My son sent me a link to this article this morning, it comes from YAHOO! Sports:
If you want to be a CEO later, play sports now
Even though I had a reasonably good idea of where the article was headed before I clicked on the link, it still piqued my interest. Linkage is a fascinating topic for me, and all the more so when at least one end of the link is something I'm heavily involved in.
Let's clear up one matter from the beginning, though. The article does not end up saying what the headline says. The headline very clearly implies you can improve your odds for being a CEO later in life by playing sports now. That is nothing more than the old correlation = causation fallacy rearing its ugly head again.
The article very clearly steers away from that conclusion. I don't know that Abigail Hess warrants special commendation for steering clear of that particular shipwreck of logic, but at least she doesn't join vast segments of our population who should know better than to jump from correlation to causation.
In fact, she goes a step further and offers a few quite plausible explanations for why the correlation exists that do not involve sports participation playing the role of causation. Good for her.
The headline writer, however, was either aiming for clicks or doesn't have a very clear grasp on the notion that two things can be strongly correlated without one causing the other.
One thing Hess does say in the article is that several skills learned in sports transfer nicely to the setting of the corporate boardroom. I have no doubt they do. I did not need an article to tell me that, but Hess does a nice job of connecting the dots even so.
What I find more troubling is the implicit assumption that becoming a CEO is something we ought to pursue for its own sake, or prod our children to pursue. As I think about the multiplied hundreds of people I've become close acquaintances with over my life, very few are cut out for the role of CEO. All are cut out for some role, but precious few are cut out for that role.
That's a good thing, actually. I recall a saying from younger years of my life that went, "Too many chiefs; not enough Indians." I'm not certain if that phrase is politically correct enough for modern consumption, but it gets to the heart of an important truth very quickly nonetheless.
The implicit suggestion that you ought to become a CEO or somehow your life is less valuable than it could have been is a lot like the not-so-implicit suggestion that you've undersold yourself in life if you don't go to college.
Where do we get this idea that all the meaningful jobs in life involve a college education, and that somehow the most meaningful jobs of all involve becoming a CEO?
I see waves of entitlement crashing onto the shore even as I write those words.
Where I come from, all work honestly and diligently done is noble. The value of one who sits in a corporate boardroom in a suit with a price tag reaching into the thousands of dollars is neither less nor greater than the value of the one who fixes the brakes on my car in an oil-stained shirt. In fact, the latter individual is far more likely to have a more direct impact on my quality of life.
So, since this is a sports-oriented website and you didn't come here to read about corporate boardrooms or brake jobs, what does all this have to do with high school sports?
This. I'm pretty sure I am not interested in having someone come out for cross country next fall because she (or he) has aspirations of being a CEO later in life and sees the high school cross country team as an opportune place to pick up and hone a few skills.
You know what? Participating on a high school track or cross country team is a pretty decent end in and of itself. It doesn't have to be a purposeful stepping stone to something else. It will, by the very nature of things, end up being a stepping stone to lots of different things in life, but most of the destinations to which stepping stones lead come upon us unawares.
I might add, that's a highly freeing observation.
I never anticipated most of the turns my life has taken. In hindsight, I can see where my participation in high school sports both enabled and encouraged me to make life decisions I would have otherwise been much less prepared to make. But, I'm also pretty sure I would have forfeited much of the joy of high school sports had all the important decisions about sports been part of an elaborate calculus to take me to some sort of predetermined occupational end.
In short, high school sports taught me a whole lot about myself, much of it stuff I didn't even realize I wanted or needed to know before I went out for a sport. I went out for football, basketball, and track because the challenges of these activities sounded like a whole lot more fun than sitting around trying to figure out something to do.
And, I knew if I sat around too much my parents would find something for me to do that I was not nearly as interested in doing. Something like keeping Dad's garage immaculately clean on an every-Saturday kind of basis.
Through participation in sports, I learned a whole lot about myself--including the kind of challenges I find off-putting and the kind of challenges I embrace.
I didn't come to football or track with an agenda that hijacked the joy of the experience from me. I also didn't have an agenda with basketball, but I did learn rather quickly in that sport that I lack the requisite skills and so--with no preset agenda of corporate boardroom skills to amass--I bid high school basketball adieu and spent the next winter getting in better shape for track. Not because track held promise of CEO skills to be honed but because it was fun lining up against other boys my age and finding out who was fastest.
Along the way, I learned a whole lot of things about hard work, perseverance, and camaraderie that reward me even to this day. I've found much the same to be true of the young men and women I've had the honor of coaching these last 17 years. And I find no correlation whatsoever between their aspirations (or lack of same) to the corporate boardroom and the value of their contributions in life.