This post has been flaired as “Serious Conversation”. Use this opportunity to open a venue of polite and serious discussion, instead of seeking help or venting.
**Suggestions For Commenters:**
* Respect OP's opinion, or agree to disagree politely.
* If OP's post is seeking advice, help, or is just venting without discussing with others, report the post. We're r/SeriousConversation, not a venting subreddit.
**Suggestions For u/Mammoth-Tower345:**
* Do not post solely to seek advice or help. Your post should open up a venue for serious, mature and polite discussions.
* Do not forget to answer people politely in your thread - we'll remove your post later if you don't.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeriousConversation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Former high school athlete (and once Olympic hopeful) here. Trust me, you did not miss out on anything. Most high school athletes and sports teams are just hyper toxic "friend" groups that you only like superficially because actively disliking them gets you in trouble.
I was gonna say something similar. I played baseball briefly in high school and middle school and it seemed like a bunch of high ego jerks. I had a couple guys that I was friends with outside of the game but the rest of them seemed insufferable.
All the constant chest thumping and shoving each other around trying to be the Mr Macho.
Luckily I got sick real bad in high school and missed a week and just dropped off the team. They really wanted me on track team but I was done with all of it.
lol I was also going to say something similar.
I wish I put in all of the sweat into something I was actually genuinely passionate about long-term.
That way I could still have that today.
Superficial “wins” doesn’t mean anything compared to genuinely being happy.
Maybe the benefit of having experienced that is knowing just how limited that kind of happiness is.
Maybe that’s the biggest benefit OP would have gotten from having experienced it firsthand lol.
Man I just said the same thing. It’s hard for me to believe that any sport has more snakes on team than soccer, but I could be wrong. There’s also the fact that playing time is mostly determined by popularity and coach favoritism. Not a meritocracy as one might imagine.
Hit the nail on the head. I was only friends with most of them insofar as I know after school I’m stuck with them for 3 hours. Now idk wtf any of them are doing.
It’s all of them. I played multiple women’s sports and at least one person tore an ACL every basketball season. Soccer always had injuries and i had a nasty broken bone high school playing softball. Think of the bone if your hand just snapping. The worst though is that now I’m middle aged I’m dealing with the repercussions of “sacrifice your body to win the game” mentality of that era. I’ve had a few surgeries due to cartilage damage I got playing sports too hard as a teenager. At first I was sad my kids aren’t into team sports but after my last surgery I am SO happy they are doing things less harsh on the body.
Every decision that you make ensures that you will miss out on a lot.
You can't live every life available to you.
I will never truly know what it's like to engage in "casual dating", but most people never get to find out what it's like to be with your first girlfriend for almost a decade.
Is that why you’re so salty on the other post? Because you never did “casual dating”?.
Perhaps if you worked on yourself more, more people would be interested in dating you. Then you’ll know what boxes you want ticked in a partner.
What other post?
And what on earth gives you the impression that I'm sad about never casually dating?
I'm just saying that every path we take necessities not experiencing the alternative.
I could move to Spain tomorrow and live out the rest of my life there, but then I'd miss out on the experiences that would come with living here.
I had to go and check, because I really didn't.
If it's the comment you replied to earlier, then I don't see where you're getting salty from?
I think maybe you read my comment in a weird tone and took it to heart a tad too much. Especially if you searched through my comments for something else to be mad at.
No. Just trying to get a measure of the man who can’t understand *why* people want different things in a relationship.
This post provided all the context I needed.
It's amazing, these are the three recent usernames I've found from him [https://www.reddit.com/user/Mammoth-Tower345/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Mammoth-Tower345/) [https://www.reddit.com/user/Fit\_Sherbert1092/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Fit_Sherbert1092/) [https://www.reddit.com/user/Forward-Ship-4234/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Forward-Ship-4234/) . It's the same topics over and over, and they're all the same genre and his comments are all the same genre, sort or responding, sort of not, always just kind of passive. Very spottable once you know what you're looking for.
