It’s Draft Day in the NBA. And you thought the season was over last week. But I’m okay with it because I like the NBA. I used to cover it as a reporter for TBS and TNT back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.
But it always struck me a bit odd back then that one of the NBA’s major public service initiatives was “Stay in School.” (A worthy idea.) Then shortly after the school year was up, the worst teams in the league would draft an 18 year-old kid who elected to not stay in school beyond 12th grade.
The rules have changed somewhat and now a player has to be at least one year out of high school and 19 before becoming draft eligible. Whether you think that anyone, regardless of age, has the right to gainful employment or whether you side with universities who invest much time and money in student-athletes, there are solid arguments to be made on both sides of the early-entry debate.
Fortunately, I, in my role as quirky features reporter, was never called upon to tackle such issues. My assignments were more like, “Do a story on the NBA’s Stay in School program.”
So I thought, in my upside-down way of thinking, that while staying in school is without question a good thing, it can be taken to extremes. So naturally, I did.