Athletics Largely Shape Who We Are

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: The licensed establishment known as organized athletics serves us well in two important areas:

• It is a great training ground to find out who you are, what you are made of, and what you’re capable of.
• It provides you with exposure to an environment from which to learn the human interaction skills necessary to be confident and successful in your life.

Organized sports, particularly in high school and at the major college level, are also an exercise in submission to social control. Within this environment, rules, conformity, plays, media, expectation, measurement, referees and pressure all conspire to make you an integral part of the team, like it or not.

By contrast, unorganized sports like pick-up ball, four-square, hopscotch, or the other playground sports we all grew up on, provided our most important life lessons. First and foremost, unorganized sports taught us a great deal about collective governance and constant conflict resolution. Pick-up ball harks back to a traditional time when kids weren’t scheduled into play dates or stashed with adult supervision, but instead made their way to the park on their own, picked teams, had fun, and sorted it all out… conflicts, disagreements, start and stop times, rules, team selections, and who was out and who was safe. It was on the playground where most athletes molded their athlete DNA and grew up along the way.