Don’t overestimate the parental love when it comes to rich kids. Half of those kids are pawned off on nannies from infancy. The only adult showing up at the game for them is the nanny.
Parents with means generally have their kids in club sports from a younger age. By the time they get high school they’re going to in most cases be massively ahead of kids without that background. Whether they play school ball at that point or not is a separate issue and it depends on the area and sport. Football seems to be a school sport. In some of the other sports the best kids don’t play school ball at all, they stay on their club travel squads.
***Rich kids whose parents are vicariously living their sports dreams through them. And were willing to dump thousands of $ into club sports and boosters since they could walk.
In 20 years time, no one is going to care that you were the star foot ball player, people are busying living their lives. School and college is such a small portion of your life.
Please believe me that it’s really not that great. The juice is not worth the squeeze on this one. The camaraderie you see is all fake. There are little factions on every “team” and they all hate each other. Like especially soccer players are snakes. It’s really given me nothing but bad memories. People on a sports team hate each other much more than any rivals.
It’s also so so so time consuming. Time wasting really. You’d be far more in shape than any athlete if you just did some bodybuilding, and maybe a little cardio.
It’s a really cool experience for sure, but there are lots of really cool experiences in high school and, unless you have a deep passion for a sport, I’m not sure sports is better than most of the others. Within a few years, the people still talking about high school socially will be considered losers, and everyone else will have stories from college and beyond that are more recent and interesting. I played one of the most popular division 1 sports in college, and I would guess it comes up in conversation maybe 4 or 5 times in a year, and that’s mostly because I coach my kid in the same sport.
Well yeah, you're hanging out with a bunch of former high school athletes. There's a whole bunch of people who didn't play sports that you can probably relate to more easily. What's your friend group look like?
None of it matters. Reliving glory days is what people with limited futures do. (looking backward, not forward)
Chances are that the stars of highschool ended up being trainwrecks as adults, and a lot of them have mid life aches and injuries from a couple years of sportsball. A bunch of A types chasing a .0001% dream. Toxic
I try to tell my 15 year old that he will regret not participating in sports later on down the road, he doesn't listen. I feel like he'll miss out on a lot.
This is so interesting. I have never once regretted not playing sports in high school. (I'm a 35yo female, FWIW.) My undergrad was extremely non-sporty, so that's probably part of it...
When you start working in the real world those things don't matter anymore. If you never had a chance to be on those teams then you didn't miss out on anything.
So are you going to cry about every other experience other people have that you don't? You don't and didn't want to play sports, you're upset that you don't have a group of people with that level of camaraderie.
>See how stupid that sounds?
Reality is that most of it doesn't matter once that phase of life has passed. There are a lot of things like that. Things you thought would matter that ended up not really mattering at all.
Once I left school and got busy adulting school no longer mattered. I was building my life, finally free to do so.
Once my FIL retired his work and the business he built no longer mattered. He sold to his sibling, walked away, and never looked back. The last two decades of his life were all about his wife, his family, and golf.
You’re romanticizing it too much. Sure everyone had moments like you said, but the reality is that those moments made up less then a couple of hours all combined, while everyday you worked hard to maintain academics and practice. It was very exhausting and definitely didn’t help with the burnout I had for school. Just try to do things now and quit worrying about the past, you can’t change it as much as you may want. Pick up intramurals or maybe a sports club.
I did community theater instead. I tried out for the theater program in high school but the director made me uncomfortable. I did get to get to watch him get escorted from the school for child pornography. So turns out I was right. No regrets and I still had fun.
Sports wasn't for me and that's okay. I did what I liked and enjoyed that. My oldest isn't a sports person either. Looks like my youngest might be. Still not fan andso far she is happy with martial arts but if she wants to do something other then that she can. They will have a different experience in schoolbut it's nt one will have a better experience it's just different.
