High school sports - impact of...

Robert Lipsyte
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This is what I learned in high school this year: The kids are not all right, and some of them even know why.

I've been talking to high school kids, especially jocks, on my book tour for "Raiders Night," a controversial new young-adult novel about the aftermath of a brutal training-camp hazing incident. In the book, the coaches, the school and the town try to put a lid on the incident. On the tour, coaches, schools and towns have been trying to put a lid on the book.

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As it turned out, the high school kids I did get to, in New York, Illinois, Michigan and California, weren't all that concerned about the language, the sex and drugs in the book, either. It was what they lived with every day. They said they could handle that. What they did want to talk about was something they obviously couldn't handle – betrayal by adult society.

At one suburban Chicago high school where more than a hundred juniors and seniors had read the book before I came to speak, the football players I talked to privately wanted to vent about their profound and sophisticated mistrust of coaches.