When I made the basketball team my freshman year in high school, my coach insisted that we all wear high-top sneakers.

It didn’t matter the color or the brand, but they had to be high-tops to help protect our ankles, he said.

That year for Christmas I received my first pair of expensive ($25) sneakers – one from one sister and one from another.

The intensity and importance of high school sports have changed since then.

Today team members, whether basketball or cheerleading, wear matching sneakers bought from the same sporting goods store. The level of commitment expected from high school athletes and their parents is great.

Commitment and hard work are valuable lessons, but certainly families with student athletes sacrifice many things in order to keep up with game and practice schedules. At our house, family dinners and weekend getaways seem a distant memory.

This year, for example, cheerleading tryouts occurred over several days, including the night before Thanksgiving and the day after. Attendance was mandatory, so any extended holiday trips to Grandma’s house were out of the question.

Today my niece will be at cheering practice for 51/2 hours.

Conflicts with tryouts, practices or games cause much anxiety.

Rob Reeves, the CEO of the Bangor Y, knew that when he and his staff made the difficult decision to schedule the Y’s insanely popular Leader’s School camp for Aug. 11, 2008.

“We knew there was a good chance that it would overlap with preseason for fall sports,” he said this week.

Of course, scheduling it much earlier most likely would interfere with Little League All Stars, Junior League or Senior League schedules.

Leader’s School is a weeklong camp that wraps up the summer camp season at the Y’s Camp Jordan on the shores of Branch Lake in Ellsworth.

It’s for students going into seventh grade through those going into 12th grade. It has become so popular that the girls camp was filled up with a waiting list a month ago and the boys camp is nearly full.

Staff, counselors and volunteers consist of teachers, a state supreme court justice and a variety of outdoor survival experts. Campers spend two days away from camp on challenging trips such as climbing Katahdin, rock climbing, canoeing the St. Croix or major biking expeditions.

Today, when so many kids spend most of their time in organized team sports, Leader’s School gets many of them out into the wilderness of Maine. They learn a bit about self-reliance and a whole lot about teamwork.

It’s not like a high school team, where the slower, less athletic team members may just sit on the bench. At Leader’s no one sits on the bench. The team doesn’t make it to the top of the mountain until the slowest member does. The magic that occurs as the campers realize that and work together to help that less-athletic camper continues to stun Reeves each year.

One year, Eric Taylor, who runs the camp, made it a point to disassemble an iPod and throw it into the lake.

“You don’t need these,” he told the stunned campers. “All you need is right here,” he added, motioning to the wilderness that surrounded them.

Parents understand the importance of this one short week in their overly scheduled children’s lives, and so were a tad distressed to learn that students may have to choose between participating in fall sports or going to Leader’s School.

“For us the issue was that we had to do what was right for the Y,” Reeves said. “We are the stewards of this program and the funds with which to run it, and if Leader’s was held a week earlier it would have meant that Camp Jordan would have been sitting empty for three or four weeks, and that’s just not good business.”

A few parents were very angry, blaming the Y and withdrawing their kids immediately.

“Others came to the table and said, ‘What can we do?'” Reeves said.

He called the Maine Principals’ Association, which sets the preseason schedule, but did not get a call back. Another call was made to Bangor High School’s athletic director, but again the Y received no response.

“We were concerned. We hated to have to see kids or parents make that tough choice and we wanted to talk about it, but it wasn’t looking very hopeful that that was going to happen,” Reeves said.

This week the parents of Leader’s School campers received a letter informing them that the MPA had changed the preseason to begin on Aug. 18, two days after Leader’s School ends and two weeks before school begins.

“With all due respect to that program,” MPA executive director Dick Durost said this week, “it had no effect on our decision to push back the preseason start date. We weren’t even aware of it. We changed the date because Thanksgiving falls later in November next year and we like to wrap up our fall season, especially football championship games, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and with preseason starting the 11th, the season would have finished a week earlier. That’s why we changed it.”

Starting fall season practices two weeks before the start of school is soon enough. The schedule is the same for each school across the state, so the playing field is even.

Summer vacation is short, and while school sports are hugely important, so is the experience of summer camp and family vacations.

rordway@bangordailynews.net