REVEALED PREFERENCES?

The Rock Valley College softball team recently won their fifth straight national championship (in the National Junior College Athletic Association, that is) defeating along the way a Brookdale, New Jersey, squad (sorry, Matt) then taking down top-seed Herkimer College.  It's mostly local kids, and it's unlikely any of them grew up in the hothouse environment of kid sports turning pro that Time lamented a going on a year ago.

And yet, there might be something about the Rockford sports stories that's not a good thing.  I've previously griped about the nature of sports coverage on Rockford television, slightly reworded, it's like this.  "Rockford television stations would put the story of a Chicago Cub pitcher carrying a perfect game against the White Sox into the ninth inning hitting a walk-off home run [of the seventh game of the World Series] that breaks up the Sox pitcher's no-hitter behind a story involving a high school cross country team that's running in the state championship."  In the ongoing basketball playoffs, it was the Toronto Raptors, not the nearby Milwaukee Bucks, getting what little coverage there is in a year the Bulls are working on their golf, because a Rockford Auburn graduate now wears a Raptor jersey.  And senior signing day is generally a sports thing, not an academic thing.

Meanwhile, Rockford is still dealing with a twenty-year-old Money magazine "worst city in America" ranking and a more recent "third most miserable" from Forbes.

To borrow from another fairly recent post, Rockfordians can enjoy the decline, and follow the next crop of rising softballers.

What we don't reward, we get less of.