Recently some friends and I were marveling at the stupidity of some professional athlete when it occurred to me that all the “jocks” at my high school were people like me - the smart kids. The majority of my HS football teammates were the better students and got degrees (no scholarships for sport here either).
I checked out my surmising at work with the younger guys. We are all bright folks with tertiary qualifications. Of the 6 males 5 were, or still are, jocks and they agreed that the guys on their sports teams included many of the smarter set at school.
So is this the reality of HS sports elsewhere or has it been corrupted to the point that the dumb jock fraternity is reality.
I went to HS in a smallish school and most of the jocks kept a pretty admirable GPA. Nothing too special about their mental capacities, they just knew if their GPA went to shit, so did their sporting career.
Most of the high school stereotypes went out the window though when it came to my high school.
The “goths” could be chatting it up with the skaters and would then turn around and talk with the preps with no problems.
Everyone had their little groups of consistent friends, but we all tended to know and talk to at least one or two people from a different stereotypical clique.
In my school’s athletic awards program, the wrestling team had few asterisks (indicating honor roll) next to their names. In contrast, all members of the boys’ varsity swim team had an asterisk.
Depends on the sport. In my HS, the football players were the stereotypical jocks, and the coach wanted 'em that way, from what I hear. Wrestlers and gymnasts were competitive freaks, so they tended to have good grades… But the track / cross country team? Hoo boy. If they -didn’t- excel at both atheletics and academics, there’d be hell to pay with both the coach and the rest of the team. (They were the ‘pride’ of our school.)
Ugh shudders You have probally never experianced the Massachusetts phenonomeon known as Yah Dudes. Basicly fake preppy (wear A&F) dumb jock types whose only purpose is to drink and date Pink Red Sox Hat Girls.
In high school, my school was just SO stereotypically Stepford…shudders
On the other hand…I recently found out that the football coach’s son turned out to be GAY!!! TOO FUNNY!!!
And the thing is…there ARE guys who are good at sports, or who play sports…but they’re not Jocks. Jocks are more like…sports are my entire LIFE They are very hypermasuline
I went to school in Texas and Missouri. In both places, teachers were under pressure to pass the jocks. The jocks themselves, and their coaches, tended to regard the academic side of school to be an aggravating distraction from the REAL purpose of school, which was SPORTS. Very few jocks were brains, and very few brains were jocks. This was also the case for the girls, too, but not to such an extreme.
This was over 30 years ago, mind you, and some things have supposedly changed, but I still read about jocks getting their grades changed. Theoretically, if a student doesn’t pass his classes, he doesn’t get to play in sports, from what I understand of the “no pass no play” law in Texas. However, in practice, it seems that the star jocks get an awful lot of accommodations made.
Jocks are always the dumbest group in every school. Except the quarterbacks and tennis players.
Every jock in college entered on a “sports scholarship”, got tutors, begged the profs for D’s so they wouldn’t get dropped and then left without a diploma, despite not getting pick up by a team.
In my high school, the football players were about as clever as rocks. Stereotypical jocks. Water polo players tended to be more nerdy, though not necessarily very academic–a bunch of them went into firefighting. The academic types who were on the honor roll and stuff didn’t play sports at all for the most part.
This is easily demonstrated to be false. We had several athletes (myself among them) in the top 10 in our school. Participation in athletics, by itself, doesn’t say anything about intelligence.
I grew up in a town that was almost totally blue-collar. This was in the Rust Belt in the 70s and 80s when you could still support a family in middle-class comfort through unskilled manual labor. My family was considered froo-froo because my mom was known to be a kindergarten teacher.
The jocks (football, basketball, wrestling, track) were proudly and aggressively stupid, as were many of the coaches. Most of the coaches went out of their way to be cretins because, being teachers in real life, they were automatically suspect in the eyes of the jocks and their dads. The only coaches who could get away with not being morons were the head football coach (gym teacher) and one of his assistants (history teacher and a known military history enthusiast). As the economy got worse, they got stupider and more aggressive.
Kids who played other sports like tennis weren’t as dumb, but then again, they weren’t considered jocks, either.
We have jocks at my school (where I teach) --“hypermasculine” kids who are all about sports, who are disdainful of intellectual pursuits, and who, if they ever had much academic ability, have had it atrophy by now. However, two things are different from the stereotype, in my experience–most athletes are not jocks (football players more often are: baseball players, almost never) and jock does not equal “most popular guy in school”. Don’t get me wrong: being a beast gets you a certain type of respect and a certain measure of feminine attention, but it isn’t the only way to be popular–one of the more popular kids in the group that just graduated was average on the baseball team, but he got a perfect score on his SAT and played a mean ukulele. I’ve had any number of “class favorites” on my Academic Decathlon team.
I always think of one person when this question comes up.
On our 8th grade trip, we were flying back from Washington. She was sitting next to me. There was a man from Australia behind us. We turned around for a minute, and she asked him if they lived in houses(down there.)
I won’t even get into details of the major reason… but I was sure it was her athletic skills that were keeping her in school when others didn’t.
She was a soccer player, and she ended up with a scholarship to college. I don’t remember where.
I played baseball in High School and College. In HS, I’d say the athletes were about normal, with a wide range of intelligence. They were far from the dumbest “group”, though. That would be the stoners who worked on cars as a hobby. They were mean and stupid.
In college, the athletes as a group were quite a bit smarter than the student population in general. They were hyper-competitive and extremely proud of their GPA’s. I’d say that at least half of the baseball team went on to graduate school. There are a couple of doctors and a bunch of lawyers in the group. One is in a management position with the Milwaukee Brewers. There are some exceptions, especially among football, basketball, and especially hockey players, but the scholarship atletes as a group were very smart and ambitious.
I’m having a hard time making generalizations about my high school. (lower middle class/poor, about half black & half white with lots of racial tension, ~1990)
The boys’ football, basketball, and track teams were mostly black, and they were not in the honors classes. The boys’ baseball, soccer, tennis, and swimming teams were mostly white. Some of those kids were the lower tier of the honors classes. Probably the soccer players were the top of the social hierarchy. What’s probably relevant here is that for the most part being “smart” was not socially advantageous, but being a good athlete was. Some of the soccer types went to four year colleges and got professional jobs, but very few of them were especially motivated to do well in school.
I did varsity sports at a Division III college. It was great - sports that no one pays attention to and people just participate because they like to!
I’m at a Division I state school now. Instructors tend to dread having athletes in their classes because it’s abundantly clear that classes aren’t a priority for either the athletes or their coaches. There are all sorts of expectations that special allowances will be made for them to accommodate practice and competition. The athletes are definitely not the smart kids.
I agree that it is a stereotype that most certainly does not fit all.
Many of the jocks in my high school (which I was most certainly NOT one of) were actually some of the brightest students in class - I think their dedication to training carried over to their dedication for studying as well.
Quite a few were popular with other sub-groups in school, and many didn’t even really hang around with the other “jocks” at school, other than when they were practicing or participating in away games.
My good friend Randy was captain of the basketball team, on the football team and track teams and eventually got a scholarship - based solely on his amazing GPA!
Of my starting 11 on the football team, I was the only one to graduate from college (university). Of my wrestling squad, I was one of the two to make it to college. Of the baseball team, I think I was among three who went to college to graduate.
Depends on the sport. In my teaching career, I’ve found that football players tend to be of the not-bright type. Next step up would be wrestlers. The smart jocks can be found in the pool or on the tennis courts. I rarely have football players in my AP classes or my Debate class.