Quotes & Sayings About High School Sports

When you join the NFL, you start from scratch. As long as I've been playing - which has been since I was eight years old - the game becomes harder at every level. Little league, high school, college - they're different stages you have to go through, and professional sport is completely different again. — Reggie Bush

At the high school level, the coaches get these kids in revenue-driven sports and take them away from baseball. There's so much pressure on these kids to even play spring football. We need to get the African-American players back in the game, which I think would make it not only a better game, but more exciting and entertaining for everyone. — Pat Gillick

I grew up in a town with a great wrestling tradition. Then I was a team sport queen in high school; I played softball, volleyball, and soccer. Oh, and I also did ski racing. — Aimee Mullins

Owen Owens Field embodies the name of the team that calls it home. It's Spartan to the core. — Neil Hayes

I would consider it the greatest experience of my life, it's the experience that made me a man, that taught me so many life lessons that you get from sport, ones that I've been able to pass down. (It was) invaluable, beyond words, got me through school, high school, and college, it was the greatest gift I gave myself. — Ted McGinley

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then ... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball. — Monte Irvin

I didn't really get into boys until my junior year of high school, when I had my first boyfriend. But for the most part I was always playing sports, so I was too busy for them! — Jennie Finch

I wanted to perform well for my mom and dad, because in high school, I didn't have a job. My brothers, they worked at Pizza Hut or places like that, but sports, that was my way of giving back. — Junior Seau

I was sporty in high school. I played tennis and hockey, and was basketball captain. Then I went to university and stopped doing sport and started eating ice cream. — Rebel Wilson

As a sophomore, I wanted to play varsity in three sports. And I accomplished that. It was a great feat that year, and something I held special. I wanted to bring a championship team to Oceanside High School, and it happened. It was a great year that I will never forget. — Junior Seau

I love sports. I was an athlete in high school, and my school was so small we didn't have a football team, so it's the one sport I didn't bother to learn the rules to because I never went to game. — Katie Aselton

I literally came out of high school thinking that I was going to do something in the sports world because I grew up with a very sports-oriented family. My last year of school, I got involved with playing guitar and singing, and I joined a band and I just decided that year somehow that I was going to play music. — Dean Geyer

Sports programs are an important part of young people's lives but should never over-shadow the true purpose of high school and that is to earn a diploma. So often today sports have become more important than an education. This must be remedied because the true focus must always be toward the student's academic development. — George M. Gilbert

I worked at a daycare for a couple of years going through high school and college. I did youth sports camps. I ran all the camps through my college. — Derek Theler

As a child, I could beat most kids in sprints, but overall, wrestling was the most natural sport for me. In fact, I was a pretty good high school wrestler. I was unusually quick and strong. — Henry Paulson

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below. — Carolyn Kizer

The Nike swoop, the three Adidas stripes, the little Polo player on a horse, the Hollister seagull, the symbols of Philadelphia's professional sports teams, even our high school mascot that you athletes wear to battle other schools - some of you wear our Mustang to class even when there is no sporting event scheduled. These are your symbols, what you wear to prove that your identity matches the identity of others. Much like the Nazis had their swastika. — Matthew Quick

I was a better basketball player growing up in high school than I was a swimmer. Basketball to this day is my favorite sport. — Ryan Lochte

De La Salle hung on for the 28-21 victory. Afterward, Ladouceur stood before his exhausted team. It was by far the biggest victory in school history at the time, but the coach noticed that several of his players wore masks of disappointment.

