The Tortoise and the Hare: The Lifelong Perks of a Belated Sporting Journey
By:Felicity Schlosser
I peeked at my phone to check the time once again during our water breaks in my lesson with Joey Smith. It was another beautiful sunny day at the yacht club tennis courts. Joey and I were on court 3, the elevated court with the most beautiful views of the rest of our textured green clay courts filled with happy members decked out in their crisp tennis whites. Whenever I get a moment to stop, I look out at the lower courts, and the horizon of the golf course lined with wedding-grade hydrangeas from every side. When I take in those moments of pure enjoyment during our lessons, I forget that they are short-lived I am reminded of this when Mr. Smith comes strolling down to our court. One hand holding the phone on a business call, and the other sushing Ramsey when he tries to tell him to watch his improved forehand. I watched Joey’s face slowly sink, along with his glasses now running off his face from shrugging his shoulders and dropping his head too hard. I tried to get his spirits back up by hitting a couple more volleys with him while we waited for his dad to get off his call. When he finally smashed the last volley right past me, his dad perked up and started asking me about the lesson.
I always assure him of how much Joey is improving because after a while I learned to not focus on whether he is having fun or not or how many times he asked me to leave early to go to the pool. I focus on what I know Mr Smith cares about…tennis excellency out of a 6 year old.
Is Mr Smith really out of touch for expecting such greatness out of Joey?
We live in a world where we worship professional sports. Events like the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Superbowl all become events that we wait years for and even spend half of our life savings to go see. We see these events and this prowess in sports as something unattainable and god-like. Is it something that we ourselves are reaching for? Or is it just blind entertainment? Sometimes its easy to forget how those athletes were able to get to that point. How can humans reach that level of achievement in a sport? What does it take?
Surely, to get to a professional level, the athletic journey starts at the beginning of childhood. The tale as old as time of the parents choosing a sport for their child that they either wish they did or did not succeed in to the extent that they wanted to. They send their child off to that sport in hopes that it becomes second nature. Take hockey players for example, they are learning how to skate simultaneously with walking. Almost comparable to raising your child bilingually- not knowing the difference between 2 things.
These parents then go on to hope that their child bonds with the sport they have selected for them, or forcing them to stay with it because they believe they will one day “thank me later”? But what exactly is the later? It could be if the child goes professional and is able to achieve greatness. Or will it be the opposite? Thank you will never end up leaving the child's mouth.
How exactly would the child's life be different if they were able to choose what sport they wanted to play and the level of involvement that they have with that sport? The child could even wait until being an adult or a parent of their own before discovering a spark for a sport. What is the harm in just waiting and finding out?
To get a glimpse into what a high-level athlete looks like jumping ahead a couple years, Palo Alto High School's newspaper “The Campanile” interviews their own star athletes to understand how they got their titles in the 2015 article “starting to compete in sports at a young age is beneficial”. High school journalists Mads and Madeline McClusky hone in on their girls soccer star Natalie Maloney who has been player soccer her whole life. Maloney views her soccer filled childhood as teaching her disciple. She continues highlighting how staying with the sport until high school is “a huge accomplishment for anyone”. This article, while speaking very highly of the importance of sports, is brushing over their negative impacts and the harm of the self when hyperfixated on too early.
Once we understand the dangers that parents bring to their children from highly competitive sports at a young age, it is clear to see that taking a step back and playing sports in adulthood can offer mental, physical, and passion based benefits.
People describe parents in many ways. Caretakers, guardians, trusting, heroes, ect. When someone becomes a parent, they have a certain kind of responsibility bestowed upon them. They are caring for another being and for a certain chunk of time, they are the ones that make every and all decisions for their child. Parents do make mistakes, lets make sure that is clear. Things happen day to day, but parents should not be making costly mistakes to their children at a young age that will bring them danger that could have been avoided, and that will affect them for life. Sports are a huge decsion that parents have to make for their children. They have the choice to keep their kids active and healthy and make sports a source of dopamine. Unfortunately, a lot of parents go in the other direction and put their ego onto the field. They will train their kids until they drop to fix some ball shaped hole in their heart. This may sound dramatic and that they just want their kids to succeed, but the story of Todd Marinovich can change anyones mind.
Todd Marinovich is a recovering drug addict out in orange county.
