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Reggie Brooks Sportscity Blog
What Do Brittany Spears & High School Football Have In Common?
Written by Reggie Brooks on January, 8th 2008
What do high school football and Brittany Spears have in common? They both suffer from overexposure. In my estimation, we have a giant leap into the information age to thank for that. Don’t get me wrong; technology can be a very good thing. It has been paying the bills in my household since I left the NFL, but there is something to be said for balancing academic necessity, athletic pursuits and a little personal down time which seems to be in short supply for four and five-star prospects. Gone are the days when coaches sent telegrams to ‘blue-chip’ players updating them on how their college seasons were going and enter IM, text messaging and emails where real-time information is sent on the progress of a game being televised on a national network, or better yet a cable network.
Depending on the time of the year and how many colleges are interested, those instant contacts can be relentless. Gone are the local All-star games where the best from the north side of town played the south side’s best in lieu of a nationally televised All-star game in which the best players from the East coast of the United States go head-to-head with the elite of the West coast of the United States. Local newspaper reporters have been replaced by national recruiting analysts that utilize websites like Rivals.com and Scout.com.
Forget going to your local college for a football camp if you want to be considered for a top tier Division I-A university or college. You better hope you’ve impressed your high school coach enough for him to write a recommendation for you to attend a Nike or an Adidas camp. At some point you have to ask, is this a good thing and if it is, who is getting the lion share of the benefits of all this instant information?
My father taught me everything I know about football. He was the first four letter man at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in almost every “lesson” I remember him comparing football circa 1944 to my generation of football players. The leap from his era to mine and from my era to this current era seems almost baffling.
I will give you that the stakes are higher now. There is definitely more money to gain or lose in this new millennium and that may be what is at the root of the need for reaching players earlier and more often. But the real cost to the student-athlete is the threat of imbalance. Between the IM’s, text messages, emails, camps, combines, workouts and campus visits a player has to manage a more rigorous academic course load and understand the importance of personal down time.
I was pretty lucky. I only worried about phone calls from college coaches and maybe the local newspaper reporter. My Mama was my caller ID. She made sure they called at a decent hour or they didn’t speak to me. I didn’t worry about my quote showing up published nationally on ESPN.com or Sports Illustrated.com…well at least not as a high school football player.