[quote=Allan from Fallbrook][quote=Russell]Funny or sad…I don’t know.A good portion of the guys of an average high school football team can not beat the average “non-athlete” from the same school in the decathlon. Many of the girls would beat them. I guess with the plumping up of America that might not be true today, but it was when I was a kid. Good thing they had separate PE classes for athletes because a lot of them would get smoked by average guys in a multi-sport PE class… The fastest miler and half miler also tends to under perform in other athletic endeavors, but they are elite for what they do relative to the school population. The miler is more looked at like a geek, simply because he is skinny and not fat enough to be on the football team. The fastest miler would probably beat a lot of his football playing classmates in the decathlon and the soccer players certainly would.
Disclaimer: I wasn’t that fastest miler or a lineman at my school.[/quote]
Russell: Nope, you’re right. A good portion of our offensive line was “excused” when we used to do stadium runs (up and down the stairs at our field), namely because they couldn’t hack it.
However, the linebackers, defensive backs and offensive skill position players all participated in other sports, including Track & Field, baseball and wrestling. I don’t know about your high school’s wrestling program, but ours was physically brutal, including a huge amount of “roadwork” (i.e. distance running) and weight lifting. I knew a lot of guys from the cross-country and swim teams because I ran and swam with them (I swam rather than ran whenever I could because it was less punishing on the knees).[/quote]
Couldn’t be more true… You were a Ranger Allan… How many people did you know that got a performance drop because they couldn’t do one particular thing? They did well in everything else but couldn’t hack a run time or a swim time… But were fantastic in everything else? All of those guys were pretty much atheletes that failed because they weren’t well rounded.
The definition of a athelete is pretty broad this days but I heard the perfect definiton a couple of years back.
First you have to define what it is they do as a sport or a skill. I once heard that if you can smoke or drink while doing it than its a skill. Golf, Curling, and even some would say baseball is a skill.
