Is the High School Jock a complete myth or what?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I hung out with a good cross section of folks in school. Some of the “jocks” were dumb, some were quite bright. Ditto the cheerleaders, for that matter. In fact, in my Algebra II class in 10th grade I was always vying for the top test scores against a very large breasted, very blond cheerleader for the top marks on tests. I’m not sure what became of her, but I hope she never let the stereotypes work against her.

Of the two kids I know that went on to the next level or more one was a complete moron and one was a pretty regular kid who was probably above average academically. The first played tackle for the UGA football team. The smarter kid is a relatively well known, to baseball fans, ex-major leaguer who later admitted to juicing. I only knew him through 9th grade so had no idea until much later that he was even much of an athlete, but his older brothers were all big jocks at my first high school.

22

Interestingly enough most of the jocks in my class kept good grades, but the three I know of that made it to the professional leagues, two minor, one major leagues, were idiots.

So I’m not sure what that means.

23

At my high school, a large portion of the varsity sports players were in Honors classes. Higher academically were the AP students, and their extracurriculars were usually speech and debate, Mock Trial, or band. (I was an unusual AP student, in that I took art classes.) A few of the male basketball players took AP Calculus.

The heavyweight wrestling champion of our school (he went on to State Finals) was also a phenomenal oboe player. I, the second chair oboe, privately found it funny that this massive guy played the oboe with such skill and sensitivity. (I never told him this, he was scary!) He went on to study music at Chapman University.

24

I tutored some jocks in college who were in on athletic scholarships. They weren’t so much dumb as just, literally, uneducated. Don’t let the GPA’s fool you. I had more than one guy tell me that their grades had always been “taken care of” in high school. One guy was actually self-aware enough to understand that he’d been short changed and exploited by schools and coaches. the others thought they were going to go pro and get rich (these were mostly hockey players).

I think it depends on the sport. For sports where there’s a lot of interest, and a lot of potential after high school (football, basketball, hockey), guys who are good enough to have shots at scholarships or maybe even the pros don’t have to suffer any consequences for not doing well in schools. Their grades get fixed. For sports no one gives a shit about (soccer [in the US], wrestling, track), guys have to maintain their own grades because no one gives a fuck if they aren’t on the team. Those guys are also less deluded about about their chances of superstardom, so they take scholastics more seriously.

There are definitely jocks that fit the stereotypes to a tee.

25

In my high school (mostly blue-collar to middle-class) a handful of jocks were smart, most were average and none were really dumb. If I wanted to generalize, the baseball players were the probably smartest, followed by track and soccer, with basketball and football at the bottom. The girl jocks (in those days that meant basketball, volleyball and cheerleading) tended to be smarter than the boys.

Most of the smarter guy jocks tended not to last past JV. But one of the smartest boys in the school was a five-letter varsity letterman and quarterback of the football team. He went on to be a successful lawyer but, IIRC, did not play college sports at all.

26

YES…perfect…Just being athletic doesn’t automaticly mean “jock” Jocks tend to play sports and be VERY hypermasuline in the way they act.

27

I can think of one guy who was the stereotypical dumb jock. He actually took off his jacket and shirt in church one Sunday to show off the stretch marks on his biceps. Disgusting guy, and thought he was smart, which was incredibly annoying. One of those people too stupid to know that they are. . .

The rest of the football players were mostly normal though. Not math team smart, but normal and passed their classes.

Sport can say something about your intelligence though; about half of our ultimate frisbee team went to MIT.

I’d also say that most of the cheerleaders were on the stupid side of normal. I can’t think of one of them I would have wanted as a lab partner.

28

I was a cheerleader for part of high school. (I quit because I hated going to the games. I mean really, who cares whether or not the football team wins?) I would have played dumb in the lab, but I would have gotten the right answers. And if you were a cute jock-boy, I would have happily shared those answers with you, all without making you feel dumb!

