Signing day

 You see it every year, re-enacted in a thousand places in a thousand towns, everywhere from the big city to the suburban sprawl to one-stoplight dots on the map in the middle of Farmland USA.

The tableau is always the same: Some kid in a fresh U. of Somewhere cap sitting at a table with a piece of paper in front of him and a pen in his hand, flanked by his beaming parents and maybe a coach or two.

A coach, because the kid is always a football player or a basketball player or a volleyball player or a softball player. Or a baseball player. Or a golfer.

Signing Day is one of those lines of demarcation in life, marking the transition of High School Harry Or Hannah to College Joe Or Julie. And it's uniquely a sports thing. Hardly anyone outside the school doors makes a big production out of the art student landing a scholly to, say, Carnegie Mellon, or the math brainiac who's bound for MIT in the fall. What this says about our national obsession for games and their outsized place in high school culture is self-evident.

And so even a Sports Guy like me notices when a high school decides to take stock of its priorities.

 Snider High School over on the near northeast side of my town takes a backseat to no one in the gild on its athletic programs. The school's won state titles in football and girls basketball and a pile of other stuff, and it's come damn close in boys basketball, our Hoosier bellwether. 

But the other day something unusual happened there.

A young woman named Sydney Spilker signed a letter of intent to attend Wartburg College in Iowa, surrounded by the usual public tableau of family and local media. But not to play basketball or volleyball or softball or golf.

To play cello.

Spilker, see, is a darn fine musician, and Wartburg likes darn fine musicians. So it recruited her to come play the cello, same way it recruits kids to play football or basketball. And Snider High School decided to conduct a college signing for her, same as for the football and basketball kids.

This reminded me of a guy named Russ Isaacs, who was Snider's football coach when it won a state title back in the '90s, and who looked every bit the part. In fact, if you were actually casting a part for a football coach, Russ would be at the front of the line: He had the Fu Manchu going, and the scary glower, and a damned impressive coach-ly holler. 

But appearances fool.

They fool because as much as Russ looked like your standard eat-sleep-breathe Foo-ball Coach, he surprised you with his grasp on perspective. He understood football's role in a high school, and it wasn't to get a kid out of math class. And he actively encouraged his players to participate in other sports, on the excellent theory they would be better football players because of it.

My take on Russ, accurate or not, was that he cared more about Snider High School than Snider High School football. Even if he cared a whole lot for the latter.

So, yeah. I thought about him when I saw Snider was putting on the dog for a cello player.,

Good on you, Snider. Applause, applause, as the music crowd says.