Forget about sports, schools should focus on academics
Just because something is done for decades and decades doesn’t mean it has to be done forever. Times change. Move on.
My point: What’s the rationale for public schools to continue to field athletic teams? It’s time we reexamine why School District X should play School District Y in football, basketball, or in any other sport.
In short, it’s time school districts start to think of ways to get out of game mode in order to concentrate their energies on their core function: academics.
Organized high school sports have been around a hundred years or so. On Oct. 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove, Texas, played the St. Matthews School of Dallas in one of the earliest interscholastic football games. Honey Grove prevailed 5-0.
In 1903, New York City school boys competed in track-and-field at the original Madison Square Garden in the heart of the Big Apple.
The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) was organized more than two decades after two San Francisco schools first lined up helmet to helmet on the gridiron.
In the case of the CIF, a handful of school principals from Los Angeles got together in 1914 to banish the practice of schools fielding older, nonstudent players in order to tilt competitive athletics in their favor.
The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) came along a year earlier, in 1913, in Pittsburgh.
At least some of the movement to organize school sports came out of the concern that American youth were increasingly “stiff-jointed, soft-muscled” and pasty, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., especially in contrast to immigrant children.
Theodore Roosevelt struck the proper chord in 1900, when he admonished young football players to “hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk; but hit the line hard.”
(TR had to dial that back some. As president, he intervened on behalf of football rule changes; violent on-field collisions were killing college athletes at eye-popping rates.)
Of course, there are arguments in favor of school-based sports. One goes back to the Holmes statement: physical fitness.
Another goes to the idea of participation. It’s important that teens get in there and mix it up with their contemporaries. Competition is a fact of life. Better to learn that at a young age than later in life.
The opposite is frequently advanced, too: playing team sports teaches cooperation. All for one, one for all, as the saying goes. Life is a collaborative effort.
All true.
Then there are more nebulous arguments. One is that sports are fun, which can be true, but it also can be false. For some young people, sports can be nerve-wracking. The anguish of sports can be just as real as the joy of sports.
Then there is the Big One, the clincher of all arguments: rooting your school team on to victory builds school spirit; it bolsters school morale; it may even take a bite out of truancy. Pep rallies. Cheerleaders. Marching bands. The sight of your team running onto the field for the game. The touchdown pass. The long run into the end zone. The three-point bucket.
The essence of the high school experience is encapsulated in the sights and sounds on the playing field and in the stands. Or so we tell ourselves.
In truth, high school sports teams are getting harder and harder to afford, a point illustrated by the Laurel Highlands School District, where school officials are kicking around the possibility of instituting a pay-to-play requirement.
Except for wealthy districts, the money poured into organized sports makes offering quality education more and more difficult. Instead of paying for books, science labs and, yes, teachers, districts are buying shoulder pads and paying referees.
The point is not whether young people should play sports or be members of a team. Those that can and want to play should be afforded the opportunity.
The argument is whether the public schools should be saddled with this responsibility and its attendant expense.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.