"It's OK to feel disappointed if you didn't play your absolute best," he told them. "That's what we're all about. — Neil Hayes

He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults' living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete. — H. G. Bissinger

You all know and lived the 'secrets' to De La Salle's success-love, brotherhood, sacrifice, discipline, heart, courage, passion, honesty. These are not just 'catch words' we throw around to impress others or justify our existence. We know what these mean because we created it and lived it. Understand that with that knowledge there is no turning back for us-ignorance is not an option. It is your future duty, no matter where you end up, to create the environment you have created here by bringing your best selves to the table. — Neil Hayes

I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I follow the sport. I played in high school, a little bit in college, played on various club teams most of my life, and all three of my sons are competitive soccer players and far better than I ever was. — Hampton Sides

Every high school I went to, I joined in the middle of the year, so sports helped. But you see a lot of bullies when you move to eight states, I'll say that. — Pierce Brown

When I was in elementary school, we weren't allowed to do sports other than cheerleading. By junior high, they let us play, but we had to come back after 6:30 p.m. to practice because there was only one gymnasium and the boys used it first. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

J.J. Watt is larger than life and Houston's newest sports hero, in every sense of the word. He is a guy who spends NFL Fridays at high school football games and actively seeks out those in need of his kindness. — Hannah Storm

I've always felt a little lost in life, like I never received complete instructions on who I'm supposed to be. Everyone else around me seemed to know exactly who they were. Their lives would fly right by me; their GPS's locked on to destinations while I just sat idling in the street. In high school I never did any extracurricular activities because I couldn't figure out if I was a sports person or a music person. And it was no different in college. I wandered through four different majors, unable to decide who I wanted to be. I just felt like a blank slate.

And if I was a blank slate, Micah York was The Starry Night - authentic, beautiful, perfect. He was my exact antithesis which is what attracted me to him in the first place. He was born knowing exactly who he was and what he was about. His confidence and certainty in himself was an all but tangible element of him. — C.K. Walker

I put so much pressure on myself to be perfect. Between homework and sports and drama and being social, I slept about four hours a night through high school and college. — Allison Williams

I played three sports in high school, baseball, football and basketball. Baseball really helped me a lot. — Calvin Pryor

In student government in high school, I learned how to deal with people, and in college I studied Eastern philosophy. I'm also an avid team-sports fan. I think I just blended them all together and came out with a business management philosophy that combines the Eastern ethic with the Western sport concept, basically. — Michael Ovitz

Understatement has become part of the tradition. A proposal to build a history room to house the football team's memorabilia was immediately shelved when many former players complained. What makes this program so special is what you carry in your heart, they argued, not what you hang on the wall. — Neil Hayes

I am going to go out a winner if I have to find a high school race to win my last race. — Johnny Gray

I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page. — H. G. Bissinger

One of the most unfortunate things I see when identifying youth players is the girl who is told over the years how great she is. By the time she's a high school freshman, she starts to believe it. By her senior year, she's fizzled out. Then there's her counterpart: the girl waiting in the wings who quietly and with determination decides she's going to make something of herself. Invariably, this humble, hardworking girl is the one who becomes the real player. — Anson Dorrance

I started modeling when I was about 2 or 3 years old; I started with Baby Guess, and I did Guess Kids, and that was the extent of my modeling career as a kid. I took all of my elementary, middle and high school years off to focus on school and sports. — Gigi Hadid

I've always loved movies but everyone loves movies, so I never conceived of the fact that I could actually be in them. In high school I had some friends in the drama department, but they were just doing plays, and I was like, "Eh, I don't really think that that's me." So I just played sports. Then, a bunch of years later, I'm acting. — Channing Tatum

One of the privileges of being an athlete is that on days when I have practice and games, I'm present whether I'm present or not. It's not fair, but that's the system. What can I do about it? — Erin O'Riordan

When I was fifteen, I dreamed of living in the big city, as many a young person does if he is artistic and sensitive. By 'artistic and sensitive' I mean short, skinny, unkissed, bad at sports, and carrying a C average in high school. — P. J. O'Rourke

There will soon be streams of data coming from all manner of products - appliances, clothing, sporting goods, you name it. Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you can export the data from your son's football helmet to a new app that monitors force and impact against a cohort of high school players around the country? — John Battelle

I was sports editor for my high school newspaper, but I think I shied away from journalism. — Jenna Bush

