Here we see that honkey skateboarders drop out of high school to maximize their financial and professional success in their sport. Many opt for home-schooling, but some just drop out. Figure skaters and tennis players do the same thing. Why not for football and basketball players? Why must football and basketball teams accept the obligation of (supposedly) educating its participants in math and literature? And why must schools accept the obligations (taken seriously!) of feilding the best football and basketball teams? Should they now also accept the task of fielding the best possible skate-boarders?
It's insane; it defies logic. If a kid shows a genius for skate boarding, acting, or basketball, logic demands that we permit that kid the option of persuing that life track to its ultimate conclusion. If the kid wants also to learn physics and history, he can do it on the side, or do it later. Leave schools alone to produce scholars, and leave sports teams alone to tend to their own affairs. DIVORCE THEM!
2006-09-20
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[This article will become pay-for-view.]
September 20, 2006 nyt.com
For New-Sport Athletes, High School Finishes 2nd
By MATT HIGGINS
In a sport skewing younger every year, Ryan Sheckler was one of the youngest professional skateboarders ever. By eighth grade, he had defeated competitors twice his age and won several contests, including the 2003 X Games skateboard park event on national television.
Immortalized as a character in a best-selling video game franchise and in movies, Sheckler wanted a role that many teenage skateboarding stars repudiate: that of a regular student, in his case, at San Clemente (Calif.) High School.
“I wanted to see what high school was all about,” Sheckler said in an e-mail message. “I wanted to be with my friends and go to the dances and football games.”
Two years ago this month, he began his freshman year. He wrestled in the 103-pound weight class, and hung out with friends in the cafeteria. But after returning from a skateboarding trip to Australia in February 2005, he realized that as he sat in history class, his future was inexorably rolling away.
“It was a good experience, but it was a disaster,” his mother and manager, Gretchen Sheckler, said of high school. “He was out of circulation for six months, out of the magazines. It hurt his career.”
As salaries soar and sponsors stoop to sign younger talent (the youngest professional skateboarder now is the 11-year-old Nyjah Huston), Sheckler’s situation has become increasingly common across action sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing and motocross. For those who do not drop out of school altogether, the approach to education has been somewhat similar to what young athletes in sports like tennis and figure skating have established: home schooling, independent study and sports academies.
“As athletes get younger and these sports get more competitive, you have to stay in the game,” said Circe Wallace, a retired snowboarder turned action sports agent. “I’ve been in this business 15 years, and it’s always been those with parents that understand the freedom and flexibility of home schooling that go the furthest.”
On the East Coast, some surfers have turned to home schooling.
Brian Broom is competition director of the Eastern Surfing Association, the world’s largest amateur surfing organization. “A joke we have is that in the next few years companies will be in the maternity ward,” he said, referring to sponsors aiming at younger and younger athletes to endorse their products.
Broom said young East Coast surfers must travel to California, Hawaii and Australia to prove themselves on better waves. Because mounting absences threaten to wipe out the academic year, home school becomes an attractive option.
In motocross, where an elite 13-year-old can earn more than $100,000 annually, 90 percent of minors are either home schooled or drop out of school, said Jimmy Button, a professional racer who is now an agent.
Button said the prevailing mentality in motocross, like skateboarding, did not place a priority on school. “A lot of parents aren’t worried about missing education,” he said. “They just want their kid to ride as fast as possible.”
In order to keep young riders on track to complete high school, Button’s company, Wasserman Media Group, and Racer X magazine have discussed collaborating on a mobile classroom with teachers that would travel to races.
“Only 6 of 40 amateurs are major competitors,’’ Button said. “Only two will make it to the pro ranks, and maybe one will make a substantial living.’’
He went on to say: “With no education and making 80-90 grand a year, after your career is over, after seven or eight years, you have nothing. It’s sad.’’
Of all action sports, snowboarding has been the most progressive. For more than a decade, two ski and snowboard academies in Vermont, both boarding schools, have helped athletes receive an education.
At Stratton Mountain School, alumni include the 2002 Olympics halfpipe gold medalist Ross Powers and the 2006 snowboard cross silver medalist Lindsey Jacobellis. In nearby Ludlow, Okemo Mountain School has served as a satellite classroom for the two-time Olympic silver medalist Danny Kass and the 2006 women’s gold medalist Hannah Teter.
And in Southern California, a hotbed of action sports, the Olympic snowboarding champion Shaun White graduated in 2005 from Carlsbad Seaside Academy, where he received art credit for designing a pro model snowboard with his sponsor, Burton.
Part of the Carlsbad public school system, Seaside was founded in 1998 for successful students. White, who grew up in Carlsbad, north of San Diego, was the first action sports star to attend. Credit is offered for those sports and for news media interviews, and students are required to check in only every three weeks, so local professional skateboarders have gravitated to Seaside. Rob Lorifice graduated last year, and Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins, an X Games gold medalist in women’s skateboarding, is a senior this year.
“This allows them to travel without being marked absent,” said Katy Heritage, a teacher at Seaside. “Here, they’re more on their own. Our kids have to be a little more independent.”
Hawkins said she appreciated the freedom. “Most kids in action sports learn to focus when there’s a lot of commotion,” she said, explaining how she once did homework on top of a ramp during a contest.
Still, Hawkins remains an anomaly among professional skateboarders: she is a woman, and she is still in school. With prime sponsorship years falling between 15 and 25, most of her peers shunt math for the calculus of a lucrative career.
“You can’t do both,” said Carleton Curtis, managing editor of Transworld Skateboarding magazine, referring to skateboarding and school. “Skateboarding is big business these days. There are too many obligations when it comes to sponsorship. It’s a full-time adult job taken on by 15-year-old kids.”
Sheckler, for one, skateboards daily. He travels frequently for contests and appearances, such as a trip to New York recently to be the host of a party coinciding with MTV’s Video Music Awards.
Although the Shecklers would not discuss his earnings, Ryan’s sponsors include the apparel maker Volcom, Red Bull, the cellphone service Amp’d Mobile and Etnies, with whom he has a signature sneaker. And last year prize money from contests alone exceeded six figures.
Still, Gretchen Sheckler, who has a bachelor’s degree in finance, determined that her son would finish high school.
So in 2005 Ryan Sheckler enrolled in another school near his home, the private Futures-Halstrom High in Mission Viejo, where he began his junior year last week.
“I quit my career to start managing his,” Gretchen Sheckler said. “I said, ‘I’ll do this for you if you get your high school diploma.’ ”
With an independent study schedule, Futures appeals to a range of students, including athletes like Sasha Cohen, the Olympic silver medalist in figure skating, who graduated in 2002.
Each week, Sheckler works with teachers for 45 minutes per subject. He completes assignments on his own time, and earns school credit for work experience: Skateboarding serves as a surrogate for gym. Philanthropic and media engagements count. And so does travel to Spain, the Czech Republic and the United Arab Emirates.
Since leaving traditional school, Sheckler’s grades have improved, he said. He is featured again in skateboarding magazines. And he has regained competitive poise, winning the Dew Action Sports Tour’s skateboard park championship in 2005, and placing second at the X Games in August.
Gretchen Sheckler said academics had kept her son grounded.
“Their lives are so jaded,” she said of professional skateboarders. “They don’t have normal real world experience. He has to have those real world experiences and perseverance for eight months of class to make it through geometry or algebra.”
Yet according to his mother, Ryan Sheckler is a normal high school student in at least one respect.
When it comes to homework, she said, “He waits till the last minute.”
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