three sports at the University of Illinois, competed in the high jump at the 1948 Olympics and played in the National Basketball Association. Eddleman, 63, doesn`t believe an athlete could do the same things today.
”It would be pretty tough to go through all three sports and make some of the teams today,” says Eddleman, executive director of the grants-in-aid program at the University of Illinois.
Quinn Buckner, arguably Illinois` second most celebrated high school athlete, says the pressure to specialize did not exist when he was earning all-state honors in football and basketball at Thornridge High School in Dolton in the early 1970s. Had he been exposed to the kinds of pressures that exist today, he doubts whether he would have been able to cope.
”I wasn`t (ready for such pressures), and most people you talk to at that age aren`t,” Buckner says. ”That`s what we`re forgetting–the development of the child. Those are very impressionable times.”
Buckner led Thornridge to back-to-back state basketball championships in 1971 and 1972. He earned All-America honors in basketball in 1972, his senior year. At Indiana University he played football and basketball his first two years before concentrating on basketball. He was an all-Big 10 safety in football and led Indiana to the 1976 NCAA basketball championship. He then went on to play in the NBA for the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics and Indiana Pacers.
”I don`t think anyone at such a young age knows his potential in a sport,” Buckner says. ”I still don`t know it. I`ve had a number of people tell me I should have played football. Even now. Quite frankly, I might have been a better football player.”
Today Thornridge High School awards three-sport athletes special pins for their letters to persuade more of them to reject specialization. Ron Bonfiglio, the athletic director who has taught and coached at the school for 20 years, says the school still has many two-sport athletes but admits that three-sport athletes are rare. Those days, he laments, are gone.
”It`s wrong,” Bonfiglio says. ”I get sick of all the leagues in the summer. We all just get caught in the web. Who are we to say, `You should specialize and you`ll get a scholarship`? Can we really project that for a 15- year-old kid? I wonder, if we let a kid be a kid, if he won`t be better off. I wonder at times if we`re not our own worst enemies.”
”All this is just to keep up with the Joneses at the high school level,” says Linda Marable, who has coached the Hinsdale South High School girls` volleyball team for 14 years. ”I don`t believe, in the end, that it is a good trend. There are fewer kids who just want to play. The kids on the bottom end of the roster don`t think they`re getting anything. A varsity letter is not a tangible reward to them. It`s not like the `50s and the `60s, when everyone was wearing letters and the letters were a source of pride that put them above everyone else.”
”In today`s structured society, if you enter something just for the heck of it, just for the fun of it, it would probably have to be at the intramural level,” West Aurora coach Proctor says.
Lockport High`s Basarich believes the high school athletes are just following the examples set for them by professional athletes. ”I think you`ve got to start at the top of the system and back up,” he says. ”The guy who says he`s not going to play for $300,000 a year; he wants a million. That`s the hero.”
The most tangible sign of success for today`s high school athlete is the college scholarship. It can be worth tens of thousands of dollars, and its value in self-esteem is inestimable, largely because so few will actually earn one.
No statistics are kept on the total number of available college athletic scholarships. Whatever the number, there is no doubt that the total number of high school athletes far exceeds it.
In the 1984-85 school year, 3,354,284 boys and 1,757,884 girls participated in high school sports nationwide, according to a National Federation of State High School Associations survey. In Illinois 186,419 boys and 94,420 girls played that year, according to an Illinois High School Association (IHSA) survey. The boys included 48,542 in football, 29,391 in basketball and 23,499 in baseball. Of the girls 20,839 were in volleyball, 18,006 in basketball and 13,412 in softball.
The total number of initial full or partial athletic grants awarded by all Big 10 schools in all sports for the 1985-86 school year was 704 for men and 327 for women. For men, there were 256 scholarships awarded in football, 47 in basketball and 80 in baseball. For women, 36 scholarships were awarded in volleyball, 32 in basketball and 24 in softball.