I was a ballplayer, but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports, but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder. — Chad Harbach

I was into sports in high school, but I got kicked out of Richmond High at 17, so I never graduated. However, I still get invites to the class reunions ... I don't know that I want to see how everyone looks now. — Ryan Stiles

Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.
This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN.
Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much. — Sherman Alexie

I ran the high school newspaper and was in student government. I played sports my whole life but was never picked as captain. — Bing Gordon

[When asked how someone 6'3 had dared take up golf:] I was too tall to make the chess team in my high school, so I tried golf. — Carol Mann

I was a pretty normal high school kid. I just loved to play sports and had opportunities, and the Lord blessed me with talent, and I just tried to take advantage of it. — Matt Holliday

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. — John Holt

In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure. — Mike Krzyzewski

The process begins during the off-season program, when players spend countless hours together and become heavily invested in the season before it even starts. It continues during these weekly meetings, when players stand and deliver heartfelt testimonials. You can't play for Ladouceur unless you're willing to stand in front of your teammates and bare your soul. You can't play unless you're willing to cry. — Neil Hayes

Everyone has those times when you feel like you don't fit in. Everyone struggles to a certain extent with being cool and popular, but I never really let it affect me. I played sports and did theater, and school was really important to me. I had fun in high school. — Spencer Boldman

I played basketball in high school, and I love watching sports - I'll watch everything except maybe hockey. — Andy Roddick

Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Sports were a big part of my life. I was the captain of the basketball team in high school, and captain of the basketball team at Princeton. — John W. Rogers Jr.

I didn't know it yet, but he would become one of our high school's super-athletes. There were hints of athletic (and, presumably, sexual) prowess there. For one, boys as ridiculously Abercrombie- esque good-looking as he was are always sports stars throughout high school. It is a rule, a self- fulfilling prophecy. It seems as if, sometime during elementary school, coaches make note of the little boys with the most classic bone structure and the best height projections and kidnap them, training them under cover of night. Not all of them will make it in college ball (that's what people call it, right?) because by the time they're all seniors, many of them will have been riding more on the sportsman-like nature of their faces than their actual abilities. But until that day, coaches will keep putting them on the field in the most prominent and visually appealing positions because they just kind of look like that's where they should be. At least I'm pretty sure that is what's going on. — Katie Heaney

Victories are a byproduct of a larger vision. It begins with a question:

How much do we owe one another?

Each coach's and player's individual answer is one of the building blocks of The Streak. De La Salle separates itself from the competition because everyone from the head coach to the least accomplished player on the roster is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to be their absolute best. — Neil Hayes

If we had played Poly a hundred more times that year we wouldn't have beaten them again. On that night we found a way. It was an unbelievable thing. It was a marvelous, miraculous win." -Coach Frank Allocco — Neil Hayes

In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski. — Mallory Ortberg

For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams. — Hamish Bowles

Basketball was not my main sport in grade school, or even the first year of high school. — Mike Krzyzewski

Acting was something I did growing up. I never it took it too seriously; it was just one of those things I got into high school and was like, 'Nah, I don't want to continue acting.' Cause I got into it professionally by local theater, and from there, I just decided to do sports and be more a high school kid and have my fun. — Stephen Colletti

When I got cut from the varsity team as a sophomore in high school, I learned something. I knew I never wanted to feel that bad again. I never wanted to have that taste in my mouth, that hole in my stomach. So I set a goal of becoming a starter on the varsity. — Michael Jordan

I played sports in high school and in college. — Jon Bernthal

He wants to play major college football at a university far away, where nobody will know about his tragic family history. Then he wants to play in the NFL.

Every catch brings him closer to that reality. That's how he thinks of it, anyway. Every time he runs downfield, sees the ball in the air, and hears the defensive back laboring to catch up, whenever he feels that ball fall out of the sky and into his waiting hands, he inches closer to his goals. — Neil Hayes

He hadn't developed into the accomplished running quarterback many had predicted he would become over the course of the season.

