Ever since I was five years old, I have been playing sports. Whether it was baseball, football or lacrosse, I was playing. Although I played pretty much my whole life, I never expected myself to play a sport in college, but here I am today playing lacrosse for Cabrini College.
Cabrini is known for dominating the Pennsylvania Athletic Conference and making five consecutive trips to the NCAA tournament, an invitation that only 16 teams in the entire country get at the end of every spring. It is a complete honor to play a sport in college because the talent is so great and your team is made up of people from all different areas of the country. With all this said, I still find high school sports as being more enjoyable and memorable due to a few factors that you do not usually receive at the college level.
In just my first year playing lacrosse at Cabrini, we played nationally-known and ranked teams such as Washington College, Cortland State, who was ranked number two in the nation, and Salisbury the team which won the Division III National Championship. Though the talent level is not as great in high school as it is in college, one of the main things I remember from high school was the rivalries that were formed.
Once you hit middle school in my area, for every sport, you play the same nine teams at least once per season because they were the teams that were in your league. Those same teams remain in your league even when you enter high school, thus creating great rivalries. By your senior year of high school, there is a possibility that you have played the same team and players at least seven times.
One of the great rivalries that my high school, Ridley High School, has is the annual Thanksgiving Day football game against our cross-town rivals Interboro. Every Thanksgiving for the past 40 years or so, Ridley and Interboro have clashed in front of crowds that fill both bleachers, line the fences around the fields, and even fill up the grass areas under the scoreboards. If you played football at my high school, there was no greater feeling than going out on the field on Thanksgiving and representing your school and your town. In high school you get to represent both your school and your town, whereas in college you represent just your institution. This is what makes high school sports so great.
Another reason that I feel high school sports is better than college is because you get to play in front of your family and friends all the time. I know that there are a few guys on my lacrosse team here at Cabrini whose relatives cannot come out and watch them play that often because they live too far away from campus. However, in high school, chances are that their family members and friends were at the majority of their games. I have the luxury of living near home so my family can come to my games, but other people aren’t as lucky.
Finally, I feel that playing a high school sport is so great just because you get to play with the people you grew up with. You are competing with your buddies, your best friends and people who are from your town. You are playing with the people you see in the hallways, the classrooms or when you go out at night. Participating in high school sports is a feeling and an experience that I don’t think you can get at the collegiate level.
Don’t get me wrong, playing a sport at the college level definitely have its advantages. As I said before, the competition level is much greater, you get to play teams that are nationally known, you meet new teammates and coaches and make new friends. But when all is said and done, I think that playing for your high school and representing your town and the people who live there gives you a feeling that you cannot get from playing a sport at the college level.
Posted to the web by Tim Hague
