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Jay Davis: End of season leaves hole in sports heart


By Jay Davis

It happens every year at this time. My two favorite sports come to an abrupt end at the same time when the World Series ends and the area’s high school football teams have to hang up their pads after the end of their respective playoff runs.
You may wonder how one sport with professional athletes and another with high school boys can be so intertwined in one man’s psyche, but in mine they are. I think it is the emotional investment.
Baseball is the sport of all sports, to me, because it is the game that is played with the most mental challenge. It is a game of mind over matter and matter over mind. It must be played with wisdom, but it must be a learned wisdom, because once the ball is pitched the mind needs to shut off and let the body take over. When baseball season ends, I am forced to go without baseball until the fall and winter turn into the green grasses of the next spring.
High school football is the ultimate amalgamation of athletes.
Sure, there will still be football. The state’s high school teams will play for a couple more weeks and I will follow them closely, including watching as much of the state championship games as possible. And of course NFL and college football games will still be around every weekend until early February. And when the Super Bowl is over, hey, pitchers and catchers report to camp the next week, the days are getting warmer, and baseball season is just around the corner.
But it is the Mobridge-Pollock Tigers and the area teams, especially the Herreid-Selby Area Wolverines, that I am emotionally invested in.
Yes, I will be wholeheartedly invested in the Lady Tigers and their postseason run; but there is still an empty space in my sports heart now that the football team is done for the year.
There is just something about high school football that grabs that sports heart of mine and tugs at it. In high school football, especially in rural America, the sport is played by kids who (although many don’t understand it) will never play the game again in their lives after that final game their senior year. It is played by some of the most talented and the least athletic young men in our schools. These young men invest their time, bodies, blood and emotions for that chance to go out and play the game. They hurt. They run until they can’t breath. They vomit. They ache. They need tape and they need bandages. They learn that getting hurt and getting injured are two entirely different things.
High school football is the game that needs, truly needs every player from the star quarterback to the 89-pound freshman. You see, just to practice and prepare for the next opponent, a coach needs 22 (at the minimum) players going at each other, playing just like it is already Friday night. Football players have to be prepared to get injured (by mid-season most will already be hurt) on Tuesday or Wednesday, because success takes that kind of investment.
Trust me, I was that player. I was the Redfield running back on Tuesday. I was the one who knew I would spend most of Friday night on the sideline, but if the team was going to win, I was going to have to give my all during the week. Coaches tell players, “Practice like you play.” That is more important in football than any other sport. If a team has to practice slow during the week, the players cannot play fast on the weekend.
That’s really why my sports world gets melancholy when our Tigers are at the end of another season. It’s not because they were beaten and there will be no more games. It is because I know exactly the kind of commitment our young men just gave us for three months.

 

 

The blocking sled sits silent on an empty practice field since the Mobridge-Pollock Tigers football season has come to an end.

The blocking sled sits silent on an empty practice field since the Mobridge-Pollock Tigers football season has come to an end.

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