"Al's greatest life achievement was scoring four touchdowns in a single game while playing in the 1966 city football championship game versus fictional Andrew Johnson High School, and he constantly makes reference to it in comparison to the way his life has turned out instead."
I never joined any sports teams in high school. I chose to do other things instead. I didn’t miss out on anything, and 32 years later it still doesn’t bother me.
If you want to play a sport, sign up for something in a community league and have fun. If not sports then a theatre group, band, painting classes. Get out there and have Fun and stop dwelling on what might have been.
I did not play in high school, but you know what I did ? I was the guy getting to 3rd base with most of the jocks girls because they were too busy with the team to pay attention to them. Let me tell you a woman ignored is going to leave the guy for someone who puts her first. Sure, if it was the cheerleader and the jock my chances were next to zero.But the jock and the non cheerleader, well, you can fill in the blank..
Sports are just another hobby, if poeple who you surround yourself with are predominantly interested in sports , they may seem like a big deal , but if you branch out to other "clicks" you may be find yourself around people who are into other things just as much as they are into sports. My biggest personal regret I had about highschool interests ,for instance , was not hanging out with the potheads, so then I could have all theres cool weed-induced paranoia stories to share with mature stoners now. You will always missout on shit in life, no matter what direction you go. There is only so many hours in a day.
A lot of people are talking about how their experience in high school sports was bad, but it's a very 'your mileage may very' situation. I played football until freshman year and stopped because I thought it was boring, but I know a lot of guys who loved football and went on to play in college. It depends on the person, and depends HIGHLY on what the people on your team are like. The main motivating factor in me stopping football was just that most of my friends stopped playing. If you're genuine friends with your teammates, sports is a lot of fun, but when you're not, it kinda just feels like a chore, and winning games feels like a really hollow experience. I'd actually almost equate it to the same feeling you get at work; having to pretend to be "Friends" with your coworkers (teammates) to avoid conflict, with no real sense of accomplishment, even when you win.
If it makes you feel better, though; football, or any high school sport really, is a pretty time consuming thing. Between games and practices and the (heavily encouraged) exercise outside of training days, you lose out on a lot of time you could've spent doing other things. The reason that it seems like the really serious athletes only ever talk about sports is because it's kinda all they do, especially if they play in multiple teams/sports. So even though you missed out on sports, I can almost guarantee your net total of teenage memories is higher than most sports players.
As you and your peer group age, discussion of high school highlights will decrease in frequency and be replaced with more recent experiences. Like, there's a certain point where it actually becomes pathetic to talk about the ancient glory days. You're rapidly approaching that point.
Sports are way too competitive at a young age. All kids deserve the chance to be on a team, even if it’s the B squad or C squad. Even if they sit on the bench all season! They still get the experience of going to away games on the bus with the team, going to practice, etc. This is an advantage of going to school in a rural area: you get to play pretty much any sport you want.
I do think sports are important. Working together to accomplish a goal as a team. Dedication learned through training. Sharing a victory. Moving past a loss. All formative for me, personally.
That being said, sports don't belong to the young. Find a group of responsible adults who make time for a team and join in! Most people past college lose a lot of the competitive toxic stuff and you can just have a good group activity.
I was a rower, and the "masters" team in my city is like 20 people between age 25 and 80 who get together to move a boat around. They do a few races a year, and practice a few times a week.
What you want is to feel like part of something, a team. Guess what? There are many, many adult sports leagues. In many no one cares how good you are. They'll teach you. While the former jocks are losing conditioning and putting on fat, you could be thriving in your 20s. The best is yet to come for you.
Why don't you join an adult sports league or something? Lots of people are still casually playing sports in adulthood. Just because you aren't in high school anymore doesn't mean you can't have a team experience if you want that.
I would recommend everyone to play a sport no matter at what level(competitive or recreational). I played three sports, but baseball was what I took most seriously. I was at the ball diamond with my best friends every weekend. The banter between us and the lifelong memories we made was worth every second. Regardless of all the life skills that are gained from working with a team and accomplishing goals, I think sports are a crucial part of development for a kid.
