In today’s competitive sports landscape, the tracking of young talent can at times seem overly transactional; athletes are assigned a given number of “stars” as an attempt to generalize the many factors that contribute to their value and potential in recruiters’ eyes. For journalist Eric Sondheimer, who has covered high school sports in Southern California for the past four decades, such an approach is an alarming indication of the rising pressure that high school athletes face from coaches and recruiters.
