OT: Do you think your child can play D1 ball?
I don't know if anyone listens to Colin, I know a lot of people don't care for him, which could really apply to anyone on tv/radio today.
More interestingly, there is a statistic that says 49% of NBA players have an "elite" athlete in their family. Elite meaning they played professionally, internationally, or D1. The NFL and MLB is significantly lower, at less than 20%. So when it comes to nepotism, from an athletic standpoint, do you think it is better genes or better exposure/opportunities, or both? Does it depend on the sport?
Also of interest, the average NBA player is 11 inches taller (6'6) than the average American, which would obviously suggest it is more genetic.
I'm not a big person at all, 6'1, 160 lbs soaking wet, ran a 4'5 forty at age 33 (and lost by a half step to Da'Shawn Hand who was 6'4 280 at the time. ) Da'shawn's dad is 6'3 and maybe 185ish, but was an all-conference receiver in high school. I just assumed my kid would be a D1 level talent, because I would encourage him to start at a good age, I would put him in the right position form the start, I would hold him back a year if necessary as I was a late bloomer, and I have a good friend who is well-respected and connected coach. I'm also aware that part of this is wishful thinking and Al Bundy type reminiscing, but I can't be the only person who thought or thinks this...right?
Thoughts?
(Also, Colin is still making nice with Harbaugh, so he is defending Harbaugh vs Saban, pointing out Saban complains about what he doesn't like eg. Chip Kelly's no huddle offense as being "bad for the kids" as well as pointing out his lack of Harbaugh-level success at MSU and in the NFL)
Let's talk about athleticism across sports for a second, by the way.
It is often said that, for example, USA would be better at soccer if more young athletes played soccer. This is probably true. But it is then speculated that some particular great athlete (say, Kobe Bryant or Lebron James or Usain Bolt or so on) would be incredible at soccer or some other sport because of how gifted they are.
But this is silly. Lebron James was born to play basketball. He has height, size, and coordination. To that combination he has added a terrific set of skills (probably assisted by a genetic athletic aptitude) to be a peerless combination of basketball characteristics. Could he play tight-end in football? Maybe. Might even be decent in college. But his body was built to play basketball.
It is less obvious but no less a fact for other athletes. The combination of factors that are required to be elite in, say, soccer, do not necessarily apply to other sports. Soccer players need a certain type of vision, a certain level of coordination and power in the legs, a certain level of balance, an agility of the hips, an angle of the knees. A guy who can throw a pitch 95 mph and hit with power as a baseball prospect is also a great athlete, but his gifts do not necessarily apply to soccer (or basketball, or football) at all. Yeah, they're athletic, so they can get by in any of these sports. But to be elite?
Michael Jordan would not have been as good at soccer as he was at basketball, had he chosen that path. Nor Kobe Bryant. Randy Moss was a super athlete and reasonably tall; he would not have been dominant at basketball in the same way he was at football.
The truth is, USA Soccer's would-be great athletes aren't playing in the NBA or in the NFL or in MLB.
Soccer's great athletes are guys that never discover their perfect, Messi-or-Ronaldo-like soccer genetics because they are average players in those sports who top out in high school or in D-2 or riding the bench at Illinois or Washington State. Guys who are athletic, who work hard, but whose gifts are left untapped because they are playing something else.
played soccer, he would be the best ever.
But with those thighs, one kick and the ball might explode.
Ladanian Tomlinson. I'm not a soccer guy, but my buddy, who is, and I used to play a fun game. The basis was that US soccer is so behind the rest of the world because our best athletes play basketball and football, mostly. We would field imaginary soccer teams with bball and fball players. it was a fun game, we had Ben Wallace at Goalie, Ladanian and Allen Iverson at Forward with T-Mac smashing headers (these conversations took place in college), Kobe as midfield, Lebron on defense, and thats all I remember...it was fun to think about.
Who would make up our roster currently assuming they grew up playing soccer their whole life and not basketball or football? Running backs would make some scary soccer players...
I would think cats like Deion Sanders and Russell Westbrook would have been awfully good. Maybe Westbrook as a goalie?
