# Sports in school is cool...and? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [January 14, 2026, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687 "2026-01-14T16:03:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2026, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/81 "2026-01-31T17:35:27Z")
> [@Atamasama](#): > > > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > > Other school programs don’t _encourage_ aggression, violence, praise for “strength”, rulebreaking to win, and attacking the “weak”. They were effectively bully training programs in my experience. > > I’m sorry your school was so awful. They taught us to do the opposite of all that when I did sports. LOL…seriously. Did Cobra Kai diversify into other sports in his school district or something? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/82 "2026-02-01T01:25:29Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Did Cobra Kai diversify into other sports in his school district or something? I don’t know that character, but did Cobra Kai openly encourage the big kids to put the little kids “in their place”? Because that happened in my PE classes. It was a constant violent free-for-all that the teachers did nothing whatsoever to stop. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/83 "2026-02-01T01:29:59Z")
In my school PE was a hellhole where the students had to run four laps (one mile) around the track and the person coming in last had to immediately run four more laps (or until they vomited, whichever came first), and organized sports was an excuse to skip out on class (practice being held during the day a lot of the times.) ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/84 "2026-02-01T12:37:44Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > I don’t know that character, but did Cobra Kai openly encourage the big kids to put the little kids “in their place”? Because that happened in my PE classes. It was a constant violent free-for-all that the teachers did nothing whatsoever to stop. [It’s not a single character. Cobra Kai was the antagonist dojo from like 5 Karate Kid movies and a popular Netflix series over the past 40 years. Mostly known for their motto "Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy "](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxpBHBvmds). ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/85 "2026-02-01T17:44:58Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > [It’s not a single character. Cobra Kai was the antagonist dojo from like 5 Karate Kid movies and a popular Netflix series over the past 40 years. Mostly known for their motto "Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy "](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxpBHBvmds). Ah, OK. Never watched any of them, not my taste in entertainment. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/86 "2026-02-01T19:06:12Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > In my school PE was a hellhole where the students had to run four laps (one mile) around the track and the person coming in last had to immediately run four more laps (or until they vomited, whichever came first), That’s just abusive. I’m pretty sure my gym teacher said the only way to get an A in her class was to run the mile, which is why I did it. I didn’t want to wreck my GPA. The pain in my knee came that night. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, an injury, so much as a pre-existing condition that was exacerbated by the running. The surgery helped with the worst of the pain, but I’ve had issues all my life. I did have a turn of running in/after college. I was always very slow but I got up to five miles. I broke a ten minute mile once in my life. Anyway that experience taught me that you don’t just put someone completely unfit on a track and force them to run until they feel like they want to die. It doesn’t work. It’s really something you have to work up to gradually. Especially if you want them, at any point in their lives, to enjoy physical activity. This kind of torture is why so many people end up hating to move their bodies - their only experience of it is suffering. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/87 "2026-02-01T19:21:51Z")
Talking about sports in school is different than talking about PE in school. The problems with PE class have little to do with whether sports are used as an activity in PE. Kids in PE who are at the lower end of athletic ability will often be subjected to bullying or feel embarrassed about their performance regardless of whether they are playing a sport in class or just doing any sort of physical activity. It doesn’t matter if they’re playing a sport in class (basketball) or doing calisthenics (push ups). And even sport activity in PE isn’t really the same thing as school sports. If the PE class is playing basketball, the experience is very different than playing on the school’s basketball team. Using PE class to evaluate the benefits of school sports isn’t really a viable comparison. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/88 "2026-02-01T19:48:29Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > Talking about sports in school is different than talking about PE in school. Not really; for most students, PE _is_ going to be their experience of sports in school. Not a team they’ll never be on. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/89 "2026-02-01T20:15:35Z")
No, PE is their experience with _PE_. That has little or nothing to do with their experience with _Sports_. Different subjects entirely, to my thinking. I loathed PE; I loved Swimming/Water Polo. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/90 "2026-02-01T20:49:01Z")
Yeah, if you asked me, I’d say that I did have experience (ranging from bland to horrible) of PE in school (some of which happened to involve sports), but that I did not have any experience of sports in school. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/91 "2026-02-01T22:44:40Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > In my school PE was a hellhole where the students had to run four laps (one mile) around the track and the person coming in last had to immediately run four more laps (or until they vomited, whichever came first), and organized sports was an excuse to skip out on class (practice being held during the day a lot of the times.) That’s horrifying. I am so sorry. I hated PE but mine wasn’t nearly so bad. It’s a very good point that PE is a different animal than team sports. PE was mandatory up until 11th Grade when I started High School but to my delight when I was in 10th Great they eliminated 11th Grade PE. PE at my high school was the shitty athletes like me, the stoners and people whose grades were so bad that they got kicked off one of the teams. Sometimes they’d give us a few basketballs and say don’t get hurt. My favorite was when they’d give us softballs and some bats and send us to the baseball diamond. It was far enough away that they didn’t see that I just sat in the bleachers the whole time with the stoners passing around a joint (before the days when I would partake). ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/92 "2026-02-01T23:24:07Z")
In some small schools (like mine) the PE and the sports teams are run by the same people, and what happens in PE can sometimes indicate how the teams are run. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2026, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/93 "2026-02-01T23:45:29Z")
Except the people on the team are the ones the coach actually likes, and the ones in PE class are the ones the coach doesn’t like. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2026, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/94 "2026-02-02T00:08:05Z")
