I ran hurdles for a state championship team in high school, then again in college, and four years of 110-meter races teach you one thing: a clock does not care about your feelings. It does not check your privilege. It does not grade on a curve. You clear the hurdle in stride, or you eat the track. That lesson followed me through decades coaching youth football, rugby, and track, and a career spent evaluating risk for a living. It is also the lesson at the heart of the Patriot Games: this country was not built by people who were protected from difficulty. It was built by people who were tested by it.
The Patriot Games ran this week, August 9 through 11, at SPIRE Academy in Geneva, Ohio, part of the Freedom 250 celebration marking America's 250th birthday. One boy and one girl, ages 14 to 17, represent each state, territory, and several tribal nations in football, basketball, soccer, track, a revived Presidential Fitness Test, a boot camp circuit, and an obstacle course, competing for a $250,000 scholarship pool streamed live on ESPN, with a primetime ABC special August 13.
Some critics reached for dystopian movie comparisons the moment the Patriot Games were announced, which tells you more about how they view children competing than it does about the event itself. Nobody drew these kids' names from a bowl. They applied, trained, and earned a slot the way my athletes earned a varsity letter, by showing up before school while their friends slept in. That distinction is the whole American premise. A free country does not draft its children into a spectacle. It gives them a stage and lets them decide whether to walk onto it.
Here is what competition actually does, because I have coached both the varsity sprinter and the kid at the back of the pack for two decades. It teaches a fact our culture has spent 30 years trying to bury: results are earned, not distributed. Lose a race and you learn to train harder, then how to come back and win. That is the raw material of leadership. Every executive I have worked with in three decades of investment management got there the way an athlete gets off the bench: by failing in front of people and getting back up. The Aspen Institute's Project Play initiative has found that teenagers who play organized sports are eight times more likely to stay physically active at age 24 than teenagers who do not, and the habit runs deeper than fitness. It is fortitude, stamped into a kid before he or she is old enough to vote.
There is a less measurable benefit, too, one I have watched on every field I have coached. A state-by-state competition gives a 16-year-old from rural Wyoming and one from the Cherokee Nation a reason to root for each other under the same flag. That is American exceptionalism in its simplest form: a kid from anywhere can earn a place on the biggest stage on merit alone. A June Gallup poll cited by CNN found that only 14 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 say they are extremely proud to be American, the lowest share on record. You do not fix that with a lecture. You fix it by handing the next generation of leaders proof that this country still rewards grit over grievance.
To be sure, the funding fight around Freedom 250 deserves real scrutiny, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Congress appropriated $150 million for semi-quincentennial events, and reporting from NPR and NOTUS shows the Interior Department steering most of it toward the Trump aligned Freedom 250 group instead of the bipartisan America250 commission Congress created a decade ago. Taxpayers deserve a full accounting before Congress hands over another dime. A fiscal conservative does not get a pass on oversight just because he likes the program. But sloppy federal bookkeeping is a separate argument from whether teenagers should compete for scholarships on television, and the Left keeps collapsing the two because the second argument is one they lose every time.
I spent years running kids through August two-a-days in the California heat, watching soft summer bodies turn into athletes by September. Nobody signed them up against their will. They chose the harder path because something in them wanted to find out what they were made of, and each one walked away tougher. That is the premise of the Patriot Games, and it is the premise of America. Resilience is not inherited. It is built, one rep and one setback at a time, and the kids who build it now are the ones who will run our companies, lead our platoons, and raise the next generation. Congress can argue about the invoices. The rest of us should be cheering for the kids, because the character they forge this week in Ohio is what keeps this country exceptional.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.