Much like Amie Creagh, Ginsburg and others also question the increasing number of sports tournaments and showcases. They’ve proliferated because they make their organizers money and ease life for college scouts, who can now evaluate thousands of talented prospects at a few events, rather than attending lots of high school games. Private teams and tournaments increase pressure on players to stick to one sport all year and to overtrain, which Ginsburg says promotes burnout and repetitivestrain injuries. Chip Davis notes that parents who have spent countless weekends and thousands of dollars shuttling their children to travel games and tournaments often arrive in the Deerfield Admission Office with a “rate of return” attitude: They expect an advantage when it comes to college admissions. Davis’ predecessor, Jim Lindsay ’70, says that when he was the head coach of boys varsity hockey, some parents would try to negotiate with him: “‘The Exeter coach says my child will play on the first line and the power play. What can you offer?’” Lindsay had a stock answer: “I don’t need chiefs. I need warriors. I need players who are going to say to me, ‘Where do you want me, Coach? How can I help the team?’” The kids, he says, got it. The parents—not so much. Lindsay was trying to uphold Deerfield’s values, but he risked losing “market share” to a rival school, and losing games. There have also been some strange shifts in Deerfield’s athletics program. Some varsity sports, such as wrestling and softball, have lost favor in the wider world or with college admissions officers, and thus at Deerfield struggle to attract full squads. The lacrosse player who used to wrestle in the winter now feels pressure to look good for scouts at a spring tournament, so he wants to spend the winter season in the weight room rather than on the wrestling mat. And varsity coaches in what Davis calls “high visibility” or “high volume” sports such as lacrosse and soccer face more pressure as well—to win games so they can attract great specialists, to recruit more in order to compete with Deerfield’s peer schools, some of which throw far more money at this. Whereas Deerfield still uses coaches who also know students in the classroom because they’re teachers as well, Choate, for instance, has a fulltime basketball coach. The pressure is on to replicate the kinds of athletic programs you now see at the collegiate level, with recruited players, former-professional coaches, and expensive facilities. Davis resists this as much as he can, but “increasingly,” he says, “we are running a diet version of a Division-three college program.”
A Competitive Edge Back in the Reunion forum, when an alumnus tells Davis that he ought to require students to play multiple sports at Deerfield, Davis looks wistful. “You’re preaching to the choir,” he says, “believe me.” That’s in part because students who
play two or three varsity sports make it easier for Davis and his coaches to field teams against bigger rivals. He also believes that playing multiple sports teaches you the vital life lesson of humility: Even if you’re a starter on one team, you might learn what it’s like to be a bench-warmer on another, and thus how your bench-warming teammates might feel. That’s a lesson that’s hard to get anywhere else. Jim Lindsay says he used to tell his players, “You’re going to be a better hockey player for me if you play football or soccer in the fall rather than lift weights and skate one day a week.” Those other sports teach you physical skills, Lindsay says. “The hockey player who plays football is going to know how to check and leverage balance and all those transfer skills. The quarterback who plays point guard learns to see the floor, which helps in football.” Best of all, though, Lindsay says, playing other sports teaches psychological skills. “You have to learn how to play hard, fight back from adversity, not give up. And I don’t think you get that playing the same sport year round, when only a small sliver of it is highly competitive. The first few weeks of hockey season, the kids who played soccer in the fall might be rusty at skating, but they competed like hell. And that’s the kid you want on the ice in the final minutes of the third period.” Richard Ginsburg agrees. “I’ve been working with kids at Harvard since 2000,” he says, “and in my experience the kids who have specialized in one sport, doing travel-team leagues and flying around the country to tournaments, don’t fare as well as the kids who are working at a job, playing multiple sports, and have been humbled in their life. Some of these specialized kids can’t function when they get to a competitive level where they’re on the bench.” And what happens, he asks, to the specialized athlete who blows out a knee, or loses their love of the game? A white-haired alumnus at the “Deerfield Athletics: Then and Now” Reunion forum asked Davis, “When we were here we all had to play a sport every season. Would you bring that back?” “I can’t,” Davis said. Agreed a former Deerfield faculty member in the audience, “It’s a new world.” “Well then,” the alumnus countered, “You should shape it.” That’s the dependent variable question: Can one school really shape such enormous social forces? Last year an athletics task force made specific suggestions intended to both increase athletic participation at Deerfield and ease some of the burden on coaches. Some of the task force’s recommendations signaled compromise—some might even call it a “win-win” situation; for instance, that lacrosse player who wants to get ready for his spring season by lifting weights during winter term is now free to do so . . . if he agrees to play a different sport, maybe even one he hasn’t tried before, during the fall season. Davis hopes that the specialists, thanks to these changes, “will leave here more well-rounded.”
deerfield.edu
23