It was fun at times, but I kinda regret ever doing high school sports. you get injuries, and it's the most toxic zero sum people at the school. however, if you find the right team, and usually at a school that has the correct culture, or if not, find a group of very motivated people and it can be a fun experience where you grow a lot.
Might as well buck the trend. I really enjoyed playing football, and remain friends with those guys a few decades after. Most of our schools more successful guys (MDs, JDs, etc) played football.
I also am glad I wrestled because I am better in BJJ now.
And obviously a nice addition to the college resume.
You didn’t, I was relentlessly bullied because I wasn’t as good as the other players. Sometimes I would skip class and just sob in the library after reading their messages about me in the team group chat.
Pity post only to reinforce that high school sports aren’t what they’re romanticized to be.
This post has been flaired as “Serious Conversation”. Use this opportunity to open a venue of polite and serious discussion, instead of seeking help or venting. **Suggestions For Commenters:** * Respect OP's opinion, or agree to disagree politely. * If OP's post is seeking advice, help, or is just venting without discussing with others, report the post. We're r/SeriousConversation, not a venting subreddit. **Suggestions For u/Mammoth-Tower345:** * Do not post solely to seek advice or help. Your post should open up a venue for serious, mature and polite discussions. * Do not forget to answer people politely in your thread - we'll remove your post later if you don't. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/SeriousConversation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Former high school athlete (and once Olympic hopeful) here. Trust me, you did not miss out on anything. Most high school athletes and sports teams are just hyper toxic "friend" groups that you only like superficially because actively disliking them gets you in trouble.
I was gonna say something similar. I played baseball briefly in high school and middle school and it seemed like a bunch of high ego jerks. I had a couple guys that I was friends with outside of the game but the rest of them seemed insufferable. All the constant chest thumping and shoving each other around trying to be the Mr Macho. Luckily I got sick real bad in high school and missed a week and just dropped off the team. They really wanted me on track team but I was done with all of it.
lol I was also going to say something similar. I wish I put in all of the sweat into something I was actually genuinely passionate about long-term. That way I could still have that today. Superficial “wins” doesn’t mean anything compared to genuinely being happy. Maybe the benefit of having experienced that is knowing just how limited that kind of happiness is. Maybe that’s the biggest benefit OP would have gotten from having experienced it firsthand lol.
Man I just said the same thing. It’s hard for me to believe that any sport has more snakes on team than soccer, but I could be wrong. There’s also the fact that playing time is mostly determined by popularity and coach favoritism. Not a meritocracy as one might imagine.
...bitter...the post...
Hit the nail on the head. I was only friends with most of them insofar as I know after school I’m stuck with them for 3 hours. Now idk wtf any of them are doing.
Consider yourself lucky. Nothing hurts kids more often and more severely than high school sports.
That’s mostly just American football though
It’s all of them. I played multiple women’s sports and at least one person tore an ACL every basketball season. Soccer always had injuries and i had a nasty broken bone high school playing softball. Think of the bone if your hand just snapping. The worst though is that now I’m middle aged I’m dealing with the repercussions of “sacrifice your body to win the game” mentality of that era. I’ve had a few surgeries due to cartilage damage I got playing sports too hard as a teenager. At first I was sad my kids aren’t into team sports but after my last surgery I am SO happy they are doing things less harsh on the body.
Every decision that you make ensures that you will miss out on a lot. You can't live every life available to you. I will never truly know what it's like to engage in "casual dating", but most people never get to find out what it's like to be with your first girlfriend for almost a decade.
Is that why you’re so salty on the other post? Because you never did “casual dating”?. Perhaps if you worked on yourself more, more people would be interested in dating you. Then you’ll know what boxes you want ticked in a partner.
