We pine for the old days as athletes

 If you play sports or have played sports in your life you can remember when your athletic peak was or is currently. It may have been that high school baseball career where you hit .290 as a junior, the senior year of a college football player where they averaged 120 yards per game or even a hall of fame professional athlete in the year where they broke the NFL record in rushing (Erik Dickerson in 1984 with 2,105 rushing yards). Whenever it was for you, you probably remember it. For me, I have had three different peaks for various different reasons in various different sports. In 2012 I started the year going second team all-state in tennis, getting far in my counties section tournament with my doubles partner and going all-section in football averaging 11 tackles a game. In 2015 I made the varsity football team at Lafayette College after thinking I would leave the world of competitive sports behind me. In 2025 I raised my tennis ranking heavily and lowered my handicap in golf to its lowest it's ever been and I still think there is more work to do.

The year 2012 was an interesting year for me. Arguably this is pre-social media days, although twitter (now X) and Facebook still existed, Instagram had just started, and vine was the proxy for TikTok. I was a sophomore in high school the spring of 2012 and a junior the fall of 2012. While I was playing tennis, I would go to our local newspaper for the scores of my matches, sometimes laminating the section that talked about my high school or mentioned my name. The first few weeks of tennis practice every year, march madness was being monitored on all our phones through twitter, letting us know who a Cinderella was and who was holding true to their blue blood status. Kentucky won the tournament that year led by the ageless wonder Anthony Davis, beating Kansas in the championship. The tennis bus was filled with kids sharing Instagram posts, vine videos and funny tweets. Granted this was before Instagram was flooded with memes by pages you didn't follow, it was just you and your buddies' sharing pictures of your social circles. Vine was short form, mostly comedic videos, that you couldn't quite get from YouTube. Life was way different back then, kids played outside, weren't plugged into their phones 24/7, and they actually socialized with each other. 

The football season was a similar experience for me, summer workouts were my world from July to August, followed by two a day practices in late August. Leading into the season, which started right after Labor Day. Football was a little more serious than the tennis bus, game planning, listening to heavy metal music and preparing for the upcoming game. But the simplicity of the pre-social media times still rang true. Rather than doomscrolling, we would talk to one another or just psyche ourselves up. We had a game that was on local television that year that we won on a game winning drive in the fourth quarter, many scrimmages against another local school, and even participated in a playoff game at the end of the year. What I remember most about this season was how seriously we used to take sports, and the other distractions via social media and news didn't have a stranglehold on us.

The year 2015 was another peak but also a very hard year for me. Between football and difficult college courses I was very stressed during this time. But again, way simpler a time as this was pre-2016. Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton were all running for president and their debates were constantly on the news. TikTok hadn't been formed yet and Instagram was taking off as a dominant social media platform. I made two tackles in my colleges Spring Game, which was the highlight of my college career. The football team was less than stellar that year, being a whopping 1-11 for the season. The idea of blowing off some steam took the form of experimenting with drugs and alcohol with your friends. Donald Trump became President the following year, which changed the landscape of media for the worse in my opinion. Suddenly news outlets were the bad guy, and we were getting our news via tweets from the president. The media landscape changed and has not gone back to what it was, and honestly it may never. 2015 may have been the last year we had with some normalcy in our countries body politic. Since then, mass shooting events have sky rocketed, political violence is considered normal, and we are as divided as ever.

The year 2025 was also a good year for me athletically, however, politics reign supreme in our worlds now. I lowered my golf handicap to a low of 15.5 and raised my tennis UTR to a 6, both great achievements and highs for me. However, in the year 2024 there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump during his political campaign. The iconic picture of him with the bloody ear flooded news outlets and social media like wildfire. I was actually golfing when it happened and would've preferred to keep going with the round without that information, but one person in our group told all of us and I thought it was a joke at first. The previous year in 2023, the terrorist group Hamas carried out an attack on Israel on October 7th, and the previous year before that Russia invaded Ukraine. The landscape for peace has ended, and there is political dispute even at your local bodega. Everyone and their mother have an opinion, and they aren't afraid to share there's with you even if you aren't interested. Last week, the US attacked Iran, killing the Ayatollah Kameni as well as many others, carrying on this era of dispute and violence. Not letting us even have a year where no major dispute occurs in the world. 

So, this begs the question, do athletes pine for the old days? Yes, but most people are aware in major years in their life what was going on around them, whether it be in their social circle or in the world. As for me, I pine for the old days because it is easy to pine for a day when there was peace and not so much hostility in our world.