Amaateur Athletics

With the NCAA men’s basketball tournament weeks away, those wonderfully hypocritical commercials should start running soon, about all the unseen athletes out there.  It’s true, the amateur ideal thrives outside the spotlight, and not at all what March Madness has come to stand for.  Isn’t that right, Coach Pitino?

Here’s a side of NCAA sports you won’t see at bracket time.  Clare spent last weekend in and around Miami with her Valpo team at their first tournament—five games in three days, look out the window on takeoff and landing if you want to see the ocean.  My daughter learned—and can now teach—lessons on the movement of equipment and bodies under chaotic conditions that the cadets at West Point and Annapolis would do well to absorb.

While Clare was getting this up-close view of the coach’s life (as in it’s snowed, and now we have to take the bus back to ever-icy Indiana), the Syracuse softball team tweeted out a picture that they’re ready for the new season.  Of course, it was an indoor shot, given that the temperature over the weekend in beautiful Syracuse registered a brisk thirteen below.  That reminded me of all those teams we’d play in Florida, from Maine and upstate New York.  Yup, those are some of the places where the NCAA ideal of amateurism thrives, and will never see the light of national television cameras for anything other than basketball.