All hail the special teams hero, the lifeblood of everything we love about football
This case for fixing high school sports is actually an even better case for high school football.
Malcolm Gladwell had a take on the state of high school sports in his latest newsletter, so you know I had to take notice.
Gladwell’s main beef with high school sports is that it does a great job unlocking elite gears in top-performing athletes, but a poor job making sub-par ones feel like they belong:
Let’s start with this question: What are high school sports for?
I think most of us would give three answers to that:
To prepare those with elite ability for post-high school competition.
To provide an opportunity for students to experience the joy that comes from exercise and competition.
To lay down life-long habits of physical activity.
I think American high schools do a really good job with Number 1. I think they do a so-so job with Number 2, and because they do a so-so job with Number 2, they do a lousy job with Number 3.
The fundamental problem is that the first goal—to develop elite athletes—is in contradiction to the second two. To the extent that we cater to the 90th percentile, we make a sport psychologically forbidding to the 50th percentile. I mean, if your high school has four tennis players who have been honing their topspin forehands and kick-serves for 10 years, why would someone who grew up playing with their siblings on public courts on the weekends want to try out for the team? It would be an invitation to humiliation. And if we require everyone who wants to play tennis to do the kind of exhaustive preparation necessary to return 100-mph serves, then we’ve chased away anyone who needs to hold down an after-school job, whose parents can’t afford tennis camp, or who thinks there is more to life than hitting tennis balls over and over and over again.
I would add a fourth answer to that list — to get kids to appreciate being responsible and accountable to the success of something bigger than themselves. But these are all fair points.
However, Gladwell’s proposal for fixing this is told through the lens of cross-country running, a highly individualized sport. For the unfamiliar, a typical high school cross-country meet is scored similar to golf, in that the lowest points win. The higher you finish, the lower you score, and the lowest cumulative team score among the top five finishers wins. Gladwell essentially proposes expanding this from five to 20.
I’m not sure that’s an adequate solution. It might punish elite runners too much for things they don’t have much control over. But the whole thing unintentionally makes a great case for why more high school kids should go out for the football team.
Two words: Special teams.
Name me another sport where such a niche element can have such a massive impact on the game’s outcome. It’s been said that 90 percent of NFL games featuring a blocked punt are won by the blocking team. Placekicking wunderkind Justin Tucker sees maybe a dozen snaps a game, and he’ll never beat his quarterback Lamar Jackson in a footrace. But when there’s a tie game late, there’s nobody the Baltimore Ravens would rather have on the field.
Heck, think of how many would-be touchdowns Matthew Slater has prevented from even building momentum on the Gillette Stadium turf, just by sprinting downfield and expertly slipping free of the opposing team’s punt return coverage.
This is not an area of the game that requires 4.3 speed or Herculean strength. Just heart, grit, and the ability to follow one direction.
And in turn, this is where you can get the players at the end of the bench to feel appreciated and buy in to what you’re trying to do as a coach. That they’re not being asked to perfect a whip route makes them feel more confident about going out a dozen times a game to complete one very specific task that can make or break the game.
Take it from a guy who got his ass kicked on special teams a lot back in the day. Knowing your niche role has just as important an influence as the star player’s touchdown run breeds confidence, breeds swagger, and heightens your sense of responsibility.
All hail the special teams hero at the end of the bench. You are what makes America’s Game worth being America’s Obsession.