29

Almost without exception, every cheerleader I’ve had in class over the last few years has been an excellent student. Most maintain an “A” average, and take reasonably challenging classes. It helps that our district has a “No D” policy, so students have to get Cs or better to take part in athletics. I’ve regularly taken cheerleaders to State in Speech & Debate. Just because they seem to be bubble-headed bimbos doesn’t mean they aren’t smart/talented/motivated. :smiley:

30

This is my experience, as well. And even the ones who were not particularly intellectually gifted tended to still stay in advanced classes and work really hard–which is enough for even a less-than-average student to still be more than prepared for a decent state school. Cheerleaders usually leave school with every thing they need to do ok in life.

31

The jocks in my school were no more or less stupid than anyone else. They tended to be a bit cliquish and hang around with themselves, somewhat understandable given the team ethos, however from what I saw they were never hostile towards anybody.

Probably had a lot to do with their coach who was just about everything you could possibly want in a football coach. Great coach on the field but also never missed a chance to support the school at large. He played cameos in school plays and did lots of other stuff to give exposure to smaller student groups.

32

I went to a private high school with an admissions requirement. There were definitely some pretty dumb kids playing sports, but they still made an effort in class. But some of the best players were also excellent students - because they had good work ethics. Additionally, this school was annually accused of “recruiting” or “paying” their athletes (especially football), because we were always in contention for a state title. Sorry - not the case. We just worked harder.

For college, I went to Notre Dame. Say what you will about the quality of the program on the field, but those kids must pass admissions to get in, along with everyone else. There’s a slight bit of leeway, but not as much as you’d think. It’s the reason Randy Moss never wore the gold helmet. I had plenty of guys in my classes who asked better and more pointed questions than many others. A guy in my brother’s graduating class had a double major and finished with a 4.0. Can’t remember his name, but he also went pro.

33

The “jock” stereotype was created and transmitted by a few sensitive, Woody Allen-ish filmmakers who must have failed to make the team, way back when, and are now getting their payback. Is not every movie with the mean jock in it filmed at some southern California HS?

In my HS the star quarterback also had the highest GPA (and the hottest girlfriend.) I would have hated that guy if he hadn’t been so nice. I’ve spent a lot of time around a lot of high school grads recently and all of the really good students participate in extra curricular activities, usually including sports. Heck, the girl’s basketball team won the state championship AND maintained an average GPA close to 4.0 - hardly seems fair to suggest they somehow slide by easily.

Sure, there are stupid athletes, just like their are stupid people everywhere. The difference with the stereotypical stupid football players (and their counterparts in other activities) is that they are at least participating in something and often doing well at that. There are lots of losers hanging around behind the school doing nothing at all AND making crappy grades. They get movies made about how cool they are though.

34

And I suspect that when they do get good grades in such situations, it’s largely due to cheating.

That’s why I wouldn’t rely on grades as an indicator that someone’s not a jock. When I was in school, some of the lazies people also tended to get honors.

35

The high school jock is not a myth, but he’s not a reality that everyone encounters.

Things vary from school to school. If you’re a basketball star at a rural high school in Indiana, the whole town knows your name, and you’re treated like royalty. On the other hand, a basketball star at most of the New York City Catholic high schools I knew wasn’t Big Man on Campus. His friends thought it was pretty cool that he was doing so well, but he didn’t get or expect special treatment.

I’ll cite one example: Power Memorial High School (long since closed down) was a Catholic school in Manhattan run by the Irish Christian Brothers. Two of my uncles were members of that order, and used to take me and my brothers to Power games regularly. Now, Power usually had a VERY good basketball team, and such stars as Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chris Mullin played there. But crowds were usually sparse at Power games. That’s life in the big city- kids who went to Power usually had other, better things to do in their spare time than go to school basketball games. So, some great athletes were playing great games in front of a few dozen people!

Hence, most of the basketball players I knew at Power were good students, probably a bit better than average. When you’re playing at a school where nobody’s paying all that much attention to a sport, jocks don’t get special breaks or much adulation.