In my school it was the exact same people. All of them had to take on one class of what was called Basic Fundamentals as I recall. The first semester it was the track and tennis coach. The second semester it was the cheerleading coach. They didn’t respect us much. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2026, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/95 "2026-02-02T02:21:34Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > answer the OP, I think one benefit of team sports in school is that it teaches responsibility (in theory.) You get to see how much the team depends on you At least sometimes, however, what seems to be taught is that responsibility to the sports team overwhelms responsibility to anything else. Years ago I hired a local high school student; who, it turned out, wouldn’t show up to work on a day he’d agreed to if there was an unexpected practice. A lot of farm work is very time dependent; it often can’t be done just as well on some later day. > [@ricepad](#): > > have always believed that participation in organized sports in childhood is good for any child. I think such participation helps kids learn that life isn’t always fair, it’s usually better to get along with your teammates than not, losing isn’t the end of the world and the benefits of winning tend to be fleeting and finite, etc. Sports participation does not guarantee these life lessons, but those lessons are there to be learned if the student is receptive to them. The lessons learned by some, however, is that nobody wants the klutzy kid on their team, that being really good at sports is considered very important and therefore people bad at sports won’t get any respect, that a lot of people will think you’re not trying when you really can’t do something. I suppose a really good sports program might get across your lessons and not the others; just as a really good sports program might teach responsibility to others in additional contexts, not just responsibility to the sports team over everyone else. But in practice, that’s all too often not what you get. > [@wolfpup](#): > > I was never interested in joining organized sports, but I kinda enjoyed the hockey and basketball stuff that was part of phys ed. I have an extremely clear memory of being the only kid in class who couldn’t manage to make a single basket. It wasn’t that I was an entirely inactive kid who just wanted to sit on my butt. I ran around in circles for the sheer joy of it. We had ponds and I swam. The neighbors kept an old horse in our field and I rode her. But none of that was anything like either PE or school sports (with the partial exception of the one school which had horses, in a very non competitive fashion.) Let me clarify: I’m sure that sports in school, competitive sports included, are good for some people. They probably even rescue some kids. But while physical activity of some sort is good for nearly everybody, the huge emphasis on competitive sports in most USA schools is also actively bad for some students. I don’t know what the percentages are. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2026, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/96 "2026-02-02T16:38:23Z")
The problems of competitiveness are exacerbated by some sports having full-time coaches. Most school sports are coached by teachers who coach in addition to being a teacher. But a few sports, like football and basketball, often have a coaching staff who only coach the team. They don’t teach classes. Their full-time job is to be the coach. This means that the school is focused on wins since they are putting so much money into that sport, and the coaches are focused on wins since their continued employment depends on the team doing well. There’s a lot of pressure on the football and basketball kids to win since so much depends on having a strong team. But the sports with teachers with part-time coaches are more often just centered on the sport and the athlete. If you’re on the cross country team, no one is making you feel like the the whole school is depending on you coming in first place. You may put pressure on yourself to do well, but that’s up to you. The coach will typically be more laid back and the school pretty much doesn’t even know the team exists. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2026, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/97 "2026-02-02T22:51:25Z")
I think that, around here, coaches whose only job is coaching aren’t allowed. But that just leads to coaches who are still hired to be coaches, and are just stuck with some class, usually PE, sometimes health or something else, so they can officially say that they’re a teacher. Which means that you get all of the problems associated with a full-time coach, plus the problems of some classes having bad teachers. Like, I had a PE teacher (who was primarily a coach) in 9th grade who thought that four Cs averaged out to an F, and don’t blame him for it, because he didn’t write the rules of mathematics. ---
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2026, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/98 "2026-02-03T01:19:07Z")
Having teachers, particularly PE teachers, coach in addition to teaching often means something has to go the wayside. And guess what… it’s not usually the coaching. This was one of the main reasons I left the field. PE is an important subject, but it must be taught well. I was expected to coach, which meant I could not possibly devote the necessary care and time to being a good PE teacher. Result: the kids who need good PE the most, don’t get it because the teacher is much more incentivized to focus on coaching. In other words, we end up preaching to the choir - devoting the lion’s share of our attention to kids who are already athletic. Another good word for that approach would be… stupid. And we end up perpetuating PE being taught poorly. Am I saying we should have full time sports coaches? No. In my world, we would make athletics much less important in schools. I’d much rather see a club type system, which was the standard in Europe (not sure if that’s still current). That is, kids want to have a basketball team? Fine, give them a place to play and some support, but nothing like making it the focus of the school district as we do here. Athletics are much too formalized and prioritized. I’d much rather see a system that gets kids active at whatever level - low, medium, high. Give all kids a chance, no cutting them from teams without having somewhere for them to participate if they want to. I’ve seen school districts that did this, but they were not common. I don’t miss being in that field. All the incentives are wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2026, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/99 "2026-02-03T23:03:16Z")
Heck, even for a math/physics teacher, there seemed to be an assumption at a lot of schools I interviewed at that because I was a male teacher, I’d have to be a coach for some team. It’s one of the reasons why I’m glad I’m at a girls’ school now, because there’s a lot less of that toxic emphasis on sports (sure, we have sports teams, and we’re proud of them, but nobody is ever going to say to me “We’re playing our big rival Saturday, so you have to make sure to give Sophia an A on this test so she can meet academic eligibility requirements”). ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2026, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687/100 "2026-02-03T23:13:28Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Heck, even for a math/physics teacher, there seemed to be an assumption at a lot of schools I interviewed at that because I was a male teacher Seemed to always be the history teacher in my schools (possibly because history teachers were more often male in the schools I went to, and the physics teachers were old (I mean 50-something!) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sports-in-school-is-cool-and/1026687.md?page=4)