Well, before he got that title… Todd Marinovich was a football superstar. He was trained since infancy to become the definition of QB 1. He played D1 at Univeristy of Southern California and was the first round pick for the Las Vegas Raiders. Sports illustrated article Learning to be human again, Written by sports journalist Michael Rosenburg explores every aspect of Todds life to help readers understand what exactly “happened” to Todd. What happened to him, was his father. Marv Marinovich was an unsuccessful football player that put all of his eggs into Todds basket and made him essentially, a football robot. He trained Todd out of his mind to become a s successful football player that he even became a parents worst nightmare (abusive). “Heading back from games and practices, with Marv driving and Todd riding shotgun, Marv would hit his son's face repeatedly—with an open hand, so he did not injure his own knuckles” (Rosengburg). Todd now describes his father as “A raging beast”. He had no choice with a parent like that to be pushed for so called greatness. Not only did he put his son in physical danger playing football at suhc a high level, he drove him to dangers that have an even longer recovery time, drugs. Todd using drugs as an escape from his fathers loonacy is seeting him back years of his life. He was left having to discover who he is without football because he never actually “made it”.
For the athletes that do “make it”, they do not have to find another identity because they eat, sleep, and breathe their sport. This is the other direction that parents of child athlete stars go in. They eliminate the possibility of being considered abusive or damanaging by not being present at all. Which obviously, is just as bad.
Throughout the past couple years in South Korea, female golf academies have been made increasingly popular. South Korean parents make the decision to send their young daughters around the age of 5 or 6 to golf academies that run like boarding schools. From that age until they have reached the level of professional, they are training at the highest level for golf at all waking hours of the day. Being mediocre is not an option. Some people may say that this is redundant because they do end up successful and are apart of that 1%. Although, they are completely disregarding the human aspect of athletes. These golfers are not people who grew to love it by having their grandpa teach them at their facvorite course. These are athletes without a choice and being professional does not have the same meaning to them.
This suspicious pattern in female pro golfers has become so reconizable that The Olympics published an article on their website in 2021 titled “Why are south Korea’s women so good at golf?” This article is an insight into the lives of these women that are incredibly successful golfers that dominate their tour and how they got there. Cassie Kim, professional golfer when addressed about her success states, “When you decide to do a sport in South Korea, everything is towards that sport. School doesn’t matter as much, nothing else does, everything goes into that sport”(Cassie Kim). Its funny because none of these women are ever talking about their love for the sport and the excitement that comes from developing their skill. Their anomaly of athletics becomes almost boring. What the article fails to address is how this impacts the golfers identity. They simply dont have one besides golf, and newsflash a sport is not a character trait. These golfers that are supposedly seen as the ones that made it are suffering because they dont even know who they are. Its the fine line where parents take athletics and dump them into an oxagen tank and hook their kids up to it for life. They cant take the tube out of their nose.
Mental benefits
Participation in sports has a wide range of psychological benefits that should be present throughout life. All of our muscles and cells in our brain are running wild throughout exercise, just like us. In a 2023 article published in The International Journal of Sports Studies The Association Between Sports Participation and Mental Health Across the Lifespan, Author Shazia Tahira highlights the relationship of sports and mental health. “endogenous opioid serum concentrations, particularly beta-endorphin and betalipotrophin, rise in response to exercise, and these exercise-induced increases in serum-endorphin concentrations have been related to a variety of psychological and physiological alterations”. Let's break that down so we can understand it, Exercise has a direct relation to mood changes, altered perception of pain, and euphoria. All things that we would want and need to have a happy body and a happy mind. These benefits get destroyed when athletics get taken to the extreme at a young age, with no choice of their limit.
The mental wear and tear that comes onto kids playing sports is directly stemming from their parents. No, not the peewee town soccer league that almost all kids were forced to do. Take it a couple of steps further. The kind of parents who pick a single sport to hyper-fixate on for their kids and make sure that it takes them from their diapers to diplomas. Before breaking into the brain of a child athlete, Let's just look through the window into their house.
Exhausted of course, you come home from your day of school in a hurry to get a quick meal in before practice. Without time to brush your teeth, your mom yells at you to get your sports bag and jump in the car. After commuting to your indoor field, you have about 3 hours of practice/ conditioning. On the ride home you get a rundown of your time slots for your tournament this weekend, and finalizing your registration for your multiple different camp sessions flooding your summer schedule. You don't have the time, nor the energy to fight your mom on this because you know you are going to need it on the field.
This peek into the life of a specialized child athlete may seem manageable from a birds eye view, but swooping down and looking closer into how it can impact a childs mental health outweighs the benefits of possibly getting that scholarship to play in college. In a 2019 article from specialist in sports medicine at the children's hospital in Norfolk VA, Joel S Brenner observes the lack of psychological awareness in child athletes. He has come to the conclusion that perfectionism, burnout, low quality sleep, and future expectations are all overarching themes under the umbrella of specialized child athletes. “The opportunity cost of reduced exposure to other activities outside the sporting realm is another potential concern” (Brenner). The fine line between being an active child athlete and becoming a “one-trick pony” often depends on where their parents want to place them. Parents who were once athletes themselves—or tried to be—are more likely to push their children into this hyper-focused path. But even adults need to remember that it’s not their fight, nor their game. For a more literal example, the parents of the Dublin & District Schoolboys' and Girls' League, who caused such recurring disturbance at their kids soccer games. "There were 62 red cards in the DDSL—but 95% of them were given not to players, but to bystanders for abusing the refs” (The Irish Sun). This is almost as damaging as if they were on the field themselves like giants in my mythical world slashing the townspeople to the ground.
