High school athletics facing sportsmanship crossroads

Elliot Hopkins has centered his career around a term he feels should embody high school sports.

For more than a quarter-century, he has worked on initiatives around the country to promote it at games. Go to your local one, though, and you might not see it.

“Sportsmanship is not sexy,” says Hopkins, director of student services for the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS).

“Strangely enough,” he says, “this is why sportsmanship really matters: Some people just don’t get it because of what they see at other levels or schools in their state or conference. Some parents are bad actors. And then the kids get the same vibe, and then they carry it out into the field. And then you mix in some coaches who don’t understand that education-based sports is just that: Education-based.”

Witness a March basketball playoff game between two Pennsylvania schools – Meadville and Uniontown. A technical foul on the court led to a brawl in the stands among adults. It spilled onto the court. Arrests were made and fans were led off in handcuffs.

As spring sports conclude their postseasons through the end of May and into June, state associations and administrators hold their breath. On-campus incidents like this not only occur with frightening regularity, but they sharply distort the deep-rooted message that is the backbone of high school sports.

“People immediately think our role is to get students effective for the next level, which is college or major league baseball,” Hopkins says. “It’s quite the opposite. We believe what we do makes a young person a better human being and a better contributor to society.”

Instead, emotion, aggression and me-first aggrandizement can interlock into an ugly mess with so much seemingly on the line: NIL money, next-level participation, pay-for-play opportunities on travel teams and social media reputations.

How can more kids and parents be better examples and better understand the core values of school-based sports? USA Sports shares perspective from Hopkins’ decades-long career and from coaches and leaders who spoke at March’s Project Play Summit in Berkeley, California, about the crossroads high school athletics faces.

‘One of the last free options’: High school sports connects communities and can save lives

The goal of Project Play, a national initiative from the Aspen Institute, is to build healthy communities for kids of all ages, races and economic backgrounds through sports. We can think of high school athletics in a similar fashion.

Studies have connected them with higher attendance and academic achievement. But prep sports also cuts to the core of our being and sense of belonging.

It’s a place where we band together to face our most intense rivals, but also one where we shake their hands afterward and where our parents cheerfully sell them and their supporters tickets and hot dogs.

Go to rural Virginia, though, and you find moms and dads selling cupcakes and donuts to pay for referees jerseys and lining materials for the field. For every team with million dollar donors to help build fields, there are many others who play at city or regional parks. They depend on the experience.

“School-based athletics is one of the last free options to participate,” says Franky Navarro, California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) commissioner of Oakland, California. It’s a city with a sharp divide in socioeconomic status between zip codes.

“It provides opportunity for students,” he says. “It builds community and depending on where you’re at, it can also serve as violence prevention.”

According to the most recent survey results from the NFHS, high school sports have more than 8 million participants, a rise from 444,248 since the coronavirus pandemic, an especially dark period for children. During the first 10 months of COVID, 5,568 youth between the ages of 5 and 24 died by suicide, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“We had kids taking their own lives because they can’t see their teammates,” Hopkins says. “We had kids not eating as well as they normally do because, in some cases, they get their best meals when they go to school (and) their best adult supervision is when they have coaches around them.

“Ninety-five percent of our kids, if not a higher number, when they hang up their high school jersey, they’re done. They’re not going on to the next level. They’re not going to play in college. They’re just gonna be regular people. How have we impacted them for four years?”

‘Where were the adults?’ High school sports are a chance for us to set better examples

We play in front of people we might run into at the grocery store, mall or post office. We see teachers and local Little Leaguers in the bleachers much more often than college coaches.

It can be an opportunity to show how much we have grown, but also how far we have to go.

“What’s going on in high school is a microcosm of what’s going on in society,” Hopkins says. “We see people cheating. There are fights at games (at the) college and professional level. That’s what our kids see, and that’s what they want to mirror. A prominent basketball player pushes somebody because of a hard foul, that gives credence. It’s like a dog whistle that tells some kids they can do the same thing – because he does it, it must be OK. And it’s not OK. We don’t do a good enough job to hone in on that.”

These games center around raw emotion that tests human sensibility. Taunts and gestures can begin on social media earlier in the week, heightening everyone’s awareness of what’s ahead, “so come Friday night football, there’s gonna be a fight in the stands,” Hopkins says.

He says in recent years, students in Indianapolis have shown up for baseball games against a Jewish school with swastikas on their cheeks, while others in New Mexico have thrown tortillas at a team comprised of predominantly Native American players. A mostly white team in Coronado, California, was stripped of a regional championship when spectators behaved similarly against Latino players.

“Where were the adults?” Hopkins say. “Who thought that’d be funny or would be a good idea? And you wonder why the first hard foul or that first pitch is up near the chin of somebody.”

A number of states, including Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii and Virginia, have adopted zero tolerance policies, resulting in immediate ejection and further discipline against hate speech directed at sex, race, religion, creed, age, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, marital or parental status, sexual orientation or disability.

All 51 high school associations, including the District of Columbia, have policies for curbing poor spectator behavior in general.

