Friday, Jan. 28, 2005 | 10:19 a.m.
Nick Christensen covers high school athletics for the Sun. Reach him at (702) 259-4085 or by e-mail at [email protected].
There's three weeks left in basketball season, but some teams' playoff hopes pretty much fell flat last week.
But it wasn't a crushing defeat or a severe injury that has some squads already thinking about next year. In fact, teams didn't even play last week until Friday, so students could focus on semester exams.
Yep, this column is brought to you by the letter F.
Due to federal regulations on student privacy, schools officially can't disclose which kids are academically ineligible.
But with first semester grades coming in from last week's tests, and not enough time between now and the playoffs to get above the 2.0 threshold required to play, kids, particularly underclassmen, are quietly dropping off rosters valley-wide.
"It can be a dealbreaker for anybody if it's a key guy," Cheyenne coach Larry Johnson said. "When stuff like that happens, it's especially bad for the individual and it's bad for the team."
Sometimes students get too carried away with game time, forgetting about studies in the frenzy of early-season conference games and winter break tournaments. Others simply struggle with classes. A few just don't try.
"If a kid's not trying in the classroom, they're pretty much not going to try on the court, either," Johnson said. "A lot of times if a kid is struggling in the classroom, they're struggling on the court. The basketball court is just an extension of the classroom."
And as many of the local prepsters hope, it's also the ticket to the college classroom. It's that point that Johnson said he tries to emphasize to his students.
"It's something they have to realize, academics comes first," he said. "A lot of guys, especially if they want to go on and play at the next level, they've got to take care of business in the classroom."
Of course, the already cash-strapped school district doesn't have the resources to offer extra help for student-athletes, who in the case of basketball spent four hours a week in games and another 6-10 every week in practice.
It was the ineligibility that frustrated Mojave football coach Tyrone Armstrong to the point of seeking out grants for a special tutoring program for his team.
Every day before practice last fall, the Rattlers football squad spent two hours in study hall, working with an academic coach who kept tabs on the entire team's studies.
There was no disputing the results. Armstrong said 27 of the 40 players on his varsity team had a GPA at 3.0 or above. In the lower levels, 41 more players kept B averages.
"We wound up with one person actually ineligible on varsity for one game, and even though he was ineligible, he still wound up with a three-point overall," Armstrong said.
What was it like before the study-first, practice-second regimen started?
"We were having two or three ineligible every week. It was ugly," Armstrong said. "That's why we decided to make that commitment. Our coach did a dynamic job meeting with kids individually, talking about grades and sending the young men to teachers."
The program, called Play it Smart and organized by the National Football Foundation, snowballed so that students who were doing fine without the extra study time were able to reach out to kids who weren't so eager to join the system. Mojave may have finished 2-6 last year, but Armstrong said the team was a success.
"What we do as a team, I wouldn't trade it for the world," he said. "If you told me I could have seven wins and worry about who's going to be playing week-to-week, I'll take the study hall and the commitment to the kids' grades."
In the next four years, the Clark County School District is scheduled to open eight new high schools, which cost about $50 million each to build. A good chunk of that change goes to build an athletic program, from acquiring land to building facilities to equipping teams.
The Play it Smart program costs $25,000 per school - for a football team. That's less than the salary of one beginning teacher - and with 87 percent of participants nationwide moving on to college (compared to 57 percent of general high schoolers), budgeting intense study time for student-athletes would seem to be a worthwhile investment.
A sustained academic program might just help those teams whose seasons ended in a week they didn't play a game.
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