My favorite magazine, The Atlantic, ran a piece this month connecting the U.S. school sports obsession with our lagging academic performance compared to other countries. While the causality in Amanda Ripley’s “The Case Against High-School Sports” [1]isn’t airtight, her argument raises provocative points about our education priorities.
I’m torn about youth sports. On one hand, I love them. I love my participation as a coach, and I enjoy watching the kids I coach improve their coordination and teamwork and learn those lessons of success and failure that appear so starkly in sports. With my own children, I even enjoy just watching them practice – they’re happy, churning their little bodies through space, trying so hard.
Yet the obsessiveness that takes over on the parts of adults can spoil things quickly — and often does. Ripley’s question is this: Just how bad are the results of this hyperfocus on sports?
She looks at schools around the world, saying, “Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else.” In pointing out how other countries do not “staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams,” she asks a surprisingly obvious question: “…well, why would they?”
If we’re worried about educational quality, maybe we should stop choking our kids with tests and re-think the way we present and depict the educational experience. If that experience should focus on academics in earnest way, then I suppose we would have to de-emphasize sports. Engaging in that type of dialogue would open up good conversation about our values and how our application of those values affects our schools. (Warning: In my experience, human beings loathe this kind of self-reflection.) For instance, Ripley said an analysis of one school revealed that it spent $328 per student for math and $1,348 for each cheerleader.
I think the concept of sports for the individual has become badly muddled with sports as collective. The individual running along a darkened road, pushing to be better, is still to me a beautiful image/concept. But once we’ve clustered those individuals into teams and organizations, the goal of winning ends up having little to do with what athletics really are about (see New York Yankees). It has to do with money, drugs, cheating – anything to get something in the W column.
This leaves youth coaches in particular – a group of which I’m proud to be a part – in a weird place. You have to hit the right balance between restraint and encouragement, helping the people you are working with get better, find something in themselves, without crossing over into making the whole endeavor into a machine. Rabid fans, especially those with $100 bills hanging out of their pockets, don’t help.
We end up replacing the goal of achievement with the goal of winning. If you see me carrying on like a poor man’s John McEnroe on the tennis courts one weekend, you’ll realize how personally invested I am with winning my own events — all of them — but I am a different creature when I’m coaching a nine-year-old wrestler or soccer player. I remember a conversation with a friend I coached with. Our team was getting trounced, again, and I said, “You know, we’re not trying to win.” He looked shocked, almost offended, but I said, “If we’re really trying to win” and then I pointed out to the field “that kid and that kid and that kid never play. And we would never do that to them.”
Especially in our culture now, with the problems of obesity and the inviting lethargy of screens, sports seems like a vital part of education. But if you want your team to be #1, human nature will lead you to a path that has been well-trod by big-time football programs around the country (see this amazingly predictable beat-down of Oklahoma State’s football program in Sports Illustrated [2]) and big-time athletic organizations around the world.
While the numbers demonstrating that many countries are exceeding the U.S. in key educational measures are subject to their own questioning (I’m always wary of these broad-brush educational assessments), our educational attention and dollars are not directed to academics the way they might be. This seems obvious, and people have known this: Ripley quotes an athletic director in Texas from 1927: “Football cannot be defended in the high school unless it is subordinated, controlled, and made to contribute something definite in the cause of education.”
Ripley’s article doesn’t provide all the answers, but she cites another Texas school that cut most of its athletics and then saw a significant rise in academic achievement (and character!). Could you imagine standing up at a school board meeting and saying, “I think we should dump all our sports and put all the money into the English department?” People might laugh. They might ignore you. Some might want to beat you up. And maybe cutting sports isn’t the real answer, but your question could get people asking a few healthy questions of their own.
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