Torres Tackles: Multi-sport athletes

You’ve heard it before, “you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

How about, “you can’t get a home run if you don’t swing.”

You can find endless iterations of that metaphor but it all boils down to the fact that you can’t succeed if you don’t try. That is important in not only sports but in life as well.

Growing up, math was my thing. I aced exams from grade school through high school while also hating English class at the same time. I can solve algebraic problems or explain trigonometry. But poetry? Shakespeare? No thank you.

One of my high school teachers convinced me that I’d be a great computer scientist. I looked up the salary one day, saw that I can make $80,000 a year and knew that’s where I wanted to be.

So I went to college with a computer science major and eventually double majored in mathematics. But even though I never liked English class, I wrote on the side on a blog, because I really love sports. More importantly, I love talking about sports. And if I’m not around someone to talk about it, I write.

One semester I took essay writing as an elective. It didn’t fit any criteria toward my computer science degree but I figured it would help me out with my sports writing, even if I just considered it a hobby.

Side note: it helps that I wasn’t really paying for school at the time (trust me, those student loans came later in my college career and yes they were a pain) and it was also a writing intensive class, so technically it fit somewhere in my transcript.

Nonetheless here I was, a computer science major taking a writing class for some blog.

That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

I had a great professor, the course improved my writing and it gave me the confidence to write even more. And after a couple failed semesters of trying to continue computer science I was convinced that writing was the way to go. I changed majors, graduated college and ended up here in Gonzales writing sports for the Inquirer.

I went from a math freak (I haven’t lost it, by the way. I’m more than capable of throwing down when it comes to math. Yes, that sounded as nerdy as I hoped it did) to reading and writing on a daily basis.

Funny how that works out.

So what does that all have to do with sports?

Well in this space I have tried to tie in a story line to tonight’s game and write a column about it. Last week it was about rivalries.

But this week we’re facing a Navarro team, a top-playoff contending squad filled with players who have been trained under the tutelage of the almighty Slot-T offense since they learned how to walk. Understanding that I have been here in Gonzales for a little over two years in a half, my best guess as to how those athletes over in Geronimo are so well versed in the offense is because of summer camps and going through the head coach’s system throughout junior high and high school.

But what happens when you get tired of doing the same thing over and over again.

To clarify, I haven’t talked to anybody from the Navarro coaching staff, so I have absolutely no knowledge of their system. But what I do know is fatigue is a real thing that happens in sports and the real world. You can get burnt out.

Not only that, if you get stuck playing a specific position in a specific sport, you will never know if you can excel at something completely different.

Talking to Apaches’ athletic director and head football coach Kodi Crane, one of the biggest keys to a successful program that he’s harped on is the idea of trusting the system in place.

When listening to the coach, the system doesn’t harp on specialization. Rather, it’s about being well versed in multiple areas involving multiple sports. It goes without saying but Crane wants his athletes to play as many sports as they can, not just stick with one.

The term Jack-of-all-trades, master of none carries a bad connotation and I get it. You want to be great at something, not good at a couple of things. But on the flip side, if you concentrate on one thing, for instance, playing linebacker, and you find out you’re not great at that, how are you to know that you’re a great second baseman if you haven’t tried?

That applies to the world outside of sports as well, as I’ve explained in my example. Had I not tried that elective class, I might be miserable right now in a low-end computer job doing below-average work because I didn’t expand my horizons.

For young athletes, why be stuck in one sport when you have the opportunity to play them all?

“Whenever I talk to a kid, privately or talk to a group of people, I tell kids this: Why in the world would you close a door in your life at 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, whatever, that might reopen, might not and you never know what that door might lead to,” Crane said. “Keep every door and every possibility open, not only in athletics but in your life as well.”

According to a May 4 report by Danielle Elliot from Yahoo! of the 256 players drafted in the 2015 NFL Draft, 224 played multiple sports. That’s 87.5 percent of all draftees.

In the first round alone, 28 of the 32 picks were multi-sport athletes, including Jameis Winston himself.

When we were young, it was most likely our parents who signed us up for sports that we may or may not have liked.

When I played little league, it wasn’t because love of the game. It was because my parents paid a certain amount of money to sign me up. I remember showing some level of interest but honestly if they wanted me to play (or not play) a sport, they can do so pretty much without my consent.

Thankfully they asked if I wanted to continue to play and eventually I decided my sports career should end at age 12. Sure, I regret not playing more sports as I went along school but what I don’t regret is the freedom I was given to pursue (or not pursue) a sport or hobby.

One of the questions I asked Crane this week was on how important is it to have young athletes try out different things.

“I think it’s important for a young kid to have a little time away,” Crane said of one-sport athletes. “Number one, I don’t want them to get burnt out, and I say this for every sport, I don’t want a football kid to get burnt out on football playing it year round, I don’t want a basketball kid to get burnt out on basketball playing it year round and I want them to open every door in their life.”

Even if they find out that they aren’t necessarily good at these other sports, there are still lessons to be learned that can’t be reproduced in the weight room.

“We want our kids to be in pressure situations in other sports,” Crane said. “Offseason, no matter what we do, there will be no popcorn popping, there will be cheerleaders and no fans there. And so for one of our kids to be at the free-throw line with one second left down one point, we can’t reproduce that in the offseason.”

“Same thing whenever you are pitching a baseball game and it is bottom of the seventh with two outs,” he continued. “You’re on an island and it’s you against the batter and we can’t reproduce that.”

Playing multiple sports has its benefits. You never know what you’ll be good at if you don’t try.

You miss all the shots you don’t take, as they say. Why not try one from deep to see if it’ll hit?