By PETER LEBLANC, Telegraph Staff
It’s spring. You can see the green grass that your high school-aged child is playing soccer on. You’re sitting, watching every minute of that game. Moments ago, your child assisted on a goal just before the half.
You’re cheering and jeering, but most of the time you’re just happy that the environment you’re in has a pleasing 72-degree feel to it. After all, winter’s not that far in the past.
You’re out of work early and it’s Friday, you’ll probably have some post-game pizza then embark on whatever weekend plans you have. What could be better?
It’s halftime now, and you stand up from the pleather-bound office chair in front of your home computer to get a frosty beverage.
Confused yet? While there’s no way to accurately predict the direction high school athletics will go in the next 30 years, it’s entirely possible that you could be watching little Johnny or Sally play their favorite sport on a live Internet Webcast, brought to you from an indoor facility with real, live grass and not even leave your perfectly temperature-controlled home office.
In fact, “going” to work might be a little stretch, seeing as though you work from home most days. While you still have to bring home the proverbial bacon, telecommuting allows you to dial up high school games on the Web, even the state snowboarding and bowling championships.
You don’t really think about it anymore because the Webcasts have been going on for at least 15 years now, when the local newspaper product teamed up with the high school audio/video departments to bring you this feature.
The term “newspaper” doesn’t even have the same meaning. Sure, you get some sort of paper product delivered to your house, but it’s morphed into a sort of niche publication and really just serves as an advertisement and directory for that company’s news-gathering Internet product and all of its other services – much like providing Johnny and Sally’s soccer game.
It’s easy, cool and fun, and what was merely a thought in the late 1990s and started becoming feasible a decade later, is now old hat.
Demise of high school sports?
A day in the life? Who knows. But with technology and the world in general morphing by the second, anything can happen 30 years from now, right?
“I bet you (high school sports) doesn’t exist,” Bishop Guertin High School athletic director Andy Krahling said. “I think communities will get sick of funding it, though it’s different for private schools (like BG). Not to be a downer, but it’s very, very expensive to do a lot of things. It’s difficult for many communities to find programs or teachers’ salaries.”
So Krahling’s crystal ball is a little gloomier than others, but he’s not necessarily calling for the end of athletics. Instead, private programs like AAU or Junior Olympics will thrive.
“We’re competing with AAU now,” Krahling said.
If parental involvement continues to grow fiscally and physically – both in positive and negative manners – they will probably want their child to play on a consistent basis whether they’re good players or not. One way to ensure that might be paying private clubs instead of attempting to lobby the local high school coach, which rarely proves fruitful.
Jim Desmarais, executive director of the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association, joked that he tries to just worry about what happens this afternoon, but he also has some concerns about the future, though not as severe as Krahling’s.
“I think you’re going to see a strong interest in sports at the high school level,” Desmarais said.
But it will be different. Desmarais agrees private clubs could have an effect.
“They may well grow and strengthen as time goes on,” he said. “I hope that wouldn’t take away from high school programs. There are different goals with private clubs.”
Those goals are mostly to help an athlete excel at a single sport and promote that athlete by going to popular regional and national tournaments. While Desmarais didn’t put that ideal down, instead noting that the NHIAA simply has different goals atop its to-do list such as teaching values and things “other than winning and losing.”
“I think there are a lot of things tugging at this,” he said.
Just recently Desmarais received a call from a parent complaining about unfair amounts of playing time. Already, this parent had paid a user fee that some of New Hampshire’s schools have implemented to help subsidize athletics.
“I think that with shrinking school budgets and the way schools are being funded by the state you’re going to see (user fees and parental complaints), but I see a shining star in corporate sponsorships,” he said.
Desmarais said getting corporate dollars is a front-burner issue now, but could very well be the main or only funding for high school sports in the decades to come. What would the companies get? That’s a discussion for another time, but Desmarais didn’t rule out ideas such as teams wearing the equivalent of mini-billboards on their backs. Don’t forget rights to selling products (soda?) at the school and wallpapering ads everywhere.
Media blitz
“The media is kind of crazy now,” said Dan Morse, editor of the cutting-edge mchenrycountysports.com Web site that covers the preps unlike any other media outlet in the nation. “The Web offers publishing space for people who wouldn’t normally publish. I hate to say wild, wild west, but . . .”
Morse’s site, a three-person operation affiliated with the Northwest Herald newspaper 45 minutes outside of Chicago, was launched in August 2004 and features highlight reels from high school games complete with stat overlays and even set to music. There are many interactive things to do, post-game video interviews with coaches and even round-table discussions with student-athletes. Poll questions, live game updates and pages for each of the high schools they cover can also be seen with little tricks like school fight songs soon to bless the ears of site visitors.
In Morse’s mind, and many others’, this is as close to the future as it comes.
“These kids are right there on the cutting edge,” Morse said. “Technology offers a lot of good and a lot of bad.”
Maybe even a little sensory overload or the student-athletes getting a little full of themselves after seeing a dunk-infested highlight reel featuring themselves.