In 1983 a Collegiate Volleyball Coaches Association survey indicated that the average number of female athletes on scholarships for volleyball at a Division I school was 6.96. In 1985-86 only 192 Division I schools had women`s volleyball teams. Assuming an average of seven scholarships per program, there would be 1,344 scholarship athletes playing women`s volleyball in those schools–one-half of 1 percent of all the girls playing the sport in high school.
Clearly, the odds are stacked against a high school athlete earning a college athletic scholarship. Many naively believe they can beat those odds through sheer determination, hard work and sacrifice. Some simply ignore the statistics and plow ahead, blinded by ambition and fear of failure.
Paige Paulson was willing to sacrifice everything to win a college scholarship, even though she did not need the money to attend college. It became, she admits, an obsession.
”I was blind to everything but a scholarship,” Paulson says. ”I had little visions of scholarships at night. I had tunnel vision. I wanted the recognition from the college and I wanted the recognition from my parents. I wanted to classify myself as a great athlete, and that`s why I had to specialize. If I had second thoughts about it, I would start hesitating in my performance and I`d fall behind because there are other kids out there who are not hesitating, and they`re all specializing. It`s like a race.”
Paulson, 21, earned a volleyball scholarship at Western Michigan University, where she is a senior. At Hinsdale South High School she played volleyball, basketball and softball as a freshman and volleyball and basketball as a sophomore. The summer after her sophomore year, she joined the same open volleyball club Reno and Eggers were later to join. From that point on, it was exclusively volleyball.
”Anyone who goes into that volleyball program left with a full ride to a Division I school,” Paulson says. ”In life today you need a little edge to play in college, and that was my edge. I really felt I had no choice.”
Paulson won her scholarship, but she paid a heavy price for it. She had to contend with peer pressure in high school and burnout in college, and both took their toll. Her decision to play for the volleyball club instead of the school basketball team did not sit well with coaches and athletic officials at Hinsdale South. ”I got a lot of pressure from the people in the school–from the basketball coach and from the athletic director,” Paulson says. ”Their side of the story was that I had an obligation to the high school to play everything I possibly could. My defense was I had to think about my future and specialize so that when the chance came, I`d be ready. They said it was my duty to the school to play. I agreed and I wanted to, but I had to look down the road.
”It was traumatic because I couldn`t accept the fact that I was losing some of my friends. As I went along, I felt they were dragging on my shirttail: `Don`t go. Don`t do it.` It was giving up a part of myself and giving up a part of my social life. It was hard, and I can`t imagine it being easy for anyone.”
In her junior year at Western Michigan Paulson told Marable she was experiencing burnout in volleyball. Marable remembers being surprised but not shocked. Paulson had played the sport year-round her last two years of high school and throughout college.
”She still had one more year to play, and even though the outlook for the upcoming year was really positive–they had done well in the NCAA, almost everyone (on the team) was coming back–even with all those positive things, well, she was not dreading it, but she was not entirely enthused about the coming year. All because of it being so intense and competitive,” Marable says.
”Burnout is one of the things you have to accept,” Paulson says. ”You almost expect it. At the maximum, you have two months off a year. And you`re just so sick of it. You can`t see yourself improving, although others can. And you begin thinking, `Is it worth it?`
”I even felt burnout before I came to college. I`ve never met a specialized person–someone who specializes in one sport–who has not felt burnout. Never. On the other hand, people who are playing many sports, I`ve never seen one with burnout. But for the people who specialize, the benefits are far greater than the things that will hurt them. You look down the road and wait for those benefits, and if they don`t come, you end up a bitter old woman.”
Paulson laughs at her exaggeration. When asked, however, if the specialization would have been worth it had she not earned a college scholarship, she does not answer immediately.
”That would be tragic,” she finally says.
There is another lengthy pause.
”I`m trying to imagine myself not getting a scholarship four years ago,” Paulson says. ”It devastates me to the point where I don`t think I would have gone to college. That`s why I went to college, to play volleyball. That`s how I chose Western Michigan, because of the volleyball program. If I didn`t have the volleyball scholarship, I don`t think I would have gone to college.”