When it comes to an athletic career, balance is always key. Maintaining an active presence in sports throughout your life can be incredibly beneficial for your mental health. It provides a much-needed escape from daily responsibilities and serves as an outlet to release the emotions that build up over the course of a day. However, when sports start to feel like a burden—crossing the line from being an outlet to creating additional stress—it stops being beneficial. Achieving this balance can be difficult, as humans naturally strive to improve in the things they care about, which can sometimes lead to unnecessary competition and added pressure. Recognizing that this stress is counterproductive, especially at a young age, is even harder, as young athletes may not yet fully understand the impact it has on their well-being.
I talked to an expert in this field who I have watched go through this balance battle throughout his whole life, my 21-year-old cousin, NYU student, Brick Staeger. Brick grew up a complete child soccer anomaly. He played all year round, starting at the “optimal” age of 6. He was in private elementary and middle schools not only for his academics, but also for soccer. When he got to high school, academics werent even a factor anymore. He went all 4 years to IMG academy in Florida, then right off to play Division 1 soccer at UCSB being undecided not only on his major, but on his path. “I had never known anything else” with a deep sigh was his delayed response to me asking if he really enjoyed soccer or not. He loves playing the game, but the experinecs and lifestyle that come with it don't measure up to the simple art of just playing. Bricks reality check came in that first year at UCSB. College is supposed to be an endpoint of some extent in an ethletic journey, and what they work their life for. Brick in silence chose to change his entire path and give up soccer and transfer to NYU. When I asked about the change and how it affected him mentally, I unexpectedly got the response that it wasnt a hard choice for him. His mental burnout was years delayed and when it was out of his lifestyle, “It didn't hurt”. Brick has eventually regained his love for soccer, playing club and socially. He brought it back in a distraction from his academics and from his responsibilities. Allas, brick is active and happy, 19 years late.
Physical benefits
The physical benefits of starting a sport later in life are monumental for your health. Despite the common misconception that starting a sport is only meant for your youth years, adults are the ones who will benefit in the long run. While I don't believe that adults are always right, in this sense, they are more knowledgeable. This is because of body awareness. When you are a kid, growing and developing, you don't know what your changing body needs. You will have parts of your body become tired from constant strain, which will leave you with certain physical limitations. As an adult with a fully developed body, you know how it works. The knowledge of your own system gives you a more mindful approach to fitness. You know what limits are meant for pushing, and what aren't. In your adult life you want to work on your strength and agility in ways that fit you and will only bring you benefit. When kids are all thrown into doing the same thing, they are unaware that we are all biologically different. Our workout routines should reflect these unique needs, helping us work with our bodies rather than against them.
In an Emory Public Healthy article, Rollins College researcher, Dr Felipe Lobelo communicates to adult readers the benefits of team sports at their age and reminds them that they can make that sometimes grueling workouts seem a little more fun. “The variety of movement patterns associated with team sports—sprints, bursts of intense action, changes in direction and acceleration, muscle loading—provide a combination of aerobic, endurance, and resistance training” (Lobelo). This burden that adults often fear to be healthier is made so much easier when put into a group activity. Being social and working out.. At the same time!! It takes you right back to high school gym class which adults often think of as the time in their peak (condition). I know we are all usually concerned with how what we are doing right now affects our bodies and how we look, Lobelo assures us that we should not forget the benefits that these adult sports are having later down the line. Just the simple social playing and “increases in aerobic fitness, which can translate into reduced risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease”. Its all about prevention. When it comes to fitness, we should be thinking about the future and how it will affect us down the road.
The first thing that always comes to mind when thinking about sports affecting your body later on, is the steryoptyes of gymnasts. Gymnasts are commonly assumed to be shorter and have various growth stunting issues. In an experiment included in the National Library of Medicine titled “Evidence for a reduction of growth potential in adolescent female gymnasts”, researchers were on track to prove if this stereotype was really backed up or not. “A marked stunting of leg-length growth was observed in gymnasts from 12 years of bone age, resulting in a marked difference in overall sitting-height/leg-length ratio (gymnasts 1.054 +/- 0.005)”. They came to the conclusion that gymnasts with intense training to show evidence of stunted growth. But, there is a solution.. Quitting!! This article proves later on that this harm on growth can be improved and the gymnasts can be reverted back to somewhat of normal growth pattern by stopping training. This is obviously not a solution for gymnasts that are on the professional track, but it is slightly heartwarming knowing that its not completely over, just set back with years of pain and defeat. These young girls in gymnastics have no idea of the strain that they are putting on their developing bodies to the point where puberty isnt even natural anymore. The one thing that all of human kind have to go through gets compromised because of the intensity of their sport.
