By: Jordan Hansen, Opinion Editor
Swish, the 19-year old rookie makes a great shot…for a pro team? Shouldn’t he be playing basketball for a college team? Right?
Wrong. A few young, talented players, especially ones that play basketball, are deciding to go to professional players directly after high school or after just attending one year of college. These young players such as John Wall (Spent one year at the University of Kentucky) or players straight out of high school, such as LeBron James are playing in the pros while many of their other classmates and friends are enjoying there last bit of being a teen and not an adult.
Is it really safe to trust 19 year olds with millions of dollars? Many people would say absolutely not. Many adults can’t trust there teens with $100, so what would they do with ten million? Most likely they would spend it on wasteful things like overpriced cars and multi-million dollar houses. Something that many people don’t realize is that pro sports are a real job. They can get cut and fired like everyone else. So what happens to this 19-year old if he’s really not that good? He can’t play college basketball, as once he gets drafted he can’t play in the NCAA. Most likely he settles down and tries to use his former fame to get him a job.
The players are not the only things that it hurts. The coaches that try to recruit these players can’t build a good team around these players, as they don’t know if they are going to stay more than one year. The reason that the players even go to college is that to be eligible to play in the NBA, a player has to either play a season of college basketball or be a year out of high school.
Fame and money are nice, but what if they are from a poor, specifically a poor African-American family (according to www.NBA.com, 82% of the NBA is African-American) who have never had that large of a sum of money, and have no idea what to do with it. Many professional athletes of all sports and races have either opened up businesses and bankrupted themselves, or put money into illegal activities. This is not to say all or even some professional athletes are involved in illegal activities, it just sometimes happens.
In any pro sport, 19-year-old stars just don’t have the emotional or mental skills needed to go straight into pro sports. Many of an athlete has had troubles later on in life, just because they were unprepared.
