The primary purpose of school should be to provide mental, not physical education. Enforcing the same academic standards for all students isn’t punishment, it’s the whole point of school. Athletes who skated by in class and weren’t good enough for the big leagues didn’t get the full value out of school.
And why shouldn’t someone who is able to perform in a sport be eligable to recieve some form of mental reward for that? So if someone gets fair grades, 3.0 type stuff, someone who would likely do about that in college. They are not going to get any serious accidemic scholarships. Sure, they will get accepted, but now lets assume they are poor. They cannot afford to pay for school.
So if this kid is now able to play baseball well, why should he not be able to go to school? If anything it sounds like a good trade to me. Play baseball for my university well, and I’ll let you get an education for free.
I do want to say that the students who play sports should be held to the same standards – if the school requires a 2.0, then 2.0 it is.
Add ping-pong diplomacy to the list of sports that changed the world, by the way. Oh, and that one football game that started a war. 
I was referring to high schools, not colleges. High schools have very limited funds, and not one red cent of it should be spent on sports until every single academic need has been fulfilled —every book, every microsocope, every computer, everything.
My problems with the American university system go much deeper than college sports. I prefer the older, British style of universities which are merely training grounds for those who are seeking intellectual pursuits. I don’t see sports as any more or less of an inconsistency with this than business programs (which should be handled through vocational training) or fine arts programs (which should be handled through conservatories). The main output of universities should be authors, professors and philosophers, in my opinion. This notion that everyone should go to higher education is no good for most colleges, or most of their students.
Sort of. I liked baseball, loved baseball, until the games became to be treated as if they were “important.” The moment it began to matter was the moment it was no longer fun. But I have no problem with people playing sports for fun.
I just don’t want my tax dollars thrown down a drain organizing school teams and buying uniforms and pointless shit like that.
“In war there is no substitute for victory.” – Douglas MacArthur
In sports – kids sports especially – there are a lot of things more important than victory.
In pro athletes that are coached every day to play by the rules, cheat wisely, paid millions, and far exceed the norm in terms of genetic predisposition in whatever sport, not to mention being “juiced”* to the gills, we expect hypercompetitive behavior. Trying to encourage that in children will mostly backfire.
OTOH – a big one – the basketball scouts start weeding them out in JHS. When some talented kids leave HS they are looking at multi-million dollar contracts in the NBA. Tennis, the Williams sisters – the justification for thousands of whip cracking tennis parents everywhere, I’m sure. Only Richard Williams was crazy enough to pull that off, twice. His not letting the sisters play too much pro tennis when they were young was obviously insane, as some “experts” suggested, all the way to the bank. I really do think he is, eh, off kilter. That’s why I don’t recommend attempting it.
I think we will see less and less HS draft picks in the NBA. The big (6’ 11" – over two meters) kids with some talent will get in on potential. There are never too many big guys for the NBA. Any HS point guard getting advice to go to the pros, unless he is a Magic reincarnation, better think twice. Of course, now every kid thinks he is the next LeBron. LeBron is physically mature all out of proportion to his age. You can’t coach that. Apparently steroids are available.
The European players that do drill hard in camps from an early age – properly – are not only having a major impact but it’s growing fast. Free throws, they practice them. Hey, points without running. I love those. They are simply far more fundamentally sound, and older, than most of these HS kids. Their approach differs from US coaching in many ways. More footwork drills for one thing. Teaching kids to be pros is big business. No pressure.
Wait, no, don’t take my college football away! That’s the one sport where kids are mostly useless. They need college, to become outstanding student, cough, athletes. Hey, some do actually graduate. OK, not many.
The colleges really aren’t near the problem that 100 million dollar contracts for 18 year olds are. That’s a real motivator.
*Remember when “the ball was juiced”? Right.
There were two, it was the 1970 World Cup Qualifiers between El Salvador and Honduras - each team won its home game but relations between the two countries, already stretched to the limit, deteriorated to the point of no return: The latter game between the two countries was played June 15th in El Salvador - war erupted July 14th. By August, 3.000 were dead and 6.000 injured. This is not smiley material in my books.
[The main output of universities should be authors, professors and philosophers, in my opinion. This notion that everyone should go to higher education is no good for most colleges, or most of their students.]
I’d just as soon somebody sticks around to work on the problems of environmental pollution, cancer, and how keep fungus from killing off all the honey bee in the world.
Amit it, Spectrum - you’re a playa hata
I see stuff like the OP all the time and it always makes me think of a friend of mine. He and his wife have no kids - they say they didn’t want kids, I suspect they couldn’t have kids but I don’t pry. He tells me he would be a lousy father but I can recall a day at cricket.
He was playing a game and I dropped down to Canberra to visit. We were standing on the boundary and two kids (about 10 or 11) were kicking around a football. While continuing our conversation he gave kicking and catching lessons to the kids and got them doing drills. He spent over an hour with them and never appeared to criticise them at all. The two kids were having the time of their lives.
I have often suggested to him that he handles kids better than he thinks but he just says, “That’s because they’re not mine.”