But he had come to personify this team. He was raw and untested when the season began, but he played his two best games in the two biggest games on the schedule. He wasn't the player anybody expected him to be, but he got the job done-at times spectacularly. — Neil Hayes

Baseball was my main sport, but I peaked when I reached high school and so my baseball career stopped. — George Winston

You might be a redneck if your mother has been involved in a fist fight at a high school sports event. — Jeff Foxworthy

I get an adrenaline rush from "playing with the big boys." I consider myself a tomboy and was an athlete in high school, so I like to "talk shop" anyway. But it's fun to actually get paid to cover the NFL with all these incredible former players and sports anchors. — Megan Alexander

Life is full of all sorts of setbacks and twists and turns and disappointments. The character of this team will be how well you will come back from this letdown, this defeat. You could still be a great team and you can still accomplish great things as football players but it's going to take a real resolve to do it." -Coach Ladouceur — Neil Hayes

For me, sports is a big part of my life. It helped me through high school. It helped me get better grades, because if you don't have good grades, you can't play sports. — David Charvet

When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me ... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports. — Noam Chomsky

Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don't have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won't get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this. — Elizabeth Thornton

They should have a rule: in order to be a sportswriter, you have to have played that sport, at some level; high school, college, junior college, somewhere. Or, you should have had to have been around the game for a long time. — Oscar Robertson

The day after high school, I was off to basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Station. You gotta understand, we didn't care about sports. We wanted to win the war. We wanted to win the war! And at the time, we didn't know if we would. — Bud Grant

I don't want to return to the past. I don't yearn for when I was 18 years old. I was in high school then. I had acne. I had a terrible hairdo. I'm sure I was sporting polyester pants. — Joe Scarborough

In any small town, sports are really important to the high school, and I wasn't very good at sports. — Martina Mcbride

Play more than one sport in high school. If you play, say, football and basketball, you can learn to be physical and you can take those physical aspects of both sports and become better in both sports. Basketball players use some of the same skills football players do and vice versa. — Antonio Gates

The recruiter didn't bother to introduce himself when Alumbaugh extended his hand. Instead, he turned to Aliotti and said: "He's not six-foot-one."

Nice to meet you, too, Alumbaugh thought. — Neil Hayes

I grew up in Arkansas and that's the law. My dad was a high school basketball coach, so I was raised as a coach's son and I was a baseball player back in Arkansas, and I lived in Texas, too, so I was just surrounded by sports. So that's what I was going to do: Pitch for the St Louis Cardinals. I had no idea I was going to be an actor. So I got my collar bone broken in the Kansas City Royals training camp. And once I got hurt I started doing other things for a while. — Billy Bob Thornton

I played team sport as a kid and loved it. I played basketball and football throughout high school into college in the intramurals and I loved it. There was nothing like a team. — Tom Watson

I've often told people that the greatness of this football program will emerge when The Streak ends. I hope you will all live up to that. It's all numbers. It's nothing. It's not what we're about. It's not what this school represents." -Coach Frank Allocco — Neil Hayes

Just getting young kids excited about hockey, then they'll want to skate, they'll want to start joining junior leagues, they'll want to play in high school, etc., so we're trying to expand at all levels. That's good for the sport, and it's good for the Ducks long term. — Henry Samueli

I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there. — Mal Peet

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape. — Christine Stockton

I played baseball up until my freshman year of high school. That was my main sport. I played third base. — Macklemore

Established a thriving medical practice and was a fixture at our high school sports games. He never spoke to any of us of the horrors he had seen. When one of his sons wore as a casual jacket one of Doc Auld's Army coats with the major's insignia still attached, I remember thinking, — Tom Brokaw

I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company. — Timothy Ferriss

High school sports: where lessons of life are still being learned, and where athletes still compete for the love of the game and their teammates. — Michael Powers