There's no clear evidence that this is the case. Barry was an utterly unique talent whose best measurable attribute was his ability to violently accelerate in any direction. Yes, he had powerful legs, so he could kick a ball far. Literally every major professional soccer player can kick a ball far and hard. Using appropriate touch, using spin, passing, and other skills are far from a sure thing.
Barry's ability to hit full speed on his second step was incredible, but it is far less clear if he would be able to accelerate like this while still controlling the ball. And moving the ball laterally at the same time as his body is even trickier.
The soccer players who use elusiveness to avoid defenders when they handle the ball do so by exercising brilliant, minute control of small increments of force to manipulate the ball in the direction they want it to go. They've learned this through countless hours of work, and they have bodies that are well tuned (and well-bred) to kick the ball in this manner.
We simply cannot confirm or deny whether or not Barry would be capable of that.
1. Doesn't Harbaugh like multiple sport athletes?
2. We had a hockey player in HS who, in football, ran back 11 kicks and a couple of interceptions for touchdowns. He was an amazing athlete. Red Berenson told him not to try out for hockey because he wasn't good enough. (He was good enough to have the conversation.) He ended up being the MVP of Michigan's baseball team his Senior year. Didn't even come close to being a pro in anything and he had more athletic ability than anyone I ever knew (including a few guys who played pro football).
No U.S. soccer or maybe no soccer player ever was an athlete like Barry Sanders. I'm not saying take Barry from the Lions and have him play on the U.S. team with no soccer experience. That's idiotic. I'm saying that the U.S. sucks at soccer because all of its best athletes, primarily black athletes, don't play soccer at an early age and continue to play it as their only sport.
And I think that's the point that everyone is making but yourself.
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I thought he said he was in love with his right hand... I better read more carefully.
and he is incredibly fast
My son is 11. He just completed his little league baseball season. He finished the year hitting cleanup. I'm 6'1", 215 pounds, so my son will probably be big enough to play. He only struck out twice all season. Most kids struck out 10 times or more (I know because I kept the scorebook all season) so he's got better than average hand-eye coordination. I looked up the local high school and they are 28-2 and ranked 10th in the state, so I don't know. I do know if he wants to, he can be the #1 singles player for the high school badminton team. Decisions, decisions...
Recruiters are going to look at travel teams more than HS. If he has potential, you may want to consider what club he's going to play for more than just HS.
EDIT: I didn't neg you. Just saw that -- it wasn't me.
Yeah, most of the kids on his team already play travel ball. Friends of ours have a kid on a travel team and they said never again. It was way too expensive.
Being in Southern California, we have spring, summer, and fall little league available and my son plays in all of those. If we lived back in Michigan, I think he'd end up in a situation like my brother did - having to choose between a partial scholarship to a Division II or III school for baseball or no money for a place in UofM's College of Engineering. He chose UofM. Baseball is so competitive out here, that's why I'm just thinking about high school.
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let your wife do his sports training then. In fact, better have her teach him about drinking too ...
Go Blue!
The highlight of my sports career was being JV captain. I didn't really make varsity anything. My wife has some athletes in her family, but she is 5-2 so our kids won't be very big. She plans to push them into gymnastics which makes sense given her background. She has lots of upper body strength and flexibility.
He's better than every kid his age and better than every--yes, every--kid 1 and 2 years his senior (in his given sport). And this is probably D1 "talent". Not meaning he will be a D1 athlete.
And when I say every kid his age, I mean in the area you live. For example, your kid is best soccer player in Washtenaw County and Metro Detroit for all 14, 15, and 16 year olds.
My dad and all his brothers played D1 football. I could've played D2 but didn't want to give up 4 years at Michigan to live/play at SVSU or grand valley. I had little bit of interest from a couple Ivy League schools, but not enough. Probably would've gone to one of them had an offer/financial aid package come through
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This won't hijack the thread b/c the following is not of sufficient interest to most but I would love to know if anyone has recently sent a child to Michigan to play on a team other than football or basketball. Do you get a partial sports scholarship, and if so, did Michigan find other scholarships to cover the balance? I'm sure it's case by case but it would be interesting to see if anyone has direct experience on same.
most non-rev sports are on partial s'ships. So hockey has a 25 man roster or so, but only offers 12 or 12.5 s'ships I think.
baseball carries like 28, but only has 11.8 s'ships or something.
