In my present young body, have had the great opportuninty to play baseball and basketball for my high school’s team. I came in thinking, it’s still a game, we are still gonna have fun, but I have been greeted by wave after wave of animosity by opposing teams. These guys want to hurt me.
High school coaches have instilled a form of win or die trying in their players these days. I admit I play a hardball sort of sports, spiking people in baseball, and occasionally giving a hard foul in basketball, but more and more outrageous things are happening in the world of high school. For example, at a recent tournament for baseball, a huge mammoth of a kid, about 18 years of age I assume, got hit by a pitch in the leg. There was no prior instigation, but the kid took it as a personal attack. He came flying out to the mound and hit the pitcher with the bat in the stomach. Completely uncalled for!
Something has to be done quickly or future sports will end in a series of gun wars. Parents need to teach their children good sportmanship, being a gracious loser, and a gracious winner. If this doesn’t happen, Sports is Doomed.
1.Blame the big leagues. Batters charge the mound all the time. Benches are cleared. Punches are thrown. Fines are issued and paid. Next time they do it all over again. Until the majors clean up their act how can you expect those who learn from them to clean up theirs.
2.Blame the little league coaches. If these Casey Stengal wannabees didn’t push the little ones so hard they would learn things like sportsmanship and teamwork.
3.Blame the parents. Raise your kids right and the occasional twisted coach won’t warp them into bloodthirsty savages.
3a.Blame the parents on the sidelines yelling and screaming like there’s no tomorrow and threatening the umps and refs with bodily harm if they rule against their “angels”
4.Blame the school system. If they monitored the little beasts better these things wouldn’t happen.
5.Blame the pinheadded morons who put rules into place to reduce the amount of competition in elementary sports. They worry that the self-esteem of the kids is so fragile that in Massachesetts some school districts have outlawed keeping score at soccer games. In Pennsylvania there is a rule that if you hit a second home-run in a single game, you are out. Wouldn’t want the opposing pitcher to cause his whole team to lose.
6.Blame the kids. Grow up and act your age. It’s a game not a battle.
I suspect that you might receive a better response had you posted this topic in MPSIMS. Perhaps you could email a mod and asked to have it moved.
To address your position, I don’t think there’s anything to be done about the way in which sports are coached. Successful athletes, like other entertainers are the bumbling royalty of the United States. As a society, we have allowed them to exist outside of our own sense of conventional morality. We have sacrificed our values for the sake of the entertainment and inspiration with which they are expected to provide us. HS coaches and athletic directors are just trying to churn out marketable athletes. Until the market changes, the marketing will remain the same.
Well I personally stopped playing sports at my school two years ago while I was a sophomore. The reason I did becaused it was just getting too serious. All the hard work and progress we made meant nothing if we did’nt win the game. I think the media allowing athletes on all levels to be glorified is one reason. Student feel that if they can be the best running back or center fielder than they will get fame and glory. This gives them an attitude of being better than other students who don’t play sports. I hate the attitudes of most of the football players, eventhough most of them are my friends. I have seen many good students turn bad after getting to sit on the bench at the football games and cruise with some of the better players. Adults also have a negative effect, when I stopped playing my parents got pissed, for some reason they felt that they could have more pride in me if I was a star athlete. Well in all I think that the problems will only get worse as long as these athletes are getting all the attention and money that they want, cause along with that goes the attitude.
Most of how people behave on the court/playing field has to do with how they were taught to behave in sports when they were young, and how much pressure parents put on them to be the best. I am on my school’s varsity volleyball team, and the overcompetitive people on the team have parents who were/are higly competitive in sports and push their kids to be the same way. Few of the teams I’ve played against had bad sportsmanship skills, but there are the few teams I play against that go out of their way to be the winners, even if it means breaking rules and being rude. High school football players are the worst with the bad sportsmanship IMO. I have no plans to contimue sports past high school, and often enough the people who have bad sportsmanship in the professional leagues have other personality problems that are evident also.