Sporting Propositions

GONE FISHIN’

Farmersville fishing team send two teams to state

Actual headline and sub-headline from the local newspaper a couple of weeks ago. Farmersville High School has “Fishing” as a school sport.

At first it seems weird, but come to think of it, there’s a pretty fair-sized lake between my little corner of the DFW Metromess and Farmersville. On any good fishing day, at least a good half dozen cars are parked in the median of the causeway going over the lake, their owners out with poles and tackle boxes in pursuit of what I will assume to be some really good fishing.

I never really took to fishing, myself. When I was a kid, we were in bicycling distance of a small lake in suburban Cleveland Ohio where we would go fishing in the summer. We never caught anything we couldn’t throw back. The only “catch” we had was when Mickey T. somehow got a fishhook stuck in his nose.

But a school fishing team. Not that I’m knocking it, but, who’d a thunk?

For that matter, who’d a thunk of some of the other sports being offered at the high school level these days? Time was when there was a cycle of sports throughout the school year. Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, tennis, softball and baseball in the spring. Regular as clockwork. Then there was wrestling. Not WWE style, but Greco/Roman style. Cross Country, track, all of them.

In the later seventies, onward, a few other sports started to creep into prominence. Volleyball, for instance. We played it as one of the winter sports when I was in high school. Somehow or another, it became a big thing, likely because it was another sport which women could play and go on to college on a volleyball scholarship. A niece of mine went to college on a volleyball scholarship.

Times change.

I mentioned golf in my last little tirade. Yeah, we had a golf team, I think, when I went to high school. Then there’s bowling. One of the first impressions I had of high school sports after moving to Texas was the brag that the Allen High School BOWLING team had won the state tournament! Most of the bowling I’ve done was as an adult. We included a “beer frame”. I don’t imagine that high school bowlers would have a “beer frame” – probably why they tended to have higher average scores than I’ve ever rolled.

Another school sport I’ve come to find out is lacrosse (the Native American game, not a Buick or the nickname Canadians give to “self-satisfaction”). I had no idea the game was even being played until one morning when checking out of a hotel, my then almost three-year-old son was flirting with a girl’s lacross team in the hotel lobby. One of the residences I’ve lived in here in the Dallas area was just around the corner from a field where people were out practicing their lacrosse skills.

Oh, and ice hockey. But that was a club sport when I was in college. No scholarships, just two groups of people skating around and beating at each other with sticks. One of the club members was part of a group I hung with… there would be tales of some of the guys going to Byrd Arena to watch Harvey A. play, or to get drunk. Take yer pick!

But fishing! Good luck to ’em. I may not understand or I may get a chuckle from it, but… it’s whatever floats your boat, I reckon!

Be Seeing You!