Middle School Sports Important to Competing

As of late, you'll notice I have been covering regular news as well as sports for the Southwest Times.

I had never realized just how close the two sides could come until I went to cover a School Board meeting last week.

Proposed in the numerous budget cuts needed to close the large deficit is the $40,000 dollars that is being spent every year on the many sports—including volleyball, basketball, football, track, and wrestling—offered at the middle school level.

While it is necessary to make the cuts to get under the deficit, I think that $40,000 dollars is only a "drop in the bucket" of the money that will be needed to get us out of the shortfall.

A while back the issue was brought up about why our high school sports teams aren’t winning. Well, many school systems start from the bottom at the recreation leagues, develop to middle school and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and by the time these kids reach high school, they are ready to compete at a high level.

Without these middle school programs, our sports competitiveness in the county will suffer tremendously, as many athletes will not be prepared for what they face at the high school level after leaving middle school.

If these cuts do indeed happen, we need to rely on our recreation league sports and AAU teams more than ever to keep our kids in great physical shape as well as have experience with athletic competition.

I think one thing that does sadden me is that if the two schools merge, the Pulaski-Dublin Middle rivalry will end. It will no longer be the Orioles against the Dukes. Instead, we will be one unit together now.

However, the merge can be beneficial. If we were to keep middle school sports and merge the schools, there would be several extremely competitive unified middle school programs.

After covering both middle school basketball programs, I cannot imagine taking kids from each squad after middle school and putting them on the same team. But doing so in middle school will certainly help their chemistry as they develop as a team to the next level.

I really think it is a shame that we have to look at this issue and others as a "keep or discard" issue. Hopefully, our town can get through this tough time and move on to much better times in the not too distant future.

– Cody Dalton is a writer for The Southwest Times in Pulaski. He can be reached at [phone] or at [e-mail].