With the Gravette Lions hosting the first major competition of the year, track season is off and running for 2011.

Lots of folks turn out to watch football games and basketball contests, and some turn out to watch baseball battles. Track and field, on the other hand, is usually far from setting revenue records for high school sports-related gate income.

Football games usually take and hour and half, maybe two to complete. Basketball games are a bit shorter but they usually come in groups, like junior varsity, girls varsity, and boys varsity, meaning that local supporters could easily spend four to five hours in the gym watching the games. Baseball games are not on a clock and can be short or they can be long, depending on a lot of factors. Track and field meets, for the most part, will easily take four to five hours and sometimes more.

I had a parent ask me once why track was even a sport since very few fans attend. To anyone who didn’t really understand what was going on, track meets can seem to be almost interminable. Of course, I had to explain to this person that first of all, high school sports don’t exist just to provide entertainment for a community. High school sports can be entertaining, but the sums of tax money spent in the administration of sports have a different goal in mind.

While people of the 21st Century, at least those of the industrialized nations, probably cannot imagine a society or culture where sports don’t have a major presence, it has not always been this way. Actually, modern organized sports haven’t been around for all that long, compared to the history of civilization.

Football and baseball have only been around the U.S. since the 1800s, but football is the sport that got sports in general thrust into the academic environment in colleges than later in high schools. Concerning football, a lot of observers wrote in the 1890s that people “were mad for it.” Not angry mad, crazy mad!

In the late 1800s there was a European movement to revive the ancient Olympic Games, a sporting event that took place in Greece thousands of years ago. The fall ofthe Greek empire and the rise of the Roman one ended the Olympics until they were reborn in 1896 in Athens, Greece.

Track and field season was then as it is now, traditionally competed in during the summer and early fall with most nations around the world with one notable exception - the United States. American track and field starts in the indoor season in the winter with state high school outdoor meets concluded by May with collegiate nationals held in June.

A late addition to the Olympic Games, the U.S. team was a generally rag tag group of athletes from a few Ivy League schools. Incredibly enough, the American neophytes totally dominated the first Olympic Games particularly in the track and field portion, the main event of the Olympics.

That track and field should grow to its prominence that it enjoys today is not because of Americans desire to honor the “Olympic spirit.” The whole reason behind the original Olympics was that it became a kind of “off-season” training process for Greek soldiers. When they weren’t engaged in warfare, they would practice throwing the shot put and discus which were the weapons of the day.

Soldier/athletes trained at running for endurance and quickness which are valuable assets for foot soldiers.

Fast forward to the early 1900s, and many American football coaches realized they had the same need for their “troops” as did the Greek field commanders of B.C. times. Schools in the U.S. began sponsoring track teams that competed in the spring, a weird idea to European track enthusiasts. American track was done in the spring, allowing football coaches to get their players more speed, agility, and stamina when competing in the games of the fall. Track even became mandatory for football playersat a lot of places, with some football programs still carrying on that tradition.

When I was a freshman in 1968 at Monett High School, the new head football coach announced to all the football players that he would not require anyone to compete in a track meet but that everyone had to participate in track practice. The same requirement was extended to the basketball and wrestling teams which led to the spectacle of over 100 boys running on the high school track every day in the spring. We had about 30 kids, including me, who made up the actual team that competed in meets.

Some thought the coach was crazy, but within three years, Monett started a string of victories that led to a pair of state football titles.

Monett was notoriously small in size but were feared for their team speed and endurance. Players were almost never injured, a great by-product of being in outstanding physical condition. The running backs became top flight 400 runners which made them tough to wrap up by would be tacklers. While a lot of griping took place in the first couple years of this program, the fact that the school went from being an 0-10 team to a 13-0 team in four years changed a lot of peoples’ attitudes.

Now there are a lot of track enthusiasts and athletes who love track for the sport it is and may not even compete in the other sports such as basketball and football, the major beneficiaries of track and field conditioning. I believe that any sport that a student engages in has value and should be supported by the school and community.

While it’s fun to win, what you become is really more important than what you win. The bedrock principle that you get what you pay for and that great honors most always go to those that put in great effort and dedication is a principle that is too often neglected.

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Editor’s note: John McGee is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected]

Sports, Pages 7 on 04/06/2011