Where have all the good times gone.

By Jason Pike

Somethings been lost in sports today.

Where has all the passion and tradition in sports gone to? Rarely in today’s society do we see the camaraderie of old. Seldom do we see pep rallies or cheerleaders or school spirit where students come out to support their friends and fellow students. It’s a rare occasion to walk into a gymnasium and feel that electricity.

I grew up in the 90s, and I was a student athlete as well as an athlete outside of the school system. The one thing that I treasure the most and that I’m glad to be able to say, is that I was one of the last generations, I believe, too experience such things. We had cheerleaders of sorts but we had fan pride as well. They came dressed in school colours with signage and were loud in their support of their home team.

Youth sport is about building good memories

Every tournament we held there were pep rallies and opening ceremonies with introductions, team by team, player by player, to fan cheers and jeers, and somewhere in the middle of that tournament there was always a sit down, semi-formal banquet, with food and speeches and awards.

And the same was equally true for road trips, when we would head out across the province to whatever location. We all piled into a school bus and travelled together as a team, and often times there was another bus allocated for fans who wanted to come along and support their team.

Nobody wants to travel outside the Avalon Peninsula for tournaments or provincials even. I know last year alone in a particular basketball tournament the provincial ‘A’ was held in Corner Brook and at least two of the east coast entries dropped out because they didn’t want to travel. The same was true this past summer for my son’s soccer team provincials were hosted in Gander, and there weren’t enough people interested in going because parents just didn’t want to travel.

I certainly understand that there is financial aspects to all of this. No matter what generation you were in that was always an issue for Newfoundland athletes, but it was always overcame by fundraising and bottle drives and whatever needed to be done to make it work was done.

Now it’s like the air has been sucked out of all of these things. So many would like to blame Covid for a lot of this and yes to an extent Covid did change a lot of things in the way that we socialize and the way social events are now held but but its three years later now and these problems existed years before this worldwide lock-down during the pandemic.

Smells like sports

These are supposed to be the times that kids are making memories. Looking back now one doesn’t easily forget the smell of their High School, a mixture of industrial strength cleaning products, chalk, deodorant, wet paint and hormones and that locker room smell, that you can’t really nail down, somewhere a mix between old sweaty equipment and mold.

It’s comparative to the smell of old books in the library but most of you know exactly that smell that I’m talking about, it’s the smell of nostalgia.

The fear I have for my child as he comes up through the ranks, is that he’ll never truly get to experience all the things I’ve mentioned, not through the eyes that I did anyway. Something’s been lost through these last two decades and I don’t know exactly where things started to go wrong, but something got lost somewhere along the way.

The thing that disturbs me the most about it is that I talk about this as someone from the generation who experienced it and I’ve had this conversation with other people from my generation, and they are involved in sports in coaching capacities or organizational and I don’t understand why or how as people that grew up in this have not been able to hold on to that sense of team rivalries and camaraderie, excitement and fun …the sportsmanship and fellowship with fellow athletes that we ourselves so proudly talk about, reminisce and even romanticize.