The thing that most don't know about when they are training their kids from age 5-6 in a single sport is that A) they still won't be good enough for a D1 s'ship even being the best little leaguer from age 6-12 since they've had more training than everyone else and they haven't matured yet. I knew a kid who hit 28 HRs in little league at age 12-13 and 3 years later couldn't make the HS baseball team. Or just burned out of the sport. .. and B) even if they do get a s'ship, it's likely a quarter to a half in in the non-rev sports.
So the parents spend $2-10k/year for 10-12 years on training their kid in a single sport. Camps, persanal training, travel teams, uniforms, fundraising, etc, just to maaaaaaaybe get a .25 s'ship at SUNY Stoney Brook or Alamaba A&M. Then they turn into the PITA parents that most coaches won't deal with b/c they don't understand why little Jainey isn't good enough to get a full ride.
If the kids likes the sport and it's a good way to spend time with them, great take it as far as the kid wants to go. But too many times it's taken as far as the PARENTS *think* it should go, to the detriment of the kid.
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...at least once.
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D-3 football teams that don't cut are a thing, however D-1 is tough.
I had one buddy make it in baseball and it included doing CC ball first.
I was blessed to be 6'6'' but cannot run or jump to save my life, so the most I got was some interest from small D-3 basketball schools. Michigan as a regular joe was a much better choice for me.
My kid can do whatever he wants, but we have some D1 talent in our family. My grandpa was a running back at MSU before the war, and a RB at WMU after, he was a local sprint champion. His two brothers played D2 football at Wayne. My uncle on the other side of my family and I each played D2 sports. On the other side of my son's family tree, my wife's Dad still holds his HS sprint records and was a D3 running back.
With all that said, I will probably have the most muscle bound, fastest, coordinated clarinet player ever.
be a legit reason for optimism. Height helps in most cases, especially in volleyball and basketball.
I worked out with the wrestling team a couple of times at Michigan. After practice I saw the most beautiful woman I've ever seen walking towards me from far down the hall. She saw me looking at her and returned my gaze. We had a genuine moment, but as we got closer and said hello, I realized that she was nearly a foot taller than me and on the woman's basketball team. She said hello back, seemingly with interest, but I didn't act fast enough. My chance at a professional athlete children passed me by... MAccLA, you succeeded where I failed. ;) Good luck with the kids.
But there's a lot of snake oil salesmen an saleswomen whose livelihood depends on selling that dream to parents. As a former league official I saw it repeatedly whether it was a washed up minor league never-was selling private lessons or infomercials for the next great training aid.
A true D1 athlete is something very few people actually have met in person. They are just bigger, stronger, faster, and often more focused than anyone else. Most of the 'really good' local kids are usually D2 and D3 is full of above average HS players.
With a certain baseline level of athleticism, I think with enough training/effort it's possible. There was a guy a year behind me in high school who was a pretty decent athlete, was the RB on a bad high school team, made the varsity bball team, but rarely played, but had a hardcore work ethic. He decided he wanted to letter at Michigan in something, looked in the mirror and realized he wasn't going to play basketball, so started hitting the pavement (a lot) and walked on to the cross country team.
Another, perhaps better example was the younger brother of a friend in high school. He was the youngest of 3 brothers, the older two had some athletic abilities (started a few games varsity football, played but didn't start varsity basketball) but the youngest had a work ethic like you wouldn't believe. His family also had the means to support his drive with weights and personal coaching. That dude went on to start at LB at Penn State and was briefly a practice team NFL player.
My son? Guess we'll see, I'm 6'6", but if he isn't someday, I'm going to blame my wife.
name checks out
These are interesting examples. And I think they actually make the point that the truly elite require both hard work and genetics.
Let's start with the LB: some athleticism, insane work ethic and drive. He was able to start at a good college; his ceiling was practice squad on an NFL team. Now, that's pretty good. Thousands of people would give their right arms for that. But practice squad still means that you can't make a roster; there are 120 linebackers that are better than you, plus guys in the other positions.
So this guy probably reached his ceiling. The fact is that the reason he was linebacker #121 or whatever wasn't because there were 121 guys working harder than him; there was something else that separated them. Maybe it was vision, the in-born brainpaths to process information properly. Or it was explosiveness. Or it was height. Or it was the hand size that allows others to tackle better than him. Whatever.
