They laced their shoes up Monday morning; maybe Monday afternoon for the first time this fall.
Off to football or softball practice. Maybe a date for some volleyball conditioning or a run on a gravel road for cross country.
It was maybe the last first or the first first. Kids off to learn lessons about hard work, discipline and about being part of a team. Lessons they’ll carry with them for longer than their coach or their parents might think.
Don’t believe me? Ask the successful ones. The leaders in your town. You might find them in your town making a loan to a small business owner, or serving a family during a time of need, maybe, helping your kids get better grades because now they can see the whiteboard.
These practices, the ones that lead up to those packed bleachers and Friday Night Lights, last way longer than you’d think. For some, they last for the rest of your life.
“When you’re a high school athlete, you don’t understand how a 6:00 a.m football practice is helping you develop work ethic and discipline for years down the road,” Dr. Chad Hudnall said.
Once a farm kid turned quarterback for Grand Island Northwest, and later the signal caller at Doane College, Hudnall now is an owner and optometrist at Family Eyecare Center in Grand Island.
The lessons didn’t have to just be in the fall either.
“My mom used to get up early to take me from our farm to early morning basketball practice at Northwest,” Hudnall said. “She will probably never know how seeing her do that – the sacrifice it took – continues to guide me today.”
These lessons and memories linger rather than fade away. Ask James Mowitz.
“The lessons you learn from sports are endless really,” said Mowitz, a member of Sutton’s 2002 state runner-up basketball team and three state playoff qualifying football teams for the Mustangs. “For me, it was all about being on a team. Everyone works together to sacrifice toward a common goal.”
The lessons led Mowitz to a career in banking with Pinnacle Bank in Lincoln. He is a husband, a father raising three boys on a few trips to see a football field on a Friday night or a small gym in the winter. It’s the community he remembers.
“Kids have the values given to them by their parents and grandparents,” Mowitz said. “When you step on that field or the court, you aren’t just representing yourself, your team and your school.
“You were representing a whole community.”
These lessons, you see, they can last even until you are a grandfather. Paul Farmer knows this.
Fifty-one falls ago – before they even invented the state football playoffs – he laced up some black high top cleats in Geneva. That winter he and his teammates won a state basketball championship.
They still get together every once in awhile.
“It has always been my belief that each sport teaches you things that cannot be learned in a classroom or if you played one sport only,” Farmer said. “The most wonderful thing about team sports like football and basketball is that you make lifelong friends.”
For Farmer, who owns Farmer & Son Funeral Home in Geneva, each sport he played helped him become a successful business owner and community leader.
“Each of the sports I played brought something to the table that I could incorporate into running a successful business,” Farmer said. “Now the players were the teammates.”
“My coaches had the great ability to show the role that each player had in the team concept is critical to the success of the team.”
All lessons that could be taught in 1964 as well as they could be taught today. You just have to be ready to learn them. Those things – discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, knowing your role – are the lessons of fall.
