Steroids and the athletic recruiting process

While steroids have been around for sometime now, the real reason that they have been so popular in the media over the last few years has been because of baseball. With players like Jose Canseco openly admitting that he used them and suspicion for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and many others, stories fill newspaper headlines all throughout the country. But because parents push their children so much to succeed in sports, it may also be finding its way into the athletic recruiting process.

There are two recent stories that really brought this to my attention recently. Both were covered by the national media as it shows more and more that younger athletes are using steroids.

The most recent, which was posted today by ESPN, talks about a recruit for Ole Miss being kicked off the team because he was selling steroids. Quarterback Jared Foster played at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College last fall and was enrolled at classes with the Rebels. He was expected to sign his Letter of Intent a week from today and be able to practice this spring.

After Foster was caught selling steroids, new Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt kicked him off the team. Chances are high that if this athlete is selling them, than he is also using them. The question many wonder is did he sell any juice to current Rebel players? How about to the Junior College that he attended? Foster obviously had his chance to play major Division I football in the SEC but will not because he cheated and sold steroids to boot (Click here to read the full article).

The second story is much worse and has parents much more involved this time around. This story appeared in Sports Illustrated. At age 13, Corey Gahan was a champion in-line skater. His dad then decided it was time for his son to use steroids and HgH. This obviously help Gahan dominate the in-line skating field as he set a number of national records. Eventually, the dad was sent to prison for doing this and deserved it (Click here to read the full article).

I felt sick when reading this article for a number of different reasons. The first is that the in-line skating community has little upside. By that I mean there is only so little money that Gahan could eventually earn from being at the top of his profession. With that in mind, why exactly would a parent do this to his son?

The second is that this has put his son in a bad spot for the rest of his life. He will be dealing with the adverse side effects of steroids for quite sometime and now he without an education as well. If anything, my hope is that Gahan is able to get his life back on track and be able to succeed in what he does for the rest of his life. His dad already put him in a bad spot and is in prison because of it.

These two stories show that an athlete or even their parents are willing to use steroids in order to succeed in sports. And considering how much a college education does cost, there is little doubt that many more people throughout the country are using steroids in order to help their ability in athletics.

If you do decide to go down that path, outside of the obvious negatives that you can find looking up steroids, you will always know that whatever you accomplished is tainted. If you received a scholarship to the state school that you dreamed of, it is tainted because you got help that many others were not doing.

Steroids are illegal for a reason. Athletes do them to get ahead of the playing field. Instead of outworking their opponents on the field, the court, or in the weight room, they use a substance that can help them in the short terms and hurt them in the long term.

Recently, Illinois and Texas will be joining New Jersey and Florida as states that test for steroids in high school athletes. While that is only four states out of fifty that do it at the prep level, it is a step in the right direction. These states are making the right call by making it tough for an athlete to cheat. If it eventually costs them a scholarship, then they should have worked hard and taken the honest way to an education that was paid for.