You may wonder what would be the biggest money-loser that a large successful running club like the Knoxville Track Club might incur.  For more than forty years KTC has provided one of the largest and most energetic youth athletics programs in the nation, offering yearround programs of track and field, both indoor and outdoor, as well as cross country, even a few kids only road races.   Our two hundred person youth competitive team competes nationally within the framework of both the AAU and the USATF, claiming dozens of national championships by the kids, and gaining a reputation as consistently one of the toughest and most skilled group of young athletes, year in and year out. 

The heart of this youth athletics program is not, however, the gold medals won by the best athletes.  Nor is it the team championships.  Instead, it’s the developmental program for the less talented kids.  Over a thousand kids come out on Tuesday and Thursday nights to 20 or more sites scattered around our region to learn about running, jumping and throwing.  Then on Saturday mornings, they all assemble, over a thousand strong at the University of Tennessee’s world class Tom Black Track to compete in a low-key track meet.  Everyone competing gets a ribbon.   Surprisingly, most kids quest to attain for their collections one of each color, rather than half a dozen blue ribbons for first place.  And if you’d ever want to see an exercise in mass chaos and jubilation, watch race organizers attempt to keep a hundred five year olds organized enough to stage heats of the fifty meter dash, eight kids at a time.  It’s hilarious.

Seriously, though, mastering those three activities — running, jumping and throwing — can be a springboard to success in nearly any sport.  KTC is fortunate enough to involve dozens of talented and giving individuals as coaches to impart those skills.  Some of the coaches are high school athletes who have come up through the program, some are former program members who have graduated and gone on to become college athletes.  Some have achieved national and Olympic glory.  What they all have in common, though, is a love of kids and a love of our sport.

When I became a parent at the late age of 47 I gained a great appreciation of the importance of a program that encourages kids to run, and looked forward to my son participating in Knoxville Track Club programs.  When I found out a year later, however, that my son had been born with an extremely rare brain anomaly and that he’d likely require care throughout his life, I felt the chance that I could share in the pride that every parent feels when their child participates in sports evaporate in an instant.  It appeared that the son of two avid runners was not going to be a runner, after all.

And yet what did my son Jesse do on the morning of March 26th, when the second annual Knoxville Marathon sent thousands of runners scampering through the streets of our city?  He ran with them.  Our club put together a kids marathon, wherein kids signed up for a mile-long run through the zoo back in January, pledged to run 24 more miles between that day and the marathon eight weeks later, and then finally running the final 1.2 miles on race day along with the the 5Kers, the half marathoners, and even the marathoners, finishing in one of the largest sports arenas in the country, Neyland Stadium, home of the Tennessee Volunteers, with so many fans cheering and the giant Jumbotron on, showing these delighted kids a 51 foot by 120 foot image of themselves approaching and crossing the finish line on the fifty yard line of that famed football stadium.  Man! What a thrill that had to be for them!

So, as a parent, I was most fortunate that the worst case scenario drawn out by the neurologists and radiologists didn’t happen, and that Jesse, one of the most delightful and engaging youngsters around, is indeed able to run, and, surprisingly, throw a baseball and shoot a basketball very well.  He can’t jump much, but two out of three ain’t bad.  He’s also one of the biggest and most beloved cheerleaders at Knoxville Track Club races; everyone looks forward to cresting a tough hill out on a race course and hearing and seeing my son clapping, cheering, and maybe jumping in and running thirty or forty yards alongside.

So, if ever the question comes up about whether it’s worth it to fund a youth athletics program that provides so much joy and opportunity for the kids in your community, even if it loses five hundred, five thousand dollars or more, as ours sometimes does, if you can fund it, if you can find a way to make it happen, by all mean do it. 

The nationwide epidemic of childhood obesity casts a chilling pall over the prospects for a healthy and prosperous America in years to come.  That’s reason enough. 

For our sport to grow and prosper, we need young people to come to love running.  That’s reason enough.

And, truly, whether our kids grow up to ultimately prefer running or some other sport, it’s abundantly clear to me that kids are better off playing sports than playing around, running track instead of smoking crack, shooting hoops instead of shooting smack.  We can make a difference.  That’s reason enough. 

Bottom line: when you see the excitement, the pride, and pure unbridled joy on the face of a child who has done his very best, whether that best is good enough for a gold medal, blue ribbon or simply the best he could do that day, then you know that you’ve done a very VERY good thing in providing an opportunity for that child to play, to compete, to excel. 

And sometimes, when you watch a child reach out higher than he’s ever reached before, and you see that look on his face, it can be enough to break your heart with pride.  Like mine breaks every time I run with my boy, every time I see him cheer for his running friends, every time he makes a basket and raises his hands joyfully to the sky, and every time I plant a kiss on his forehead despite his best attempts to evade it, I know that all our efforts are worth it.  That’s the real reason.  That’s reason enough.