Another forum was discussing high school sports and I was wondering, do high schools in New York have school mascots and sports teams like high schools in other areas? Also do they have homecoming?
From what I can see high school sports is more run thru the Public School Athletic League than thru the high schools.
I’m assuming you mean NYC, and yes, most have a variety of teams. Some have a mascots. It certainly isn’t as big here as a state like Texas. We have Homecoming too, just don’t expect the big to-do you might see in smaller one-horse towns.
I can’t speak for NYC, but the rest of NY State has HS sports teams and mascots just like most everywhere else in the US.
NYC has sports teams and mascots like other cities and towns. I don’t know what the OP is getting at concerning the PSAL, but from what I recall (I haven’t lived in NY for many years) it’s an association/league of schools like other places have, not some sort of Mafia.
My public high school (H.S. of Performing Arts) did not have sports teams, and a grass roots effort by a few students to organize a prom failed due to lack of interest. Apart from exceptions like that, NYC schools have extracurricular activities including homecoming, proms, chess clubs, gangs, drugs and shootings just like schools around the country.
My sister’s high school mascot near Albany was the Spartans. Guess how many folks were in her graduating class? Yep.
Well I went to high school on Long Island, and though we did have teams and homecoming and all that, no one other than the players and their friends & family really cared. High school sports here are not a town-wide thing like they are in other parts of the country.
The Public School Athletic League (PSAL) is just the governing body for public school sports in NYC. (Public) High Schools are just a subset of Public Schools. PSAL will handle scheduling, standings, playoffs, etc.
As Jackmannii noted, not every school will have every team or event, though sometimes one might be able to compete for a nearby schools team.
I graduated from high school in Queens 45 years ago, and we had some teams - basketball, soccer, golf. I don’t know if we had a mascot, but we had a team name. While I was there they decided to try to organize a football team (other high schools had them) and sold season tickets to judge the interest. They sold about a dozen. My graduating class was over 1500. They gave up.
We did not have homecoming (but the school was only open for 4 years when I started) but we did have a prom, which was not the hip place to go to.
Bolding mine.
Heh.
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Hmmm… Interesting. someone from Queens (on another thread) said their high school didnt have those and she wasnt even totally sure what homecoming was. Some here say certain high schools have them but others dont.
But even those that seem to have them, sports, in the way they are here in the midwest where they are an integral part of the high school, are just not that important.
I’d guess part of that is a shortage of wipe open spaces for athletic fields.
Yep, that was me. I still don’t know what you ( or my fellow NYC residents , for that matter) mean by homecoming. If you mean the big event I’ve seen portrayed in movies, TV shows, and books where all the alumni and former residents from years back come back for what seems like a full week of celebration including a parade, a football game and a dance, then no, I’ve never seen that. If you mean that some football team calls a particular game the homecoming game and no one else pays attention, I’m sure that happens.
We absolutely have proms- but they have nothing to do with sports.
The lack of importance has nothing to do with a shortage of wide open spaces for athletic fields- even if a school doesn’t have it’s own field there are public fields. High school sports are plenty important to those who participate in them just like all extracurricular activities are important to those who participate in them and their parents. It’s just that the rest of the population is no more interested in high school football than they are in high school chess.
First, most high schools in New York City don’t have football teams. Some do, but it’s such an expensive and land-intensive sport that most don’t bother with it.
Most New York City high schools have basketball teams and (yes) mascots, but very few high school basketball teams get big crowds. A high school typically is NOT the center of its students’ social lives. There’s a lot for a kid to do in New York City besides go to his high school’s basketball games.
I’ve related this before, but for many years, two of my uncles were teachers at a Manhattan Catholic high school called Power Memorial (it has since closed down). One of my uncles took me and my brothers to Power games regularly. Now, the Power team was usually excellent- a lot of future NBA stars (including Kareem ABdul-Jabbar and Chris Mullin) went there. But the crowds were usually tiny, because even the best high school basketball teams just weren’t that appealing to spectators.
Once you’re out of Manhattan there is plenty of room for a few athletic fields. It’s just that schools in the NYC area don’t promote a sense of tribal identity nearly as much as places where school is a major focal point of community life. But there are plenty of schools in NYC where athletics are a major activity.
NYC schools (at least in Queens) often do have athletic fields - if not stadia. Ypu need to distinguish sports for fun from sports for school reputation and as an end to themselves. MIT has lots of sports, but none that are a big deal to anyone but those playing them. The University of Chicago is similar today (not when Hubble went there.)
I think Homecoming is tied to football. My high school in Queens didn’t have it either. Neither does MIT - alumni reunions are held during graduation week, where five and ten year classes go to lectures, go to parties, and give oodles of money to the Tute. (Just went to my 40th.)
Also, we have a lot of schools in a small area by the standards of just about anywhere else in the country. Plus, high schoolers don’t necessarily go to the closest high school. So were a city of 200,000 might have 5 or 6 schools, all with their unique geographic identity, that just doesn’t happen here. In NYC, three high school students on the same block might not just go to 3 different high schools, but to 3 different high schools in 3 different boroughs.
Plus, as noted, the spectator value is tiny. The only reason I watched girl’s volleyball and track & field (get your minds out of the gutter!) was because my daughter played and I often was asked to drive her and a teammate or three back (she didn’t care that I watched, just that I cut her commute time after the game).
I just looked up the public high school closest to me in the Bronx. They definitely have a football team that plays a homecoming game. Following that is a dance called the Fall Semi-Formal. I don’t know why they settled on a slightly different name, but that’s the concept right there – football game and a dance.
I don’t know that that’s the typical meaning of it in general, but maybe NE Ohio isn’t deep enough into the Midwest for us to go that far with it. That is what homecoming is like for college, no doubt, but at least in my town homecoming a dance like prom but for any class (where prom is for seniors), and there is a football game the Friday before it called “the homecoming game” where maybe 100 extra people show up because they graduated from there and half their friends still go there. I think possibly a pep rally too.
But no week-long celebration or parade. It’s just a dance on a Saturday after a football game on a Friday, exactly like Prom or Winter Formal but during football season.
The concept of homecoming is the team plays 2 or 3 away games, then comes back to do some home games. Hence, homecoming. Granted in NYC an “away” game is maybe only 10 miles away. I know teams in South Dakota that travel over 200 miles to find an opponent.
BTW, to compare schools in NYC with schools out here in the suburbs of Kansas City, here is a link to Blue Valley Southwest High school: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=blue+valley+southwest&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&channel=np&ie=UTF-8&ei=p8VZU7S5BZS0yATy8IKwCg&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg
Notice it has 5 athletic fields for football and soccer, 4 baseball/softball fields, a field specifically for track, and 6 tennis courts.
All for a school of only 839 students.
More like 2 or 3 miles in many cases.
Really? I’d never heard that before. It seems awfully silly, considering all the team sleep in their own beds at night regardless of home or away. Also, what if you alternate between home and away throughout the season?
Just to be another data point, I am a New Yorker, but my high school did not have a football team, and I don’t remember it being a big deal at any local school, except perhaps (though quite possibly) the expensive private schools.