I fully understand your points but many athletes as well as regular students don’t like being away from home. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s only natural to be loyal to the known then the unknown when you are young.
As far as laziness, well Combest along with others obliviously were doing just fine in HS other wise we would not be here talking about him/them 9+ years later.
So my point is, what happens to these guys AFTER they graduate that causes them to fall by the wayside? Who lets them down because after all they are only 18-19 and many times there parents don’t know much other then the menial job they haft to go to everyday.
Geez, I could use myself as example, I remember how I set school/meet records and helped my HS win a championship but after I graduated my HS coach could not even return my phone calls when I was just asking him for general advice to navigate in the “next level”. Seriously, I never got one call in return and to this day I don’t know why as I was a model pupil and gave him zero lip/trouble.
Anyhow, I wound up in a desert sort of speak for 6 years bouncing around from one coach who made me run 3-4 miles at practice to other coahes who would not even show up to practice at all; and this was at different collages so I did my part.
Just like you said however, (I agree) you haft to have self responsibility so I picked up the pieces on my own and I’m doing what I can with the time I have left.
This is going on a tangent but I really have to give credit where it’s due but I really appreciate this website that Charlie made along with Joe Defranco and James Smith because without these three guys I would be a bitter young man punching a time-clock.