....In reality it was pretty unlikely, not many professional sports are ideal for 5'9" 160 lb white guys born in the early 80s, but that may have been a different story growing up in today's society. The sporting world today is remarkably different than it was 25-30 years ago and even more so for the generation before that. Growing up I had little league baseball, pee wee football, travel basketball, travel soccer, etc., etc. and it was great, but kids today grow up in a different world. Kids today grow up with the opportunity to be involved with AAU travel basketball and the NFL involved with youth football. Some may say those types of opportunities have been around for a while and they would be correct, but not on the scale they are available today, not even close.
Another thing you see today as early as middle school is weight training, conditioning, specialized dieting, the list goes on and on. I hate to sound old, because I don't think I am, but growing up my weight training consisted of some dumbbells, my conditioning came from running around the neighborhood, and specialized dieting consisted of pasta the night before a game and oranges the day of. Today weight training regiments can be found on hundreds of websites and magazines (see Men's Health) specialized down to the very sport you want to focus on. Conditioning involves specialized shoes, compression clothing (see Nike and Under Armour), and speed coaches. As for specialized diets, forget it, you have hundreds of websites and hundreds of supplements (legal or not)(see GNC) that make kids today super-sized and almost super-human.
Maybe my opinion on the topic is skewed somewhat because I grew up in a small town in upstate NY, whereas now I live in the capital city of NC, surrounded by 3 major Universities and a slew of smaller ones. I just don't know. What I do know is that maybe if I had been born in this generation.....who knows.....maybe I Could Have Gone Pro.
No comments:
Post a Comment