Why Don’t Dayton’s Kids Play Sports?

Many of you may not know this about me, but in the winter of 1990-1991 I averaged eight points per game as a senior playing post for the Dayton Bulldogs basketball team. At 6-feet 4-inches, I was the tallest kid on the squad, but hardly the best. That honor belonged to shooting guard Jeremy Himmerich who went on to play at Walla Walla Community College. My team finished in a 3-way tie for first in the league with DeSales and Pomeroy, but like so many other great Bull­dog teams before it, we fal­tered at the ultra-competitive District 9 tournament at Bea­sley Coliseum in Pullman.

Six seniors and two ju­niors made up the varsity ro­tation of that squad. A hand­ful more juniors waited for their turn on junior varsity, not to mention the freshmen and sophomore players on JV and the C squad. In the stands, a truckload of eager and wide-eyed seventh and eighth graders cheered us on. I, a gawky late bloomer as a basketball player, even had my own tongue-in-cheek fan club among them. The members of the club (such as Matt Talbot, Ryan Rundell, and Will Hutchens-the latter who played college basketball at WSU) would later become the only class in Dayton history to record the trifecta of track, football, and basketball championships in consecutive seasons (1994 and 1995).

When I was even younger, I too cheered on teams of older Bulldogs and dreamed of playing in front of packed gyms-teams like current coach Roy Ramirez's squad from 1985, or the No. 1 state-ranked Dayton team from 1987 that featured Brian Martin, who went on to set the career assist mark at George Fox University in Oregon (my alma mater). I dreamed, like nearly every small town boy in the 1980s, of one day playing for the glory of our town at the state tournament in Spokane. At recess times and after school, my friends and I practiced our football and basketball skills. Hardly a day went by without a mass football or basketball game taking place on the "blacktop" or up on the "high grounds".

Our intensity for sports was matched by the number of us who turned out to play as Bullpups and later as Bull­dogs. Fourteen boys from my class suited up to play football each year in high school. Thirty boys in all four grades turned out for basket­ball my sophomore year. The numbers remained high even after we added wrestling to the winter sports mix during my junior and senior years.

So what's my point? That kind of turnout doesn't exist anymore in Dayton, even though the number of students attending Dayton schools does. Dayton only had 15 boys turn out for basketball this year, and just 19 for football. The school board approved a measure al­lowing eighth graders to play high school basketball to help the numbers, and were it not prohibited due to the physicality of the game, may have considered suiting them up for football as well.

The intensity of desire to be a Bulldog athlete now rests in only a handful of boys per grade-I am con- fining this to boys. And the problem extends throughout K-12 as far as I can tell. The question begging an answer is why?

Next week I'll continue on this topic, including relaying some insight on the problem from several of the people I interviewed for my original story about eighth graders being allowed to play high school basketball. While they gave many ideas as to why this might be occurring - some extremely intriguing - their solutions to the problem might best be summed in a single repeated phrase of Dayton basketball coach Roy Ramirez: "I don't know".