Day: May 1, 2022

Yesterday I talked about the memory of youth sports. Today I’m going to spend ten minutes reflecting on the next step. My youngest turns 13 soon, and will be sliding into his 8th grade year come fall. We’ve officially ended his youth tackle career. So, now what? He has goals of his own. He wants to develop into a star hurdler and not only win the district, but hit the top of the world as #1 in the US in 75m hurdles. He has a shot as he’s a top 15 guy right now and he sucked (his words). What we’ve long talked about is this gap year being designed as a transition to High School level athleticism. That means designing a full-year plan to transition him to a player who can be starter at the next level. The bad news is: We are already behind schedule.

The first chance he gets to show his stuff is in the spring program, which starts basically at the beginning of April. This brings everything to a head at once. He runs the conference championship in hurdles two weeks after the program begins. So, I have 11 months left to get this kid right. So, that means that my last true gesture to his sports life as a coach/contributor is to get him trained up in the next 11. As we speak he’s at a camp with the Cardinals staff and the local high school staff trying to see where he is at in the larger pecking order.

So, what is the plan? I don’t know. I’ll be developing that plan over the next few weeks. All I know for sure is that it starts soon. Should be fun developing it as well.

I’ve reached that place in my mind where I only occasionally think about youth sports. I don’t long for being a part of it anymore but I do, once in a while, remember the excitement of the moment and the routine of getting up to get to the game and watching it all unfold. It was, in truth, a very long moment in time, and now that it is over I do get the occasional flashback. I still engage with sports at the HS level and I enjoy that. It is growth and it is different than the youth situation by far.

What triggered the thought today was being in the gym on the treadmill and noticing there was a USFL game on. The game was played in a near empty stadium, which prompted me to think, “youth games draw bigger crowds.” The rest is obvious. No, I did not check scores. I’m not that far gone anymore. I reflected. I thought about how far my kids have come. Then I turned my head slightly to the left to watch the screen playing Rambo Last Blood. That, dear reader, is a terrible bit of fiction. And now…

Some Thoughts:

1. Won’t be long before we start to trivialize what is a quite serious solar flare problem with some crappy made for TV movies and one errant blockbuster. Yeah, I might write a story that ends up being used for evil… The issue here is a concept called fast magnetic reconnection, which if properly harnessed could be the key to limitless energy. It is basically the real science behind an arc reactor, which MIT is legit trying to build, BTW. The problem with these outputs are that the sun is unpredictable — especially in regards to how powerful a flare will be and where that energy will be directed. We get hit wrong and it is a post-apocalypse in a heartbeat.