Nevertheless, Morse’s brand new product is booming, and who knows where it’ll lead?
“It’s tough to say,” he said. “Technology expands exponentially. It’s tough for us to look 10 or 15 years ahead, never mind 30.
“We might see games Webcast right from the site,” he continued.
That would open up questions such as whether the schools would mind possible reductions in gate receipts and if Webcasters would have to pay for broadcast rights.
“The stars would have to be lined up,” Morse said. “You’d have to have an athletic director who’s willing to take a chance.
“It’s an on-demand world,” Morse continued.
Enter the television giants, such as Comcast and its CN8 regional cable network, which currently spans from New England to Maryland and already covers a fair share of prep sports.
“I think high school sports is something people care about,” CN8 spokesperson Robin Moleux said. “With TV, anything is possible.”
CN8 expanded its high school coverage two years ago after getting into the New England region and already streams its coverage simultaneously online while it’s being broadcast on conventional television. On top of that, its On Demand feature allows viewers to pull it up out of storage from their television sets to view whenever they want thanks to newer digital technology.
When things come about with professional sports, it’s easy to see a trickle-down to college and eventually to the prep level. With ESPN’s launch of ESPNU, a new round-the-clock venture that will show strictly college programming, it’s not out of realm of possibilities that an ESPNHS-like station could evolve.
Desmarais has seen a dramatic increase in coverage of high school events since he began working with the NHIAA in the early 1980s, and knows it’s possible to have two television stations, five newspaper writers, three photographers and even a radio outlet or two at big games. But decades from now, if the demand for more coverage continues, he and people like Bishop Guertin’s Krahling don’t doubt that entire press rows will need to be set up at basketball games for larger media masses.
“We have some big plans laid out,” Morse said. “The ideas are there. I think it’s mostly exhilarating.”
Bigger, stronger, legal?
The Dallas Morning News’ recent investigation into the use of steroids by Heritage High School student-athletes in Texas doesn’t bode well for administrators trying to keep ahead of the curve.
Jerry Holland, who owns Performance Rehab with his wife, Michele, is a certified athletic trainer, certified strength and conditioning trainer and registered therapist that works with Nashua High School North and South, Londonderry and BG. While Holland doesn’t ultimately predict the end of high school sports as we know it, the situation might not get any better.
“There’ll always be some sort of supplement,” he said. “They’ll just make it harder to detect. There’ll be pharmacological advances.”
And those nine student-athletes caught for steroid use in Texas?
“I’ll bet there are more than just nine. I’ve had my suspicions on some New Hampshire players. You’re always going to have cheating whether it’s taxes or athletics. You’re always going to have Jose Cansecos,” said Holland, referring to the former Major League Baseball player whose recently published book details his admitted steroid use.
With more media coverage will come the increased pressure to perform for parents, friends, casual viewers and college recruiters.
“My guess is we’d probably be on the lookout for chemicals,” Krahling said. “I don’t think it’s necessarily scary, but people will have to look at themselves in the mirror.”
Holland is confident, however that the number of cheaters won’t outweigh the number of kids doing things right.
“I would be willing to bet that 30 years from now we’d have a better appreciation for nutrition,” he said. Better eating habits, more scientific approaches to weight training and, of course, better surgeries and rehabilitation plans.
Holland doesn’t even rule out more Jetsons-like approaches to helping high school student-athletes like microchip implants, allowing doctors to quickly scan a patient – much like a grocery store scans your canned yams – for history, allergies and the like. How about implants making kids jump higher and run faster?
“That wouldn’t totally shock me,” he said. “Nothing would really shock me.”
Whether that would be legal or not is simply conjecture, but people like mchenrycountysports.com’s Morse believes the quality of high school sports is going to increase due in part to specialization.
“There’s going to be an increase in athletic IQ,” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to get much bigger or stronger, but . . . the more kids are exposed to specialization, they’re going to be exposed to more (theory and education) younger. The quality is going to increase.”
New landscape
Desmarais envisions snowboarding, bowling, girls ice hockey and even rowing becoming sports in states like New Hampshire in the next 30 years, but does that put some existing sports in peril? It depends on who you ask.
BG’s Krahling said sports such as wrestling and gymnastics are already seeing a dip in participation levels.
“But, I think for awhile field hockey took it on the chin but never went away,” he said. “You just can’t predict what can happen.”
To a point, Desmarais agrees.
“If you asked me 20 years ago about playing lacrosse, I wouldn’t know how to spell the word,” he said. “Who ever thought.”
Asked for one more look into his crystal ball, Desmarais thought for a moment. He doesn’t envision soccer players scooting around the pitch on floating disks or moving basketball hoops. Just a lot of questions.
“I see that there’s going to be a lot of work as sports continue to explode in this state,” he said. “Who knows what will happen to our world in 30 years – war or terrorism could change it all.”
“I think sports will always survive,” Krahling said. “I just don’t know about whether or not (it will look like it does today).”
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