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The Case Against High School Sports

I wonder what percentage of business, civic, political and military leaders participated in high school team sports? I suspect that a surprisingly high percentage did, both male and female. Team sports teaches skills and disciplines that are difficult to duplicate in the classroom or in other contexts. I think that good students become better students through the pressure of having to follow a more rigid schedule in order to perform well academically and in their particular sport. It is a beneficial experience to be a team member upon whom others are depending while also having to perform well on a personal level in the classroom.

Just recently a businessman told me that apart from the discipline of participating in multiple sports in high school he would not have achieved so well in the classroom. Those disciplines carried over into college and now in the business world.

This isn't a rule and does not pertain to everyone. However the loss of high school athletics would be a greater loss than some suspect.
 
mebanedeac said:
I wonder what percentage of business, civic, political and military leaders participated in high school team sports? I suspect that a surprisingly high percentage did, both male and female. Team sports teaches skills and disciplines that are difficult to duplicate in the classroom or in other contexts. I think that good students become better students through the pressure of having to follow a more rigid schedule in order to perform well academically and in their particular sport. It is a beneficial experience to be a team member upon whom others are depending while also having to perform well on a personal level in the classroom.

Just recently a businessman told me that apart from the discipline of participating in multiple sports in high school he would not have achieved so well in the classroom. Those disciplines carried over into college and now in the business world.

This isn't a rule and does not pertain to everyone. However the loss of high school athletics would be a greater loss than some suspect.
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But when your high schools have 3,000 to 7,000 kids, a smaller and smaller percentage will actually play high schools sports anyway. If you took sports out of the schools and asked educators and administrators to focus on the kids and then proposed setting up a community sports league for 10% of teenagers funded by taxpayer money people would see how incredibly stupid the current model of high school sports is.

And there are team and individual sports currently operating outside of the high schools and generally at a higher level.
 
Anything that gives a school a sense of unity is a good thing. And the best (and really only way) to do that is through sports. Too much of the school day is spent by kids trying to look out for themselves and having something for them to unify around is a very positive thing. And that's even delving into all the good that actually comes from participating in the actual events.
 
BillBrasky said:
Anything that gives a school a sense of unity is a good thing. And the best (and really only way) to do that is through sports. Too much of the school day is spent by kids trying to look out for themselves and having something for them to unify around is a very positive thing. And that's even delving into all the good that actually comes from participating in the actual events.
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It's a school. They should be unified around coming together to fucking learn something. If 97% of the school is unified around the 3% who play football, they're hopeless. Now, we know that's not happening. What's actually happening is high school sports perpetuate a jock culture while further diminishing the academic mission of the school and those who perform well. Additionally, we're laying off teachers and teaching assistants while money still pours into high school sports from the school system and parent booster clubs. It's fucking idiotic.

Sports is not the only way to unify the school. It just the easiest way to put up a facade of unity. They drag everyone into the gym or out to the football stadium for a pep rally, but do all of the kids show up for the game? No way. And a bunch of the kids who are at the game aren't even paying attention. They're there because there's nothing else for kids to do and they need to find out where to go to to drink beer and suck face later.
 
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Was HP a nerd who got picked in HS back in the 80's (probably a rhetorical question since I'm on the Wake boards) because that seems like the only obvious answer after that post.

Bro I was captain of the fucking Academic Team (only at a public school, amirite?) and still got along fine with all our athletes, as many were some of my best friends. And this outdated notion of a jock culture is beyond stupid. Didn't really exist at my HS, and from what I can tell it doesn't at most schools these days, and anything that keeps at-risk (or really any) YUTES on campus after school has to be considered a good thing.

As for people going to games to socialize, good. That was the whole point of my post.
 
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Neither. But If I had gone to one of these big schools that they have now, I might not have been able to letter in either sport.
 
If American kids spend too much time exercising then why does Michelle Obama think they're all a bunch of fat, couch ridden slugs that need to eat tofu and drink gallons of water?
 
DirkTheDeac said:
If American kids spend too much time exercising then why does Michelle Obama think they're all a bunch of fat, couch ridden slugs that need to eat tofu and drink gallons of water?
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Missesthepointdeac has missed the point.

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Or, he has actually (unintentionally) proved the point.
 
I'm not convinced that scrapping high school sports has the immediate positive impact that anecdote suggests. If you cut sports, I think afternoon time previously spent practicing would be used more for tv, video games, sex, acting like hoodlums and getting into trouble than for additional study. Classroom time previously wasted at pep rallies would - in some cases, not the majority - be used to show a movie while the former teacher/coach updates fantasy football. And I guarantee parents and people in the community wouldn't fundraise for the academic team the way they do for the quarterback club.

I'm not wedded to the idea that sports in high schools is better than sports in non-school sport clubs, but it seems silly to think that everyone is going to suddenly turn into scholars if we got rid of the football team.
 
timthedeac said:
I'm not convinced that scrapping high school sports has the immediate positive impact that anecdote suggests. If you cut sports, I think afternoon time previously spent practicing would be used more for tv, video games, sex, acting like hoodlums and getting into trouble than for additional study. Classroom time previously wasted at pep rallies would - in some cases, not the majority - be used to show a movie while the former teacher/coach updates fantasy football. And I guarantee parents and people in the community wouldn't fundraise for the academic team the way they do for the quarterback club.

I'm not wedded to the idea that sports in high schools is better than sports in non-school sport clubs, but it seems silly to think that everyone is going to suddenly turn into scholars if we got rid of the football team.
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I count eight strawmen in this post. Not jhmd level but pretty good.

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http://m.theatlantic.com/education/...school-sports-arent-killing-academics/280155/

Ripley indulges a popular obsession with international test score comparisons, which show wide and frightening gaps between the United States and other countries. She ignores, however, the fact that states vary at least as much in test scores as do developed countries. A 2011 report from Harvard University shows that Massachusetts produces math scores comparable to South Korea and Finland, while Mississippi scores are closer to Trinidad and Tobago. Ripley’s thesis about sports falls apart in light of this fact. Schools in Massachusetts provide sports programs while schools in Finland do not. Schools in Mississippi may love football while in Tobago interscholastic sports are nowhere near as prominent. Sports cannot explain these similarities in performance. They can’t explain international differences either.

If it is true that sports undermine the academic mission of American schools, we would expect to see a negative relationship between the commitment to athletics and academic achievement. However, the University of Arkansas’s Daniel H. Bowen and Jay P. Greene actually find the opposite. They examine this relationship by analyzing schools’ sports winning percentages as well as student-athletic participation rates compared to graduation rates and standardized test score achievement over a five-year period for all public high schools in Ohio. Controlling for student poverty levels, demographics, and district financial resources, both measures of a school’s commitment to athletics are significantly, positively related to lower dropout rates as well as higher test scores.
 
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