Practice and No Play?

Each time the month of March rolls around, we always have two questions to ask from the sports family, more particularly those that are from school-based programs. The first question we ask ourselves is how the school-year went in terms of sports development. The other question is what sports activities will our sportsmen and leaders have this summer?

I guess you can say it’s better late than never, but if a sport is to be gauged in terms over-all development, one of the best ways is to see how busy the sport was over the past ten months. But we’re not talking about the act of practicing as a team in school or playing in school intrams.

We all know now there’s no real substitute to the real thing: a tournament game played against a team from another school. Exposure to competition in a tournament-setting is a pre-requisite for sports development as this is where our young potentials mature and develop as players and as people. So how did our favorite sport fare this school-year? Was it all practice and no play? I’m sure you can assess it easily by counting how much practice the athletes did compared to how many tournaments or competitive games they actually joined.

Basketball is always the busiest sport that doesn’t need any introduction in this department. The first semester was filled with tournaments from the college all the way to the grade school levels, but the second semester was not as busy as the first. This could be an opportunity to look into for our sports leaders. Everything seems to come to a halt around October and November when many tournaments end. But the bad news is that this “end” seems to last until the end of the school-year!

And what’s going to happen this summer? Will it just become an extension of the lull? Summer will be filled with the usual summer clinics. Again, there’s nothing wrong here. But is that it? Will this be enough? Won’t the athletes in these clinics have a tournament where they can practice what they learned? At the rate we’re going, we might just end up being an all-practice and no-play basketball family.

In the case of football, I heard sentiments from coaches and players who said that there weren’t enough tournaments to help build the competitive level of the whole football family. After two successive tournaments in August that started off football’s activities for the school-year, football was quiet between October and December. The next tournaments were already in January and February 2008. The irony of it all is that these were basically one-day festivals or tournaments. While there is nothing wrong with these, there’s nothing compared to the kind of exposure that one can get from a long-running type of tournament where players get to play at a competitive level every weekend.

But what went wrong? While fingers will always be pointed at a sport’s group of leaders, I’d like to take a more pro-active stance in asking what we (as football enthusiasts) do to help the sport. We might have ended up as victims of our own negligence and finger-pointing ways. I often feel guilty when six-year old kids ask me when their next tournament is scheduled. I’m not strong enough to tell them that there is no other tournament left in the school-year because this kind of reply devastates them. After experiencing the fun of a tournament for the first or second time, here they are looking for more. And the sad part is that we can’t give them what they want; or what they actually need.

Basketball and football are only two of the many school-based sports that our kids get into every year. But while these are the more popular sports, we should ask the same question about all the other sports. What did our athletes do all school-year? Was it all practice for them? How many tournaments did they join? Note that we’re asking about tournaments joined, and not tournaments won. We’re not looking for instant champions or winners. We’re only looking for competitions where our athletes can play, have fun and develop to become better.

And what are they going to do this summer? Practice even more?

We should all take a strong stand that exposure to tournament play or competitive activities should always go hand in hand with all the practice that athletes spend precious time on all year-round.

So how did you rate your favorite sport over the past school-year? And what lies ahead this summer?

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Time-out: I would like to request for prayers for the soul of Tiburcio “Teddy” Licuanan who passed away recently. >>> You can reach me at [email protected] or 0923-342-8193 (for SunCell subscribers).