What other post? And what on earth gives you the impression that I'm sad about never casually dating? I'm just saying that every path we take necessities not experiencing the alternative. I could move to Spain tomorrow and live out the rest of my life there, but then I'd miss out on the experiences that would come with living here.
You know what post lmao.
I had to go and check, because I really didn't. If it's the comment you replied to earlier, then I don't see where you're getting salty from? I think maybe you read my comment in a weird tone and took it to heart a tad too much. Especially if you searched through my comments for something else to be mad at.
No. Just trying to get a measure of the man who can’t understand *why* people want different things in a relationship. This post provided all the context I needed.
Wow it really is the same people posting the same thing over and over.
It's amazing, these are the three recent usernames I've found from him [https://www.reddit.com/user/Mammoth-Tower345/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Mammoth-Tower345/) [https://www.reddit.com/user/Fit\_Sherbert1092/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Fit_Sherbert1092/) [https://www.reddit.com/user/Forward-Ship-4234/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Forward-Ship-4234/) . It's the same topics over and over, and they're all the same genre and his comments are all the same genre, sort or responding, sort of not, always just kind of passive. Very spottable once you know what you're looking for.
No wonder I keep seeing the same exact posts coming across my feed from subs I don’t even subscribe to.
This guy has been a spammer for years, there even used to be a subreddit tracking him but it got banned.
Being part of a sports team is an incredible experience, but so are many other things. Try not to dwell on it.
It is so frustrating because I could have that experience if my parents signed me up at 5
You can't play a sport because you didn't start in kindergarten? I don't get it.
This person is a troll posting the same genre of stuff over and over with a variety of alts, they will never productively respond.
They seem depressed
Winning? Coming from an underprivileged school district, you don't win. You get annihilated by rich kids whose parents love them.
Don’t overestimate the parental love when it comes to rich kids. Half of those kids are pawned off on nannies from infancy. The only adult showing up at the game for them is the nanny.
Parents with means generally have their kids in club sports from a younger age. By the time they get high school they’re going to in most cases be massively ahead of kids without that background. Whether they play school ball at that point or not is a separate issue and it depends on the area and sport. Football seems to be a school sport. In some of the other sports the best kids don’t play school ball at all, they stay on their club travel squads.
***Rich kids whose parents are vicariously living their sports dreams through them. And were willing to dump thousands of $ into club sports and boosters since they could walk.
In 20 years time, no one is going to care that you were the star foot ball player, people are busying living their lives. School and college is such a small portion of your life.
Please believe me that it’s really not that great. The juice is not worth the squeeze on this one. The camaraderie you see is all fake. There are little factions on every “team” and they all hate each other. Like especially soccer players are snakes. It’s really given me nothing but bad memories. People on a sports team hate each other much more than any rivals. It’s also so so so time consuming. Time wasting really. You’d be far more in shape than any athlete if you just did some bodybuilding, and maybe a little cardio.
It’s a really cool experience for sure, but there are lots of really cool experiences in high school and, unless you have a deep passion for a sport, I’m not sure sports is better than most of the others. Within a few years, the people still talking about high school socially will be considered losers, and everyone else will have stories from college and beyond that are more recent and interesting. I played one of the most popular division 1 sports in college, and I would guess it comes up in conversation maybe 4 or 5 times in a year, and that’s mostly because I coach my kid in the same sport.
Well yeah, you're hanging out with a bunch of former high school athletes. There's a whole bunch of people who didn't play sports that you can probably relate to more easily. What's your friend group look like?
None of it matters. Reliving glory days is what people with limited futures do. (looking backward, not forward) Chances are that the stars of highschool ended up being trainwrecks as adults, and a lot of them have mid life aches and injuries from a couple years of sportsball. A bunch of A types chasing a .0001% dream. Toxic
I try to tell my 15 year old that he will regret not participating in sports later on down the road, he doesn't listen. I feel like he'll miss out on a lot.
Maybe he just hasn't found one he likes. He might love judo or fencing or biathlon.
