The Atlantic: 'The case against high school sports'

I will jump in with some thoughts later this evening. My first is how odd it is that she felt compelled to grant high school athletes anonymity.

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/

 

For the record, I think playing a sport hurt my grades in high school. Just too much time. I know this is probably a minority opinion, but the story posits it, and I think it is worth taking seriously.

 

Me too. My time was more structured, and I knew when I had to study, and get homework done.

When I wasn't playing a sport, I had too much free time, and procrastinated.

 

The argument for High school sports is essentially the same argument for tax payer financed pro sports stadiums.

 

Not only that, but I went to high school with a bunch of guys who only stayed in school --- and kept their grades up --- to play football.

 

For certain individuals, lessons learned through sports experience have direct carryover into adult life, IMO.

For others, those connections are more marginal and for many may in fact be negative. As with pretty much all human endeavor, YMMV.

That said, if the American educational system was being redesigned from the ground up, no way in freaking hell would competitive sports (especially team sports) be part of the high school or college curriculuum. They would very properly be offloaded to club organizations. Schools would continue to offer (actually, require) phys ed in terms of general fitness, and that would be it.

 

Going to actually try to support that or are you just trolling?

 

With what high school sports have become, I'd be pretty happy if they went away or at least were not funded by the school budget. They aren't the center of social life anymore (especially in big cities), the schedules have gotten too scattered with midweek games and thus have become counterproductive to homework, and the competition level is low and getting lower because anyone with a decent chance of playing college sports is either not playing in high school or playing it as a lark while concentrating on the club team and the showcase circuit.

High school sports is no longer what we remember it to be.

 

Agreed. At least the headline admits she is making a case rather than trying to be fair and balanced, because she clearly went out of her way to bury any opinion that opposes her view.

 

I looked it up. No discern able grade difference during the spring. I think I was just generally overextended all year long between the newspaper, baseball, and my job. Probably learned some lessons that an A in physics couldn't have replaced, though, in the process.