Me and one of my boys were feeling a little under the weather this past Sunday afternoon.  So even though it’s a beautiful day, we’re just hanging out on the sofa scanning the channels.  I’m hoping we land on some type of a sporting event.  Well, in actuality, I’m just hoping we land on something other than Power Rangers.  But with the remote in his hand…who knows what we’ll end up watching.  There’s a good chance I’ll end up watching the back of my eyelids.  But lo and behold, he heads to one of the ESPN’s and says “We could watch high school football.”

So at first, I’m partially satisfied.  I mean, even though it’s high school, it’s still football.  But after I thought about it further, I began to wonder why the heck we are watching high school football on a nationally televised cable network.  A local cable access channel?  OK.  But, being that I’m in Connecticut and watching two teams from Florida on an ESPN channel?  What’s going on?!

Then, this just gets me thinking deeper into youth sports on television.  We have high school football being nationally televised.  High school basketball, and McDonald’s All-America games are nationally televised as well.  And in baseball, we go even further past high school, as every year we are nationally televising little league games!!  I can’t be the only person that sees the problem with this.  What problem?  Over-exposure, that’s the problem.

I could be wrong, but in my opinion, over-exposure is where all of the problems with PED’s in sports begins.  When the extra spotlight is put on players who are too young to handle or understand it, pressure is then created at an earlier age.  This pressure to perform in front of cameras on a national stage creates further pressure to perform at a greater level than they can naturally.  Athletes now feel the pressure at an earlier age to be bigger, faster and stronger than their peers.  Enter PED’s.

Thankfully, as far as we know anyway, the PED problem has not yet come to the world of golf – though we have questioned the possibility.  And maybe a part of the reason for that is, no one cares about amateur golf.  Well, not enough to nationally televise high school golf tournaments anyway.  But if it came to that point, do you think for a second the pressure wouldn’t reach those kids as well?  Sure, extra strength from PED’s would, for the most part, only benefit a golfer off the tee.  So it wouldn’t really help the all-around game.  But when a few 17-year old high school seniors are on ESPN ripping 300+ yard drives on a regular basis while reps from Callaway, Nike and Adidas are watching…well…I think you see what I mean.

So after all of these thoughts run through my head, I ended up changing the channel to something else.  I just don’t like the idea of over-exposing and promoting kids, who are at an age when they should be playing these sports for fun more than anything else, and I don’t want to help promote/support it.  We see what it’s doing to baseball.  It’s happening in football as well, although to a far smaller degree.  And it’s probably only a matter of time before it finds its way into basketball too.  So as long as we keep from putting high school golf on TV, maybe that can be one way to help keep the sport clean.

Swing ’til you’re happy!