Postseason not the reason for the season

Keeping sports in perspective, the late Cheney football coach Tom Oswald often told me he could do without the state playoffs.

Only one postseason team ends its season with a win, he reasoned, and he rather preferred to send his seniors out with a regular-season victory, leaving them fulfilled.

Another coach, University’s Dave Holmes, said the same, although his reasoning was a bit different. The weather was turning nasty, he said, and it cut into his fishing. But I digress.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a great time of year. The adrenaline flows higher during the playoffs. It’s a tremendous reward for the teams that get there. That rare trip to the title game, win or lose, is the memory of a lifetime.

Oswald, I’m sure, savored every minute of the two state finals in which his Blackhawks played, even if he found season-ending losses so tough to take.

Still, he and Holmes had a point. Something is askew when the entire worth of a football season is determined by a playoff berth.

Last year Ferris finished with an 8-2 record, the same as this season, but missed out on the Greater Spokane League-Columbia Basin League playoffs. Was the season any less a success?

Certainly not. As Oswald would have been quick to point out, the Saxons last year were one of just two GSL teams to finish its season with a victory. The players could savor that, and go about other pursuits.

What got me thinking about Oswald’s comments again is the way members of the college media are consumed by a team’s becoming “bowl-eligible.”

The incessant drumbeat to a sixth win is like crowds in Times Square counting down the seconds to the new year. A lot of noise ensues, signifying little.

If things begin to go sour afterward, woe to the team that lets a bowl bid slip away. Fingers start pointing. Teams that finish 6-6 or 7-5 are almost considered failures, no matter the circumstances of their losses or what gratifying victories transpired along the way.

Part of that college culture is driven by the proliferation of postseason game availability. A bowl game is also the measure of a program’s progress. Money drives the sport.

But shouldn’t high school sports be different, as Oswald and Holmes both contended? They were men comfortable in their skin. Both had inordinate success, neither was consumed by it.

They were, first and foremost, teachers of the game and mentors of young men. Although wins followed them, they considered high school athletics to be as much about the journey as the record or a playoff game.

The reality is that only one team in each game wins. Only a handful of teams from each league qualify for state. For some, the playoffs might be the end-all and be-all. But what hope, incentive or joy can there be for teams once out of contention?

High school athletics is about playing a game. It’s about camaraderie, self-improvement and certainly satisfaction from competition.

Revel in a state berth or bowl game when the opportunity arises, but to miss out is no disgrace. Consider it residual reward, not the end result, for a game enjoyed.