Listen jerkoff: first off, most high school teams play with horribly old equipment and raise their own money for uniforms. Plus, participants often have to buy their own stuff. I played lacrosse in high school and the only thing that the school supplied was the helmets (and they were at least 10 years old). The team raised money for uniforms, and the players paid for their own sticks, shoulder pads, cups, arm pads, gloves, cleats, and rib pads (if you wanted them; I didn’t).
Secondly, just because you’ve got some pissant grudge doesn’t mean being competitive in sports is bad. Being overly competitive is, but some of us enjoyed working our asses off and playing like fuck to win, though we knew we were a second-rate team. As long as the coach doesn’t flip out when you lose to an obviously better team, there ain’t nothing wrong with it. So it wasn’t right for you: deal. There’s plenty of club teams out there that don’t expect you to practice–find one and join it. I, on the other hand, don’t want to embarass myself on the strip, so I spent 2-3 hours a day drilling for fencing. And liked it. Just cause you don’t like competing doesn’t mean nobody does. The distinction to draw is between humiliating players because they lost and inspiring them to do better next time.
Argh, I forgot to include hard sciences in that list. If I could edit my post, I would. Obviously, hard sciences are a traditional university field.
I do hate people who speak like that.
Did the school provide and maintain a field? A stadium? Those are expensive costs that take money away from academics, which is the ONLY thing a high school should be concerned about.
It harms more children than it helps, and it praises and raises up for accolades skills that are unimportant and unpraiseworthy. And even worse, in high schools, it takes the focus off the only reason the schools exist, which is academics.
Who said I didn’t like practicing when I played baseball?
Maybe in sports. Maybe in boys’ sports. Don’t think, though, that moms can’t cause just as much damage. Cheerleader moms [sub]Wanda Holloway[/sub]. Figure-skating moms. Dance moms. Gymnastics moms. And god deliver us from conformity pageants [sub]Patsy Ramsey[/sub]. (I refuse to call them beauty pageants; they’re measuring conformity, not true beauty.) There are even academic parents sub Blair Hornstein’s parents[/sub], who won’t accept a grade less than A, or 100+, or 4.5 or whatever.
I already posted in another Pit thread about how my mom made me quit the children’s orchestra, where I excelled and was happy, and insisted that I join the track team, where I sucked and was miserable, and was bullied. As I said in my last post to that thread, I just needed a little Pit therapy. Now I’m able to admit that sports are not the root of all misery. But if a parent is a control freak, they will find a round hole to push their little square peg into.
Fact is, American society is just super-competitive. Doesn’t matter what field you’re in: if you don’t get awards, make money, get famous, or some combination of the above, you’re nothing.
Stadium? What kind of fucking high school did you go to? We had two or three fields, that were also used for school events too large to be held indoors.
Shut the fuck up. Schools exist to provide for the education and wellbeing of children, part of which is providing a means for them to get some excercize and participate in sports. Hundreds of generations have played competitive sports and enjoyed and learned from it. Just because there’s a few overly-competitive jerks and a few whiny assholes like you doesn’t mean the whole thing ought to be thrown out.
A fairly wealthy one. But when my brother was a freshman, they had to share science books due to budget problems. Oh, but they still had new sod on the field for the worthless, scum-sucking football playing assholes.
Sports are unnecessary for physical fitness, which certainly has a place in education. Put in a gym and have kids run/lift weights/exercise. No need to waste so much as one cent on a uniform, a helmet, a field, bats, balls or any of that other crap that takes money away from useful tools like books, science equipment or computers.
spectrum: I graduated high school in 2001. I was an athlete. Our basketball court was the gym that everyone used for PE class, as well as where dances, assemblies, and graduation proceedings were held. We had uniforms that were about six or seven years old, and a rack of basketballs. That was the extent of our school-provided equipment. We had a booster club which had fundraisers and stuff to buy us warm-up jackets and pants every couple of years. We played around 15 home games per year, attended by ~2000 spectators. Admission was 4 bucks for students, 6 bucks for everyone else.
That’s a minimum of 120,000 dollars we brought in per season, and somehow I don’t think that was less than the school was paying to keep a basketball team. Contrast that to the school’s art program, or the TV-tech people with all their expensive video equipment, or the drama people, who put on plays for crowds of probably 200, and it seems to me that in terms of school finances, the sports teams aren’t the proper target of your ire.
I have a funny feeling that we, the basketball players, were my school’s equivalents to the “scum-sucking assholes” to whom you’ve referred. Actually, I’m pretty sure I’m the guy you hate. I mean to say that my teammates and I were the guys who walked around in our championship jackets and dated the cheerleaders (I’m still dating one of’em). The scores of our games were on the morning announcements, they put up posters announcing future games, teachers were always congratulating us, and all that- I’m sure you know the kind of stuff I’m talking about.
We got all the attention, in other words- and basked in it- which (although I’m sure you disagree) seems to be that by which you are most offended. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be that every single kid who ever played on the football team in high school did something that gave you such a poor impression. I think it’s more likely that you resented the fact that the athletes were admired for doing something that you chose not to (I don’t say couldn’t). You call them assholes because they were celebrated despite not being, by your definition, valuable or important. I wouldn’t have hated you in high school, but (judging by what you’ve said so far) you’d have probably wanted me dead.
