Isn’t it mostly people associated with the schools and the current students? I can’t say I’ve ever known people who go see high school sports who just live in the community, without a son, daughter, niece, nephew, or grandchild who’s playing on the team or in the band/drill team/cheerleading squad. Which is pretty good number in an absolute sense, but I’d still guess under 10% of the population overall. Maybe more in the suburbs, less elsewhere.
My point was that people support the local town football club, which fulfills the same role as the local high school’s teams in the US. We just don’t have the same structure of pro and semi-pro and amateur sports like the FA does, so in a lot of areas, especially smaller towns, the ONLY organized sporting events are the local high school sports teams.
Part of the allure of high school sports is that I think it tends to tap into people’s tribal instincts, in that it’s somewhat similar to sending your community’s warriors off to fight, even if it’s just your local high school kids going to play basketball. But it’s probably the closest thing to it these days, and people seem to respond to that. It reinforces community bonds in a mostly harmless us-vs-them kind of way.
Reading the links and posts above, it appears that school sports is a business in which the employees (children, parents) pay the costs without sharing in any revenue. There is little benefit to the general student body and significant benefit to a miniscule group of coaches and players. The primary lesson learned is that money wins.
The system described for Finland is admirable. Teach sports to those students that are seriously engaged in a sports related career. Otherwise it’s an interest pursued outside of school.
That “commujnity bond” may be more of an introduction to partisan toxicity, something the country could use far less of. I don’t see a lack of community bonding in European towns and cities because they don’t have school sports (though there’s certainly some of that emanating from the town’s club teams).
Nah, I think you’re taking it way further than I meant. It’s just that when someone lives in a town of 750 people and you’re 30 miles from the nearest other town, high school sports is a big deal because in a lot of ways, it’s the only entertainment around, and everyone is involved, not just people associated with the school. So it’s something that fosters community within the smaller towns.
Of course, this isn’t an unalloyed good- it also puts a lot more pressure on the high school kids than is probably reasonable in a lot of cases, and it tends to put a disproportionate value on high school sports relative to a lot of other stuff.
For your second comment, about pressuring the kids, I once again point everyone to Friday Night Lights, where Buzz Bissinger examined the community pressures on the kids in phenomenal fashion.
Personally, I think that the real problem is that it elevates the high school athletes far above where they ought to be.
For example, I have a good friend who went to school in rural Arkansas. He said everyone knew who the quarterback of the football team was every year- the guy was always a minor celebrity even among adults, not to mention students. Even if the team wasn’t particularly good, or the quarterback was merely mediocre. Meanwhile, my buddy was the academic equivalent of a blue-chip recruit, with very high test scores, excellent grades, Arkansas Governor’s School, standout academic challenge team performance, and so on… But nobody really knew who he was for that stuff at all.
Or to use a personal example, I was similarly academically successful in high school, and played varsity football (center) for the middle two years of high school, but got a knee injury and didn’t play my senior year. Fast forward about 3-4 years in college, and I ran into a girl who had gone to the girls school adjacent to my all-boys school. I didn’t know her in high school, but apparently four years later, she remembered me from football- my name and even position. Either she had the hots for me back in high school, which boggles the mind considering that I had bad hair, acne and was overweight (and she was a JV cheerleader), or people actually paid attention to all that stuff far more than I ever thought they did.
Ah, that makes sense. We certainly do have a vast network of sports clubs who ‘represent’ every town and village (at the smallest village level, they are often organised by the local pub), so that tends to be where our tribalism comes out. The kids sports don’t really get a look in.
I’m curious- what ages are the players on the lower-level FA teams? Like in say… the Vanarama National League? Are they twenty-somethings, or teenagers?
I’m just kind of amazed that England can support twenty levels of organized soccer, without some of the lower levels essentially occupying the same levels as what high school sports occupy in the US.
They’re adults, just like in any league (I’m sure some are teenagers, but then so are some EPL players). There’s no age cap, and these small clubs will probably also have junior teams.
I guess teams sports just generally attract high levels of participation, at all skill levels. I work for a small company (30 people) and reckon half the guys play for a local sports team of some sort - cricket, rugby, football mostly. My wife used to play rugby for a well known rugby club (amateur), and she was probably mid 20s at the time.
That’s interesting. We don’t really get that sort of participation around here, with most people being essentially finished with organized sports by the time that they are out of high school or college. I mean, there are rec leagues, but they’re not common or pervasive or anything, and they’re not coupled to any other leagues for promotion or relegation.
No one has mentioned the officials. A mediocre player who really knows the rules can make a great official. Officials are always in demand, and even amateur teams are usually willing to (or must) pay for their services.
Maybe we don’t get the participation because we don’t provide the best opportunities for playing. One reason why England has around 7,000 soccer clubs is the way the structure provides such a wide range of skill levels at which to compete.
When you get down to the 20th tier or so we’re pretty much talking about pub teams who might get together once a week to practice and drink beer (or vice versa). Still, they keep score on Sunday afternoons and if they beat their peers often enough, they can win promotion to Tier 19!
Have you ever lived in Texas? Or, for that matter, Alabama, Georgia, and probably a few other states in the Southeastern U.S.? In those areas, football at any level (pro, college, high school, even grade school) is a BIG DAMN DEAL, and in any given town, a lot of the population closely follows their high school’s football team. Most of them probably attended that school, and if they didn’t play football (or were a cheerleader), they wished that they could.
MandaJO and I both live in Dallas- I was talking in particular about big-city Texas football. I know it’s a big deal in small towns, but in larger metro areas, I was questioning the community involvement, since there are so many schools and usually competition from local collegiate and professional sports.
Put another way, why is Joe Six-Pack who has no kids going to follow Hillcrest High’s football team, if they can follow SMU or the Cowboys? Or Lake Highlands, Berkner, Richardson, Fossil Ridge, DeSoto, etc…? Unless they’re alumni or parents (current or former), there’s not much connection to that school’s community.
Maybe I’m wrong and there’s a whole host of people who keep up with high school sports without some direct connection to the school, but I haven’t run into that personally.
There are some who stay connected. Alums, people whose kids graduated from there. But what really matters, from my point of view, is that among the parents of the students there is still that intensive devotion, and they end up hijacking the whole school to the purpose of providing a certain type of experience for their kid, a sports-centered culture that pervades everything. Among the set of people who care at all about the schools one way or the other, the set that cares about the sports program are a vocal and powerful force.
I live in one of those Texas towns but I don’t see it. I see parents of all the different levels, Academia, Sports, Band, Debate, they are all vocal , about their kids interests.
That is the common theme. Parent’s of all stripe of kid want the very best experience they can have for their children. Except you might have 50 band kids, you have 3-400 football kids. So sports ends up as the vocal majority.
Now some will argue there ARE benefits to school based sports but you are right in that many in the US are starting to question why our high schools need sports or why do sports at that level need to be run thru the schools and not thru outside clubs?