We often take for granted the incredible capacity of our bodies to reap the physical benefits of sports. Our bodies aren’t meant to specialize in just one sport, wearing out specific areas through overuse and overconditioning. Instead, we have the ability to participate in a variety of sports and cross-train, simply because we can. Physical activity is about using our bodies to their fullest potential, allowing us to enjoy all aspects of life and foster a holistic, improved lifestyle.
Development of passions
Improving our lifestyle is something that never has an end date. We always continue to find mre joy and excitement in our lives. More specifically, development of passions will help us achieve this. Passions fuel our lives, driving us to pursue our dreams and discover new paths. Sports are ideally the best passion to have. They benefit you holistically with your mind and body. I firmly believe that having a passion is essential for a fulfilling life, and I’ve experienced firsthand how discovering sports later in life can lead to a deep, lasting connection.
Starting this story off similarly to my 10-minute graduation speech about the relationship between passions and sports, I started playing tennis in high school, much later than most of the players I compete with now. Unlike others who were introduced to the sport at a young age, I wasn’t pressured into it by my parents, nor did they have any expectations of me as an athlete. This freedom allowed me to approach tennis on my own terms, and it became my passion.
Though I’m not, and never will be the best player on the court, the beauty of tennis for me lies in the journey, not the destination. I’ve built my connection to the sport from the ground up without an end goal. I even started working 30-plus hours a week in tennis. Starting as a front desk assistant at my towns yacht club. Over time, I transitioned to teaching tennis to people of all ages, sharing the same passion that drew me to the game. (Im also waiting to hear from an internship to a professional tournament in Newport this summer). I have quickly learned from teaching what my favorite age group is. For lack of a better term, the retired old people. They are there purely for, as cliche as it sounds, the love of the game. These old people post retirement are somewhat left in a state of confusion. The feeling that life's journey has mainly passed is a loss and uncertainty that no one can prepare for. It's in those moments of absence where old people make a change. Taking a more daring approach, 72-year-old Tom Simek from Santa Fe turned to exercise in his retirement, which eventually led him to compete on American Ninja Warrior. In this Business Insider article, Tom conveys how his gradual incorporation of excersize in his old age has given him fufillment. “If you're passionate about something, then you will look forward to your workouts in order to improve yourself. It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning” (Simeck). This major lifestyle change has not only improved the life of Tom, but the future of his family. He gets to play alongside his grandchildren and “teach them the importance of a fit and active lifestyle as they grow up” (Simeck). His education about the importance of exercise is already the greatest gift to his family. Keeping busy with something as exciting as a sport and exercise is what will make those golden years, truly golden.
Bringing us back to the present, Joey is still left stuck on his court with me thinking about how excited I am for my next lesson with the old people. Throughout the years of watching Joey in his tennis career, I am always left wishing I could just talk to Mr. Smith and give him a sense of reason to make tennis Joeys choice and not lead him down an overly controlled path. Through my own late starting tennis journey and my blessed opportunity to choose for myself, I really believe that I have learned the true purpose of sports. A combination of Pure enjoyment, health benefits, and self discovery. Sports open the door for us to see who we are and what we want out of them. They are not a burden, they are here for the long haul and are here to benefit us in ways that we decide. Sports have the power to change lives. They are not there to strain you early on.
I encourage you to sift your perspective. When thinking about the best sports memory you have, dont immediately go to winning a club championship game. Think about the whole picture.
A pink and orange sunset sky lighting up a slowly fading summer day. You and your family are playing a pre dinner time soccer game in the back yard. Bare feet soaking up the freshly mowed grass. You are running from end to end laughing and panting with your siblings trying to score the most goals because the winner doesnt have to do the dishes tonight. Narrating your own moves like you are in the world cup, that final goal really does feel like it. You are enjoying soccer the way it was intended.. You are getting exercise and doing it willingly. Truly think about these moments because these are the grounding ones in our lifes and feelings of happiness that we will always continue to pursue so matter your age.
Bibliography
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Jenkins, Lee. "The Tragedy of Todd Marinovich." Sports Illustrated, 11 Jan. 2019, https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/11/todd-marinovich-dad-marv-quarterback-drugs-rehab.
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Kenny, Serafina. "A 72-Year-Old 'American Ninja Warrior' Competitor Didn't Get Fit Until His 50s. He Shared 4 Ways Working Out Has Improved His Life." Business Insider, 11 Dec. 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/get-fit-59-health-scare-athlete-daily-workout-2024-11.
Staeger, Brick. Personal Interview. 12 April 2025.