In California, two former NBA players, Robert Horry and Matt Barnes, were ejected from their sons’ games for yelling at officials in the last two years. Video showed Horry shouting, “Hey ref … you suck!” while Barnes confronted a student broadcaster for the other team.

The CIF recently instituted two bylaws: adult spectators must stay away for three games if ejected; and if you assault a game official you’re done attending California high school sports.

“It’s sad that we had to put them in place,” says Ron Nocetti, the CIF’s executive director. “And we literally had people say, ‘Well, that’s not fair.’ I mean, wait, you’re telling me that you can go and physically assault someone in a parking lot, which we saw happen after a baseball game, and you think you have the right to then come back to our events?’

“It’s also why we talked about wanting to get more involved in sports at the younger ages. Just look at all the videos you see out there. There’s referees literally been chased around basketball courts after games. I mean, that’s how sad it has gotten.”

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‘Bigger than yourself’: High school sports can help us discover who we are

The CIF is only authorized to govern ninth through 12th grade athletics, but Nocetti wants to see sports played at every middle school in California. That way, affiliated high schools could partner with them and send their players in to mentor and coach.

“Then these students are looking up to those students,” he says.

Seated with him on stage at Project Play was former University of California soccer player Ari Manrique, who has coached girls at Berkeley High.

Manrique was a star who travelled as a member of the U.S. national team at the U-15, U-16 and U-17 levels. But at the end of her career at Cal, she had to medically retire and found herself using her psychology coursework to fully understand her younger athletes.

Some days, she says, she went in with a full practice plan but needed to lighten it up after her players were dragging from, say, a chemistry test.

“It’s not always gonna be ‘Go, go, go,’ ” she says. “It’s hard to be a teenager and I think teenagers are feeling that in the ever-changing world that we have – with social media and everything else. Students who already have so much in the education space, now you’re asked me to practice after class? Like, ‘No, no way.’ And they kind of can get lost in this.

“I was able to find my love for the sport again in a tough time and see the girls go from maybe deciding to quit after freshman year to seeing them at senior day, they’ve made it all the way through. And they have no plans of playing in college, but they have a nice group of friends. They got something out of it. They learned. They became a better person because of it.”

She also has perhaps realized that along her own elite path, taking online courses away form the traditional high school setting for three years, she had missed out.

“I think there’s something to be said about playing a high school sport, being a part of something bigger than yourself,” she says.

During an interview earlier this year, USA TODAY Sports asked Luis Robles, a former USMNT goalie and the technical director of MLS NEXT, if he encouraged teens within his youth soccer organization to play the sport in high school. MLS NEXT only recently added a tier that accommodates a prep schedule.

“I would stop short of encourage; it’s just allowed,” Robles said. “I think what we encourage is them to identify the best environment possible for them to develop. And what we’ve identified as what would be the best environment is where are the best coaches? And if you’re under that coach for as long as possible, and you’re competing with the best possible competition that aids your development.”

Hopkins would argue that travel coaches who ask players to skip high school sports for their team have an educational obligation, too.

“I’m not saying those opportunities aren’t good for children,” he says. “You’ve got to finish the sentence. They also have to mirror what we’re trying to teach because if they never get to play at the high school level, and they just run their career in youth sports and travel ball and things like that, they have to make sure those kids are ready for life as well.”

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High school sports is now about NIL; what about sportsmanship?

It has all suddenly become much more of a business. Navarro, the CIF Oakland section commissioner, has found himself asking former collegiate athletes in his office to help students figure out the landscape of Name, Image and Likeness.

NIL has exploded into a money-making opportunity. High school athletes, depending on their state, can create their own brand and try to profit off of it.

The chances increase when they get to college, especially if they are top recruits.

“What happens if you get a deal, what do you do?” Navarro says. “I think for many of our students that never have had the opportunity to earn income, it becomes a challenge when they do arrive at a college level and are beginning to earn.”

Hopkins, 67, who played on the defensive line at Wake Forest from 1975 to 1979, doesn’t see the system as sustainable.

“You just can’t keep doing this long term, because what happens is you and I are teammates and you get a bigger deal than I am, but I’m blocking for you,” he says. “I’m like, ‘What the heck? You wouldn’t be getting any money if I didn’t block for you. I need more money so you can do your job,’ and the whole locker room becomes frazzled, and then no one trusts each other, no one wants to work for each other. They’re out for themselves.”

To him, NIL is another disruptive force to that magic “s” word he and NFHS are holding up these days like a placard.

“Sportsmanship is a demonstration of fair play, respect and gracious behavior,” he says. “We have not seen a lot of stories of that. And it’s not a political thing. It’s just where we are right now as a country, and we need to get back to the middle, because if you raise a bunch of kids who don’t have fair play, respect or gracious behavior, we’re going to end up raising and allowing those kids to grow up having kids with little bit of a different attitude, and that’s gonna to kill the sport.

“And you can fill in the blank of whatever sport it is.”

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com