I don’t know.
It seems the divorce rates for sports participants is a lot higher than those who don’t participate. “The divorce rate for professional athletes is approximately between seventy and eighty percent. This rate is higher than the divorce rate for Americans, which is approximately fifty percent.” Why do athletes face higher divorce rates? | Gladstone & Weissman, P.A.
If kids are getting into sports so that they can go pro, that’s not viable except for the most exceptional kid. Only the top of the top of the top will make it. There should definitely be other reasons to do sports than that. And even when someone is good enough to go pro, a typical pro sports career is very short. That’s not a sensible career path for almost anyone.
There has long been suggestion that sports helps with youth mental health.
The Mental Health Benefits of Sports for All Teens
Sports allows kids to participate meaningfully with others their age in a cooperative activity. There’s social and emotional support from your teammates during a time of stress. Physical activity, all on its own, benefits one’s mental health, putting the two together is a win.
Where it can go wrong is adding stress by demanding peak performance, monopolizing a teen’s time outside of school, focusing on wins alone, etc. The benefits don’t accrue from a “win at all costs” attitude, it’s the journey. Another issue is that we actually do have children who aren’t dynamic athletes, and our tendency to demand victory shuts them out of the benefits.
That’s incorrect. The divorce rate of professional athletes is higher, per your source. It’s not making a generalized statement about little Johnny who played JV basketball.
That’s specifically for professional athletes. There’s a big difference between pro athletes and those who happened to play in a sport or three in high school.
Is true.
While we’re talking about pro, most of the people who reach the pinnacle of Olympic sports like water polo or volleyball don’t play in school. They’ll play in an academy from an early age.
Yes. I would have said that early opportunities to play their sport (in school or elsewhere) are obviously beneficial for the tiny number of players who go on to play as a pro, and the question should be whether sports helps the other students.
The most elite athletes we know are speedskaters. Several Olympians. Not a school sport. And, from our personal experience, training as an elite speedskater does not well prepare one for success later in life.
Which is yet a bit of a different category because speed skating isn’t a high school sport. Gymnastics, water polo, volleyball, track, etc are played at the high school level but also have a different track for the elite. Basketball and football pros typically go through high school first.
The one thing that’s unique about sports is they typically involve physical activity at a high level. This can help the athlete be fit and healthy through regular exercise from practice and competition, as well as specialized training and nutrition plans to compete at peak performance. This can help them be fit and healthy later in life, which comes with social benefits. People often think more highly of people who are in shape, so the person may have an easier time forming relationships, getting jobs, and other things where being attractive provides a benefit. Certainly people not in sports can also be fit and healthy, but a HS student is not very likely to put the same effort into it on their own as they would if they were in sports. Ideally, PE classes could fill this need for all students regardless of whether they are in sports or not, but rarely is that the case. PE classes are often poorly taught and lead to some of the students swearing off exercise all together.
I used to be a PE teacher and it’s true that it’s often taught poorly, and by complete idiots. But (at least when I was trained many years ago) even a well-designed and well-taught PE program won’t usually result in major fitness gains. It’s not personal training.
A good PE program shows people how to exercise, teaches skills and hopefully prepares people to be active throughout a lifetime.
IMO, challenge square dancing is more of a sport than poker.
It’s not a high school sport, though, and not directly relevant to the thread. I just brought it up because doing it gave me insight into some of the benefits of team sports.
I am unaware of any studies that show it, but I 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.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in California, but those two are definitely school sports.
They definitely are and I worded that very poorly. I meant that the elite athletes in those sports don’t play in schools. The elite football and basketball athletes do play in school.
For example, one of my friends played women’s volleyball for Stanford and one played women’s water polo for UCSB. Both played the sport through High School and on club teams. By coincidence, both started as seniors on the team that came in second in the NCAA tourney their year.
You’d think that they were one of the best players in their sport in the world in their prime. In fact the best athletes don’t play high school sports (with a very few exceptions) and are recruited to play an academy to try for the Olympics. Both of them scrimmaged against the academy players and said it was like a different universe in terms of ability.
I can vouch for this anecdotally. My wife’s cousin, her son is a stellar soccer player and is being scouted as a potential pro player. He won’t be playing soccer in high school, but rather will be playing it at a special academy to prep kids for a potential future career in the sport.
I want to say he’s 14, and has been going through that process for a while, where he’s on a different trajectory than your regular kid who plays soccer in school. When a kid starts to really stick out, they may target that kid pretty early. (The kid is also over 6’ tall and you’d think he was an adult already, good grief.)
I think that’s true for volleyball and soccer, where club coaches sometimes actively discourage - or even prohibit - their club players from playing for their high school teams. My younger one had a teammate on the school soccer team whose club coach told her to quit the HS team if she wanted to play club ball for him. (She quit the HS team.) One local girls soccer coach had nearly the exact same team for club and school for a few years.
Basketball tends to be more of a mixed bag, with the best players playing for both club and school. Youth football, however, seems to be mostly a feeder program for high schools, which in turn feed into colleges. I don’t know about baseball, but in my observance, softball appears to follow the same trend as volleyball.