Somewhere in the country this week, at an hour no reasonable person recognizes, a parent is idling in a parking lot with a cooler of water while a freshman jogs toward a 100-degree practice. Ben Sasse spent August in that driver’s seat, and Friday’s Journal has the essay that came out of it.
Sasse, a Journal columnist who served as a U.S. senator from Nebraska from 2015 to 2023 and whose own father was a football coach, opens with a big idea: across cultures and centuries, four institutions have formed young men. Family, religion, work and war. Each demanded effort and sacrifice. Two of the four, he argues, have nearly vanished from an ordinary boy’s life. Violence has been pushed to the edges of most societies to a degree ancient and medieval people never conceived, and less than 1% of the population serves in the all-volunteer military.
Then work. Growing up in Nebraska, detasseling corn was a rite of passage: up at 4:30 a.m., cold dew to blazing noon, a tradition new technology has all but retired. Only 35% of teenagers had a summer job this year, and the starter jobs that remain, flipping burgers, running checkouts, are on the automation list. That brings more prosperity on the whole, Sasse writes, ‘but we should acknowledge the trade-off.’
An Acorn on an Assembly Line
What filled the gap? Bureaucratized schooling, which he skewers in one line (‘An acorn doesn’t become an oak on an assembly line’), and the doom scroll. He cites the Institute for Family Studies: 27% of men 18 to 29 are daily porn consumers, almost as many now gamble daily, and 61% report feeling ‘little control over the things that happen’ in their lives. A slow-burning crisis, in his phrase.
Football, in his telling, is the character-forming institution still standing. It teaches perseverance through early practices and aching muscles, brotherhood through shared misery, action in a culture of passivity. And it does something odd with violence: for four quarters, offense, defense and special teams inflict maximum damage inside precisely bounded lines, while seasoned coaches punish hits after the whistle, prohibit targeting defenseless receivers and shame the bully in the locker room. The lesson underneath is delayed gratification. ‘That’s the value of one more rep on the bench when your head wants to give up but your muscles haven’t given out.’ He closes with the Apostle Paul, who ‘never picked up a blitz’ but taught that suffering produces perseverance and perseverance produces character.
We’re not the referee here. This is an opinion piece, and it’s contested: the concussion research is the obvious rejoinder, plenty of thoughtful parents have read it and said no, and Sasse doesn’t claim the sport is safe, only that its risks are bounded and its benefits are real. Reasonable families land in different places. What the desk can do is notice that the essay’s central mechanism, hard thing now, payoff later, is the whole of personal finance in a helmet.
One More Rep, Automated
Start with the unglamorous part: the season costs money. Travel teams, equipment, camps, fees and the gas for those 5 a.m. drives run four figures a year for many families and five for some. That’s a real line item, and it belongs in the cash-flow plan on purpose, funded from the monthly surplus, not discovered in October on a credit-card statement. A sports line you wrote down in August is a hobby. One you find in October is a surprise, and surprises are what bust budgets.
Now the good part. Sasse’s one-more-rep is the best description of automatic saving anybody has written this year: delayed gratification installed as a habit before the person is old enough to argue with it. That’s exactly what a payroll deduction into a 403(b) or 401(k) does. The money never hits checking, the rep happens whether your head is in it or not, and twenty years later the muscle is just there. Teach the freshman to set up the deduction on his first real paycheck and you’ve coached something that outlasts the season.
Last, the insurance rep. A teenager in a contact sport is a perfectly good reason to reread the family health plan’s out-of-pocket maximum, and to ask the school one question in plain English: is its catastrophic-injury coverage primary, or secondary to ours? Nobody enjoys that fifteen minutes. It’s also the one that matters if the whistle comes late. East of Eden, as Sasse puts it, ‘we’ll always need strong and selfless men.’ We’d add: and a funded deductible.