I KNOW that, in many parts of Texas, high school football stars are treated like deities, and can coast through school, knowing they’ll never flunk or be disciplined, under any circumstances. But… when I was a teacher at a high school on Austin’s East side, I had several football and basketball players in my classes, and NONE of them was a stereotypical dumb jock. A few were EXCELLENT students, most were average, and only one flunked my class (even there, the kid in question was a nice, bright but lazy kid, rather than a dumb jock with a sense of entitlement)

That’s the difference between Austin and a small town in West Texas. There’s a lot to do here on a Friday night, so football isn’t the be all and end all of anyone’s existence. The stadiums were rarely full for this school’s football games. So, it was sort-of cool to be a football star, but nobody treated you like royalty. If you scored a big touchdown on Friday night, you got lots of high fives on Monday morning… but then everybody pretty much forgot about it.

So, it all depends on the location and culture of the school. My guess is, BOTH the people who complain about dumb jocks AND the people who say that phenomenon is overblown, are telling the truth as they experienced it.

36

Due to moving I went to a couple different highschools. In the one school, I would say the jocks were about as academically skilled as the average student body, but at that school, sports was not a really huge, big deal. At the other school, there was a greater push for sports and the jocks, IMHO, fell into two categories: those whose genes made them really big and really only had that going for them (definitely fulfilling the “big dumb jock” stereotype) and those who excelled academically because they were very disciplined individuals.

The jocks who were very serious about sports and participated in many tended to have very regimented lives due to all their programmed time. Practice school, practice, homework, bed, repeat. Since thie r schedules were so busy, they tended to have great discipline and got their homework done and assignments in on time. If they weren’t gifted with brains, they still made up for it by really adhering to a solid, disciplined work ethic. There was one guy I used to run with, that IMHO was really not the brightest bulb, but he still had straight As because he plodded through all his coursework so diligently.

On the other hand, the guys who were just gifted with big bodies and who didn’t really need to train as hard and were not particularly disciplined in practice, were often not disciplined in other aspects of their lives and suffered academically.

37

We had a mix of good and poor students among our athletes; the coach made sure academics came first (which made sense, since no one from our school would ever make a career in sports). We didn’t have football (too small), but were big on soccer (county champs a few years after I graduated) and basketball (always competitive). The basketball team my senior year did have one honors graduate but most were average students. Girl’s basketball (with six on a side, as it was intended to be played) had several of the top students and were Eastern Suffolk champs.

The cheerleaders, BTW, had the valedictorian and salutatorian of my class and the valedictorian of next year’s class, so the image of cheerleaders being airheads was a surprise to me.

38

I know what you’re getting at, and I largely agree with you.
But… it just so happens that teenage Woody Allen was NOT an intellectual. He was, in fact, something of a jock himself. Seriously, he lettered in three sports in high school. Even his naikcname is sports related. Friends called him Woody because he was always playing stickball.

I know that’s completely contrary to his image, but he’s often acknowledged that “People just think I’m an intellectual because I wear glasses.” He’s not especially smart, and admits it. He flunked out of CCNY, which is not exactly an Ivy League school.

39

Oh, in my high schools the jocks didn’t need to cheat. The teachers were mostly very sympathetic to their needs to get at least decent grades, so the jocks were allowed all sorts of makeup tests and extra credit assignments to bring up their grades. These things were not available to students who weren’t playing in the school team, or who weren’t cheerleaders, as I found out when I needed to bring my grades up because I’d had some personal problems. So, yes, there was cheating, but it usually wasn’t the jocks who were doing it.

Bitter? Me? Why do you ask?

40

Well…stickball. It’s not like being on the varsity football team is it? But I too have heard the stories of his less than stellar school career; no argument there.

One common thread I’ve noticed in his humor is allusions, either veiled or open, to famous philosophers, from which I assumed he has some abiding interest in the subject. The same can be said of playwrights, e.g. the take-off on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler–“Lovborg’s Women Considered”. (I have removed the umlauts and placed them behind my ears.) I wonder just how much he knows about these subjects as I’m not terribly knowledgeable in them myself. And I know that when he tries to give a character a King James Biblical manner of speaking, he misses the correct grammar and inflection by several miles (viz “The Scrolls”).