Prep sports are in a giant, tangled knot
Let me tell you a story. Bear with me here as I lay it out. There’s a teenage boy at the center of this tale. A boy whose heart aches.
He’s pained because he’s been pleading with his parents for months to attend his prom. But, time and again, he’s been rebuked.
He’s asked them for a reason, but hasn’t been given any explanation that makes sense to him.
“It’s for your own good,” they’ve repeated. Whenever he hears those words, he shakes his head. It’s causing me more harm than good by not going to prom, he tells them.
At any rate, at 6 o’clock on the evening of the prom, the boy was hanging around the house, depressed at the thought of missing out on this most special of nights.
And then, out of the blue, a weird thing happened.
His parents walked into his room and announced, quite unexpectedly, that they had changed their mind.
“You can go to the prom,” they said.
A burst of relief and excitement. But that surge of adrenaline faded as he began to appreciate the implications of what he felt was a longoverdue decision.
“Why are you just telling me now?” he said.
What is he going to wear?
He asked. He wondered where he could find a tuxedo on such short notice. No time to get his hair cut, either.
Of course, the problem, he realized with an escalating concern, went even deeper. It was with a sinking feeling that it hit him: Even if he could go, he didn’t have a date. Even if he could fine one, any girl who accepts is going to face her own gigantic set of obstacles. She’d want to get her hair done. Her nails. Her make-up. She’d need time to shop for a dress and shoes, right?
The prom starts at 7 p.m. How in the world, the boy thinks to himself, can I ever meld these moving parts together, when I only have an hour to work with? This is going to be a nightmare, the voice inside his head repeated.
And what about finding a place to have dinner first? Is there time to rent a limo? Where can I find a corsage for my date?
Details, details. A giant, tangled knot. And, honestly, no time to realistically untie that knot. If I had had enough advance notice, the boy bemoans to himself, it could be pulled off.
But no way, he says, can all this be managed in just an hour. Can it?
He expresses this sentiment to his mom and dad.
“There’s just not enough time for me to be ready by 7,” he says to his parents. He’s distressed, clearly. Why, he asks them, couldn’t you have agreed to this more than an hour ahead of time? Weeks ago. Months ago.
“Look,” your parents say. “You said you wanted to go to the prom. Now we’re telling you that you can go to the prom. You’ll have to figure the rest out for yourself.”
So, did he find his way to the prom? Jury is still out. We know this much: This boy desperately wants to get to this party.
Introductions
Of course, you shouldn’t need a special decoder ring to decipher the subtext here. True, I’ve lifted the general structure from “Life of Pi,” but it is a story with very real actors. Consider athletes, coaches, parents, administrators and, now, under-fire school boards as a composite character — the boy’s avatar, if you will. You already know who the parents are.
On that note, let us remember: many school boards, it says here, have unfairly been placed under burdensome time constraints, their hands forced by the policy makers in Santa Fe to craft a rapid solution for athletes to play. Superintendents say they are justifiably upset.
“This kind of sucks,” said New Mexico Activities Association board of directors member Daniel Benavidez, the superintendent of the Central Consolidated School District in Shiprock, during Monday’s NMAA board meeting. “Here it is, guys, last minute. Deal with it.”
This is a decision that would have been far more palatable had it been made, say, the first Monday of the new year and not Jan. 26, which for today’s purposes equals our aforementioned boy’s 6 o’clock. And what has been the result, politically? It has shifted angry public opinion away from Santa Fe and toward school boards. But Santa Fe has culpability here.
Now, let’s be fair. The governor and the Public Education Department deserve credit for ultimately making the right call. They should be allowing boys and girls to make every reasonable attempt to be at this metaphorical prom. Everyone just wishes they had waved them forward earlier than this.
As it is, numerous school boards are facing a mountain of logistical headaches as they set out to fulfill the state’s current requirements that students be involved in an in-person learning model before they can participate in a sport.
The state has made one extremely wise, if tardy, choice. Let us hope they now make another one, and remove the hybrid requirement from the state being able to play high school sports.
If they don’t? Well, one hour’s not enough.