There's no shame in this at all. Some people just have the gift.
Regarding the person who lettered in CC, good for them. I guess we are holding different conversations here--there's a difference between "elite of elite" (which I have kind of been talking about) and "making a D-1 roster." I think some of the principles still apply, but of course there are far more spots available in D-1 than in NFL defensive backfields.
It is possible for someone with the right baseline to work hard and overcome some genetic disadvantages. A sport like CC has a lot less competition than big-time college football, so it may be more achievable. Of course, a guy who letters in cross country isn't necessarily going to win the Olympic 10,000m race, even if they work out just as much.
There are a few things at play here.
Take your typical 6'0 mobile qb in college who won't play qb in the NFL. Is he better served playing cb or wr? now you are taking 6/7 roster spots per team vs nearly 20-25 if you count fs,cb, tb, wr. if not more.
Going to the right high school/camps, and playing for the right coach. Case in point, Do you Josh Metellus is at Michigan if he is at a 3* high school in western Florida?
If his family doesn't have the ability to travel to get scholarships offers?
Despite everyone's opinion, the NFL still only has 17% of it's players that have "elite" athletes in their family. So I would expect that the answer would be hard work more than genetics.
How many players on the roster have you heard about having elite bloodlines? Peppers, who is the best athlete on the team, arguably? J. Lewis? Any of the running backs? Jake Butt?
He may be a mobile QB, but except for a few freakish athletes, mobility at QB still translates into average-at-best speed for other positions.
The right coach and system matters; it is hard to say how much. We lament that DG got stuck with the Hoke/Borges inferno instead of playing under Harbaugh, under whom we believe he would have excelled. Would it have been enough to be drafted? I don't know. Quarterbacking is a hard thing to evaluate. Some people think that guys like Gardner and Joey Harrington are semi-permanently "ruined" by playing in bad situations. Unfortunately, there is no control data to compare against.
But then you have someone like Tim Tebow, acknowledged by all to be both athletic and a hard worker. But no level of hard work has been able to turn him into a starting NFL QB. I strongly suspect that the skills that allow some guys to read and react to defenses are partly developed by effort (Manning and Brady are of course both incredible film geeks) but also require a certain level of mental pathway that works at a different speed. This pathway is NOT the same as intelligence; different intelligent people process information in different ways. The ability to interpret on-field data into an action of throwing to the correct place seems to involve a particular sort of reflex that some players can never develop.
I have no idea how much athleticism exists in the ancestry of Jabrill Peppers; I would suspect quite a lot. Some of these traits may never be realized by parents, or may be the result of a unique genetic combination, or they may skip a couple of generations (like my height, which skipped two generations). For an African American, athleticism that skips two generations goes back to a time when someone with great skill may never have had a chance to demonstrate it against proper competition.
But Peppers is so athletic in every way there is no question that a substantial portion of his ability is a born gift. This is not to say he hasn't worked hard and earned what he's gotten--he has--but for every Peppers there are hundreds of kids who work hard but will never rise much above average.
For sure, on all accounts. Pertaining to the OPs question about a kid playing D1, I think that it's possible to "Rudy" one's way onto the team (and by "Rudy", I mean "be a talentless runt who works hard at some garbage D1 school in Indiana and maybe makes it into a game"). To be truly elite of the elite and go pro in one of the major sports you're going to need to be born with "it" and also have the talent to practice until you can barely walk, and then do it again and again and again. My CC friend wasn't blessed with "it", I am certain Alan Webb didn't spend a single milisecond worrying about getting caught by him
I think "it" can also come out of the blue, from regular parents, though if both parents played D1 in something, their kid's odds will be substantially higher.
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and actually many girls golf scholarships go unused as many schools can not find enough players to fill them. If a girl can break 90 in high school she has a very good chance at a D1 scholarship. I wish I would've gotten my daughter into golf when she was young.
She tried a lot of sports growing up and finally settled on softball, which she now plays in college. Golf was one sport I didn't introduce her to and wish today I had.
sure it is, I broke 90 twice the last time I played.
on the front 9 AND the back 9