The standard for sports here at our school is held in the highest regard. Our sports have consistently won the Ozark Conference All-Sports Championship, an award given out to the school with the best overall sports program in the conference. With so much success and lots of talented players on our rosters, I often ask myself: How do I never hear about our good sports teams outside of a few social media posts and stories?
Students who do extraordinary things in school and in their athletics should be celebrated more, especially in the case of them doing well at the state or national level or when they make school history.
Now, I have to admit that I am an athlete who did break a school record recently. However, I don’t feel like my record fits into this story, because I got plenty of recognition and support from friends, family, and people within the school. I feel like my record is a bit of an outlier because more often than not, impressive athletic events like this fly under the radar.
To give an example, last year I knew our boys track relay made up of Trey Christian, Easton MacLachlan, Ben Musa, and Noah Harrell had gotten the school record, and I didn’t even hear about it until MacLachlan, who was a part of that team, told me about getting it.
“We didn’t get much if any recognition outside of a few teachers,” MacLachlan said.
I was incredibly disappointed that they didn’t receive much of the credit they deserve and wished that they got to have that experience. The track team works long and hard, and had been talking about getting the record all season, only to get it and the result be very underwhelming. This isn’t just for records either, as we have had multiple state qualifiers and district championships that rarely get acknowledged.
This was extremely prevalent last year and continued into this year as well. Our boy’s diver two years ago, Brett Smith placed second out of all divers in the state and got nothing for his hard work. The year after that we had a Female swimmer, Addy Moore, place sixth in both her individual events and only the team instagram made a post about it on social media, while the school page just reposted the event on their story. This simply isn’t enough for athletes who give everything to make their school and community proud, but never get the recognition they deserve.
What makes things even sadder for this year is that there were some reforms in place last year, but got thrown in the garbage this year. For example, last year we had a parade for all our fall sports who made state. This was a great way to get the word out about our athletes, and increase their support as they left to compete. However, for some reason this didn’t happen this year, which made me feel so bad for all my other peers who worked hard to experience recognition that never happened.
According to athletic director Scott Phillips, it’s a year to year basis and our school doesn’t do a parade unless multiple teams make it to state. The reasoning for this is that some teachers don’t like having class time taken away for a parade, but that’s not a great excuse. Is it really too much to ask of teachers to recognize their student athletes for a max of half an hour?
These are just a few examples that I have heard of but there can easily be more.
These two problems can be easily fixed. For state recognition, I think doing the parade again is a great first step. Like I said, it’s a great way to increase awareness of our sports and give our athletes the feeling of the school being behind them. After their performance, if they do well, I think their success should be recognized at the next assembly. This again allows for the whole school to get behind the team, and allows the athletes to feel that sense of pride.
For new records, just do the same thing. Acknowledge them during assemblies, let them have that experience, and leave it at that.
These proposed changes would fix this problem, and maybe increase the popularity of our smaller sports, because no matter how small, success should always be celebrated.
