The cost of cutting investment

Actions have consequences

When I was playing basketball growing up in the Oak Harbor school system, the high school basketball coaches would host annual biddy basketball programs.

The programs were important because they helped teach youth the fundamentals of basketball, helped generate interest in the sport and taught the children drills that would benefit them immensely if they continued to work on their skills.

I was lucky at the time because the father of one of my classmates was an assistant coach for the varsity team. We had basketball camps every year from second grade and up until organized basketball started in seventh grade via the school district.

The kids behind me weren’t so lucky. Oak Harbor got a new varsity basketball coach in 1997 and he wasn’t interested in working with younger children. He was focused on the high school team and eventually left to become a football coach at another school district right before my senior year started in 2003.

From about 1997 to 2003, Oak Harbor didn’t have any basketball camps for its youth. During that time, the varsity team was fine, twice going 17-3 in the regular season, but the youth program was in shambles. The new varsity coach for the 2003-04 season, Tim Walsh, immediately reinstated the biddy basketball programs, requiring all varsity players to help with the summer youth camps, but the damage had been done.

My class had been the last one to get any youth instruction whatsoever, with the grade right behind me getting to piggyback a little bit from our camps. My senior year, the 2003-04 season for Oak Harbor, we went 10-10 before losing our tournament game in the sectionals. It was the last Oak Harbor basketball team to not have a losing record during the regular season for over a decade.

The following season, the team featured nine seniors and they went 7-13, and then it was a complete disaster. The teams in 2006 and 2007 went 3-17, costing poor coach Walsh his job. The district brought in ’80s basketball legend Don Christie to turn the program around, but even a basketball savant couldn’t save it as the team went 2-18 the next two seasons as well before he bailed.

The first four years of varsity programs without youth basketball investment had gone a whopping 10-70. My poor baby brother deserved better. His class didn’t get any basketball instruction until trying out for the school team in seventh grade. They never won a single game in junior high. He was 6-foot-7 and could have been the star of a winning program, but without early direction, his team went 1- 13 in the Sandusky Bay Conference his senior season (they went 0-14 the next year).

The children from the reinstated biddy programs reached high school in 2012, but the damage had been done. With one of the best wrestling programs in the state, Oak Harbor’s basketball team already was struggling to keep the school’s top athletes on the court instead of the mat, but now with a perennial dead last loser basketball program, it was nearly impossible to get the best players to even care about the sport.

The Rockets didn’t get another winning record until current coach Eric Sweet took over the program and went 18-4 during the 2017- 18 season.

One bad decision to cut investment into the future of the program had cost the district 14 years of basketball futility.

So why am I talking about this?

It’s because decisions to cut investment in the future have consequences. Whether it’s voters turning down a school levy, cuts to the state education budget by the Ohio legislature, withholding grants and funding from colleges and universities or cutting the budget of the leading scientific organizations for the government like the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services, NASA and more, the long-term cost is going to be pain.

And it’s not just the financial cuts that matter. Any investment is important, whether it’s time, energy or attention.

The United States has been on the forefront of innovation for the last century, and it’s because we invest in the future through research grants and funding of science and education while also attracting some of the top minds from all over the planet to come here to practice medicine, perform experiments, research and more. We can’t let that fall to the wayside just because we want to reduce some government spending.

It may not show up immediately, just like with Oak Harbor celebrating its 17-3 varsity season while the second graders weren’t getting any instruction, but these actions have dire consequences. Pray this anti-science, anti-intellectualism stance is stopped in its tracks and the investment problem gets resolved before the United States experiences its run of going 10-70.