The point of all this is pretty simple. Generally speaking, there’s not a difference between athletic programs and any other programs that a school runs, except that athletic programs tend to be more popular, and at the same time are genuinely despised by a significant population. There’s a general agreement that athletes coast through school because of their physical gifts. In many cases this is true. There is also, however, a perception that the jocks are the ones picking on other people, bullying and ridiculing them, which leads non-athletes to really despise athletes. I think this perception is false. In my high school years, I spent most of my school hours amongst the more intellectual crowd- that is, honors classes, yearbook, and all that. Outside of school, my circle of friends was mostly the guys I played basketball with. Guess which group, in my experience, spent more time making fun of the other? The drama-club kid snipes about the athlete ten times for every athlete who picks on the tuba player or whatever.
In terms of this particular discussion, I guess some of that is a little bit off topic. My point is that your only argument against having sports in school is that you don’t like them, which isn’t much of an argument. Contrary to what you seem to be arguing, playing a sport doesn’t make you an asshole, but it’s pretty much a guarantee that someone’s going to think you are, which I think is a shame.
Some good points being brought up here, on both sides.
Can we agree that IF a school has limited funds, and these funds are going towards sports while other programs (science, language, etc.) are being underfunded (students having to share books, like spectrum describes) that this is wrong?
I have heard this time and again, and it does irritate me. Sports is popular, so funding goes for sports. No other gods before sports. So what if the science program suffers? So what? Gotta have sports. So what if they close down (pretty much) the art or music programs? So what? No other gods before sports.
Now, IF a school does this, it’s wrong, in my opinion. Sports may be fun, but it simply cannot be as important as science.
Let’s face it: how many kids are going to make a living with sports? As compared to those who might make a living from something science-related, or something requiring good computer skills, good language skills, and so forth?
It has been said (sorry, no cite, too lazy to look it up) that a kid that becomes engaged in music or art is much less likely to have problems later on. I am sure the same can be said for sports, so I’m not trying to dismiss sports and worthless. I’m just saying that if one must be given up, why is it (with some of these schools) never sports? All sports taught me was that kids were bullies and teachers looked on. Sports were torment. (Obviously not all kids felt this way so I’m not wishing that sports be eleminated. I’m just saying that it was not valued by all of us. And in fact was considered beyond useless.)
In my view, sports are not that special or that valuable. They just are. Some kids loved them in school, some kids didn’t. I don’t see why they should come before art, theatre, music, and I especially don’t see why they should come before science. But as we all know, they sometimes do. That’s screwed up.
Maybe you should refuse to pay your taxes, citing that you, “don’t want my tax dollars thrown down a drain organizing school teams and buying uniforms and pointless shit like that” as the reason.
I’m sure the IRS will see it your way.
Television and theatre are legitimate academic exercises, and therefore worthy of all the funding they receive. On the contrast, most sports teams cost far more than they will ever bring into the school, and are not legitimate academic exercises.
Why should my old high school have a football team with new turf and jerseys, instead of enough books for my brother’s science class? That’s utter bullshit. Sports should be the last item on any budget, and it should receive the crumbs left over after the real purpose of school, academics, has been taken care of.
I am well aware of the bullshit accolades given to jocks. It’s a symptom of this country’s perverted disdain for intellectualism and glorification of meaningless, worthless physical “accomplishments.” But I wouldn’t care about that if the academic departments were properly funded before the sports teams.
Let the neaderthalic jocks peak in high school. When they’re wasting their lives working on cars in a garage, knee deep in grease and remembering fondly their high school glory days, the intellectuals will win in the end.
I resent anyone who recieves accolades disproportionate to the accomplishment in question. Ability at sports should rate somewhere below a six year old tying their shoes on the whole “things worth honoring” scale.
By what definition could throwing a ball possibly be important?
Of course it is. And those athletes should be expelled from schools and the teachers who gave them favors for being athletes should be barred from ever teaching anywhere again.
The point of school is academics. Anyone can learn to throw a ball in their free time, and the dumb jocks who are only good at ball throwing will.
In Europe they don’t tie schools and local teenage athletics together like we do in America, and they are much, much better for it.
No, my argument is that schools should be for academics, and that anything that takes emphasis or money away from academics (and the arts are a legitimate academic pursuit) is a drain on the system.
Why is a high school football team more important than text books for the science class or a new computer lab?
Is there any reason that we couldn’t focus on atheletic but non team oriented sports? Why not let the school teach more olympic oriented material and let the kids interested in team stuff form teams and play outside of school. Why not let those NOT interested in team sports compete in the other activities? The attention that team atheltes recieve is shameful. It’s not that their accomplishments are withou any merit; physical training and conditioning is difficult. Their accomplishments however need to be placed at the same level as those of acedemic, artistic or other material. If the chess club, or the band got the same small amount of attention as the athletes we’d be a better society. Let everyone be praised for their individual merits and not elevate one small group over all.