You Can Teach A New Dog Old Tricks

Sports seem to evolve more and more as the years pass by. The crazy thing is we’ve noticed that just as much as sports regulations change, so has the culture between athletes. The question is, have all of these changes happened for the better or worse? Let’s analyze this a little further.
For example, grade-school athletes used to be held accountable for their efforts by their coaches and parents. A young athlete could lose a game and find themselves getting lectured by their mother or father about ways to improve their gameplay. Currently, we see more parents scolding coaches for poor play calling or not playing their child enough. Some of those discrepancies even end up in fist fights between adults, all the while, their child isn’t that talented in the sport they are playing, to begin with. That child then receives a participation trophy for the bare minimum of showing up and losing. This can mold a child into an adult that can’t take criticism and does not know how to lose. We see this the most in college athletes, who put more energy into posting their latest gameday drip when they should be shooting in the gym or watching the film because their team has yet to win a game in their current season. The motif is “As long as we look good, stats and execution of proper fundamentals do not matter as much.”
We miss the days when we could rattle off whole rosters of teams that worked together and were equally balanced in terms of talent. Players cared if someone else was lacking, but this difference is they helped each other get better for the goal of winning. We see now that often that players are more concerned with individual gameplay as opposed to team play, which can make a team suffer as a whole. Chemistry matters. The carelessness of one player can cause scouts to bypass a team completely, even a single player seen as a standout player if too many consistent mistakes are being made. Teamwork is sparse in these current days and that is a problem, fixable, but still a problem.
Sports are still extremely competitive today, and in some cases more so than they have been before. What has changed the most has not necessarily been athleticism but the moral mentality driving sports forward. If we can meet somewhere in the middle, we think the new school kids can learn a few lessons from the old school greats. If you want to be the next Kobe, Michael, Serena, or Tom you have to put in the work like them to achieve your goals. Cutting corners will only sell your coaches, team, and ultimately yourself short.