Lake Larsen | Former Sports Editor

With both the NHL and NBA playoff races in full swing, whittling away teams to find the 2019 champions, something caught my eye. Maybe there is an “I” in team. By this, I mean that the whole of professional sports is seeming to drift away from the notion of “teams win championships” to the selfish idea of “individuals win championships.” This cultural shift became more evident to me as I flipped between watching the San Jose Sharks and Portland Trail Blazers fight for the next game in their respective series.

As a person with a love for both watching and playing sports, it pains me to see that the idea of being a part of a team no longer seems to matter. With the explosion in popularity of fantasy sports, viewers don’t appear to care about franchises anymore. Due to fans abilities to select single players from the entire league to belong on a pseudo all-star team, fans focus on single players instead of franchises. This has led to individual athletes falling under the assumption that they are more important than the team they play for, thus inflating player egos much larger than they should be.

As a fan of the NHL, I became accustomed to seeing players work together as a unit. It was commonplace to see athletes dive in front of shots and put their physical well-being aside to help earn their team a bid to the postseason. But with the soaring egos of athletes in other sports, it’s now a regular occurrence to see athletes throwing tantrums on Twitter over petty issues or franchise hopping with the hopes of snagging a ring and a nice paycheck.

Seeing players engulf themselves in social media drama shows younger athletes that only they matter, and that maybe there’s no I in team, but there’s an I in champion. I don’t believe individuality should be outlawed in sports, nor is that the point I’m trying to make. I just think leagues should try to reintroduce to players the idea of actually caring about the rest of the roster.

Having played team sports my whole life, it was instilled to me that sometimes the group is more important than the player — that it doesn’t matter what your stat sheet read as long as you did your job. That’s what I believe team sports are about. Not how many triple-doubles or hat tricks a player got, but instead, the final score.

According to Gallup, 72% of Americans aged 18-29 watch sports in some capacity. And with such an overwhelming majority of young viewers tuning in, I believe we should be shown that it’s okay to be a part of something bigger than you; not everything is always about standing out. In the words of Olympic gold medal winning hockey coach Herb Brooks, “When you put on that jersey, the name on the front is a hell of a lot more important than the one on the back.”

Contact the author at llarsen13@wou.edu

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