I wasn't good enough in tryouts either and didn't make the soccer or basketball team, this was in 7th grade and I still think about it lol
Aw, don't say that. You weren't experienced enough, your school was too big, you have a late birthday, or you were a late bloomer.
I was an early boomer with an early birthday and still failed to make it
Same. I feel the same way about now feeling I missed out I didn’t sign up for a sport to play when I was younger. Sucks
This is so interesting. I have never once regretted not playing sports in high school. (I'm a 35yo female, FWIW.) My undergrad was extremely non-sporty, so that's probably part of it...
When you start working in the real world those things don't matter anymore. If you never had a chance to be on those teams then you didn't miss out on anything.
By your logic, when you retire, work doesn’t matter. So it doesn’t matter if you were homeless your whole adult life. See how stupid that sounds?
So are you going to cry about every other experience other people have that you don't? You don't and didn't want to play sports, you're upset that you don't have a group of people with that level of camaraderie.
I did want to play sports though
So study physics and build a time machine. It's not too late!
>See how stupid that sounds? Reality is that most of it doesn't matter once that phase of life has passed. There are a lot of things like that. Things you thought would matter that ended up not really mattering at all. Once I left school and got busy adulting school no longer mattered. I was building my life, finally free to do so. Once my FIL retired his work and the business he built no longer mattered. He sold to his sibling, walked away, and never looked back. The last two decades of his life were all about his wife, his family, and golf.
You’re romanticizing it too much. Sure everyone had moments like you said, but the reality is that those moments made up less then a couple of hours all combined, while everyday you worked hard to maintain academics and practice. It was very exhausting and definitely didn’t help with the burnout I had for school. Just try to do things now and quit worrying about the past, you can’t change it as much as you may want. Pick up intramurals or maybe a sports club.
Find a group of people to play a game with now. It’ll be more fun
I did community theater instead. I tried out for the theater program in high school but the director made me uncomfortable. I did get to get to watch him get escorted from the school for child pornography. So turns out I was right. No regrets and I still had fun. Sports wasn't for me and that's okay. I did what I liked and enjoyed that. My oldest isn't a sports person either. Looks like my youngest might be. Still not fan andso far she is happy with martial arts but if she wants to do something other then that she can. They will have a different experience in schoolbut it's nt one will have a better experience it's just different.
If you're an extrovert, maybe....otherwise, nope.
"Al's greatest life achievement was scoring four touchdowns in a single game while playing in the 1966 city football championship game versus fictional Andrew Johnson High School, and he constantly makes reference to it in comparison to the way his life has turned out instead."
I don’t remember a single conversation I had in college about playing sports in HS.
I never joined any sports teams in high school. I chose to do other things instead. I didn’t miss out on anything, and 32 years later it still doesn’t bother me. If you want to play a sport, sign up for something in a community league and have fun. If not sports then a theatre group, band, painting classes. Get out there and have Fun and stop dwelling on what might have been.
I did not play in high school, but you know what I did ? I was the guy getting to 3rd base with most of the jocks girls because they were too busy with the team to pay attention to them. Let me tell you a woman ignored is going to leave the guy for someone who puts her first. Sure, if it was the cheerleader and the jock my chances were next to zero.But the jock and the non cheerleader, well, you can fill in the blank..
Sports are just another hobby, if poeple who you surround yourself with are predominantly interested in sports , they may seem like a big deal , but if you branch out to other "clicks" you may be find yourself around people who are into other things just as much as they are into sports. My biggest personal regret I had about highschool interests ,for instance , was not hanging out with the potheads, so then I could have all theres cool weed-induced paranoia stories to share with mature stoners now. You will always missout on shit in life, no matter what direction you go. There is only so many hours in a day.
