Taking Flight: Is FHS OK with being OK?

This was one of three columns submitted that took third place in column writing in the 2011 Minnesota Associated Press Sports Association Awards for dailies under 20,000.

My very first day in Faribault was a Friday afternoon during the first week of March. My dad and I had just mercifully pulled off I-35 after two days of chugging a U-Haul from Wyoming to my new landing spot in Faribault.

We slipped into town along Highway 21 from the South, past El Tequila and the Broaster and Dairy Queen. When I was a kid growing up in Vermont, we had an A&W Root Beer nearby and my dad and I had fond memories of frozen mugs of root beer and Mama and Papa’s burgers.

So my first meal in town would be a chili cheese dog at A&W. As we were paying at the counter I started making small talk with a girl who appeared to be high school age behind the counter. I mentioned I was new to town and I was the new sports editor at the Faribault Daily News. I casually asked her if Faribault had some good teams.

She paused, then answered, “Well, not really.”

I didn’t believe her. I knew Shattuck-St. Mary’s has a nationally renowned hockey program and I had read that Bethlehem Academy had a state championship volleyball program. But I think she was talking about Faribault High School, and as I sit in this office each night this winter and talk to FHS coaches, I can’t help but remember that exchange.

I wrote once that one of the hardest parts of this job is interviewing kids after an emotional loss. Another is writing story after story about a losing team.

How many adjectives are there to soften the blow of a 40-point loss? How many approaches can you take to try to pull out a silver lining or shake a positive from an 8-0 defeat?

I have no doubt these losses are harder on the coaches, harder on the student-athletes and probably hardest on the spouses of the coaches who spend the rest of the night agonizing over how to bring their program back from the doldrums than they are on me.

See, Faribault High School teams — with the exception of gymnastics and danceline — are 3-22-1 so far during the winter season. Girls hockey has been out-scored 41-12. Boys hockey has been out-scored 19-9. Girls basketball has lost by an average score of 37.7. Boys basketball has lost by an average of 17.7.

From my experience, these struggles are not due to lack of effort from the student-athletes, or from a laissez-faire attitude from coaches. Some of it is numbers — participation seems to be down across the board — with the exception of girls hockey, which has brought back its JV team.

It hasn’t just started this winter. In the fall, the boys and girls soccer teams combined to go 3-28-1. The cross country teams finished last and third-to-last out of 16 teams at the Section 1AA meet. Girls tennis went 3-12 and finished ninth in the Big 9. Of course, football and volleyball saw successful seasons, but it seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

So why is Faribault struggling so much? I wish I knew the answer. It’s not just that it’s the third-smallest school in the Big 9, because many of these sports are co-ops with BA, and if you include BA’s enrollment, Faribault passes Austin, Winona and Mankato West easily and sits right in the middle of the conference.

So what’s the point? Why am I brutally re-hashing Faribault’s failures during the 2010-11 sports season? Because at some point, we have to decide if we are OK with this. If Faribault isn’t concerned with athletic success, that’s perfectly fine. If we, as a community, would prefer our young people focus on academics, or the arts, or vocations, and limit sports to merely a sideshow to have fun and get some exercise, then I will resign myself to finding silver linings in 40-point losses. But if we want to be successful at all we do, if we refuse to accept mediocrity, if we know that we have talented athletes who deserve to be showcased and celebrated, then we have to take a hard look at how we got here and how we can change the status quo.