"Mathketball" and "Student-Athlete"

There is Math.

There is Basketball.

There is Mathketball.

There is Student.

There is Athlete.

There is Student-Athlete.

This is slightly laughable, seeing as this past week One Tree Hill used the term mathketball to describe what people who attend elitist elementary schools play at recess as opposed to basketball. But I would like to use it, here, as a way of describing the balance between math and basketball that person needs early on in life--and even extend that on to the word more well known: Student-Athlete. In high school, we develop life skills by playing sports--as well as in college. Sports are our extra-curriculars in high school that help make us diverse, and well-practiced in every-day aspects of life. We go to school for 6 hours a day, and we play our sports for two or three hours a day. We are student-athletes.

Yesterday,  the Associated Press released information that a high school basketball player from San Diego High School in San Diego, CA, by the name of Jeremy Tyler, is dropping out of his junior year of high school to play professional basketball in Europe.

Now, I have heard of many players skipping their last few years of college to go on to the NBA. Heck, even non-athletes skip their last few years of college to go professional--Bill Gates for example. But I question any student-athletes choice to leave high school.

In fact, even the NBA said has a rule that basically says, "Hey, kids don't drop out of high school to play pro ball with us, because we won't draft you until you are at least 19." 

At the high school level, you are still considered a young-adult. You are at time in your life when you are making decisions that will affect you for the rest of your life. Dropping out of high school prohibits you from going to college right away when you decide you want to go back to school. Going professional means never having the opportunity to play college ball, where most players acquire skills and show off to the professional level coaches in a pool of people that are also hoping to make it big one day. I can't even say how much it has been stressed in my life that being a student-athlete means being a student first and an athlete second. I understand that this could be different for a basketball player--seeing as neither of the sports that I played had professional sports, but should a junior in high school really be growing up so fast? Should athletic students really just become athletes before the age of 18 or 19? Even younger kids who go on to perform in the Olympics go through home-schooling.

Also, how will it feel years down the road to know you missed out on your senior season of basketball? Your high school graduation? Your high school senior week? What happens if in his first few months, or years, of going pro, he suffers a career-ending injury. What happens if his junior year of high school is the year that he has plateued. Going from high school to college is challenging enough as the pace of sports is just so much faster. I can't even imagine how much faster a professional basketball game moves in comparison to a high school game. What does it tell people who look up to him? 

Sometimes people ask me who I would sit down to eat lunch with, dead or alive, if I had a choice.

I think Jeremy Tyler would be my latest choice--however, I wouldn't want it to be for another ten or twenty years. I would only have one question for him:"Was it all worth it?"