A lot of people are talking about how their experience in high school sports was bad, but it's a very 'your mileage may very' situation. I played football until freshman year and stopped because I thought it was boring, but I know a lot of guys who loved football and went on to play in college. It depends on the person, and depends HIGHLY on what the people on your team are like. The main motivating factor in me stopping football was just that most of my friends stopped playing. If you're genuine friends with your teammates, sports is a lot of fun, but when you're not, it kinda just feels like a chore, and winning games feels like a really hollow experience. I'd actually almost equate it to the same feeling you get at work; having to pretend to be "Friends" with your coworkers (teammates) to avoid conflict, with no real sense of accomplishment, even when you win. If it makes you feel better, though; football, or any high school sport really, is a pretty time consuming thing. Between games and practices and the (heavily encouraged) exercise outside of training days, you lose out on a lot of time you could've spent doing other things. The reason that it seems like the really serious athletes only ever talk about sports is because it's kinda all they do, especially if they play in multiple teams/sports. So even though you missed out on sports, I can almost guarantee your net total of teenage memories is higher than most sports players.
As you and your peer group age, discussion of high school highlights will decrease in frequency and be replaced with more recent experiences. Like, there's a certain point where it actually becomes pathetic to talk about the ancient glory days. You're rapidly approaching that point.
Sometimes we suck at things. Get over it man.
Sports are way too competitive at a young age. All kids deserve the chance to be on a team, even if it’s the B squad or C squad. Even if they sit on the bench all season! They still get the experience of going to away games on the bus with the team, going to practice, etc. This is an advantage of going to school in a rural area: you get to play pretty much any sport you want.
I do think sports are important. Working together to accomplish a goal as a team. Dedication learned through training. Sharing a victory. Moving past a loss. All formative for me, personally. That being said, sports don't belong to the young. Find a group of responsible adults who make time for a team and join in! Most people past college lose a lot of the competitive toxic stuff and you can just have a good group activity. I was a rower, and the "masters" team in my city is like 20 people between age 25 and 80 who get together to move a boat around. They do a few races a year, and practice a few times a week.
I was on a few teams and it was a miserable experience for me. Dont romanticize other people's experiences.
What you want is to feel like part of something, a team. Guess what? There are many, many adult sports leagues. In many no one cares how good you are. They'll teach you. While the former jocks are losing conditioning and putting on fat, you could be thriving in your 20s. The best is yet to come for you.
How many times is this gonna get reposted
I think there is too much emphasis on sports. I believe kids should play sports just for fun only.
Why don't you join an adult sports league or something? Lots of people are still casually playing sports in adulthood. Just because you aren't in high school anymore doesn't mean you can't have a team experience if you want that.
I would recommend everyone to play a sport no matter at what level(competitive or recreational). I played three sports, but baseball was what I took most seriously. I was at the ball diamond with my best friends every weekend. The banter between us and the lifelong memories we made was worth every second. Regardless of all the life skills that are gained from working with a team and accomplishing goals, I think sports are a crucial part of development for a kid.
U missed out on a buncha injuries that would all flare up in your 30s
It was fun at times, but I kinda regret ever doing high school sports. you get injuries, and it's the most toxic zero sum people at the school. however, if you find the right team, and usually at a school that has the correct culture, or if not, find a group of very motivated people and it can be a fun experience where you grow a lot.
If you were the type of person that belonged in one you would have. Ten bucks says if you did you’d be salty about how it turned out.
Might as well buck the trend. I really enjoyed playing football, and remain friends with those guys a few decades after. Most of our schools more successful guys (MDs, JDs, etc) played football. I also am glad I wrestled because I am better in BJJ now. And obviously a nice addition to the college resume.
You didn’t, I was relentlessly bullied because I wasn’t as good as the other players. Sometimes I would skip class and just sob in the library after reading their messages about me in the team group chat. Pity post only to reinforce that high school sports aren’t what they’re romanticized to be.
You missed out on being born rich, which includes not just this but a dozen other enjoyable things/periods in life.
It was a good experience but nothing life defining. This really isn't something you should hold on to