Against High School Sports

Kids every day, of all ages play sports, whether it be a fun game with their friends or organized through their school. Sports themselves are great, they promote countless benefits and encourage players. However, once schools get involved things change. Amanda Ripley in her article The Case against High School Sports states “In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one- not even the people in charge- relizes their actual cost.” The academic focus of schools can shift to the athletics, with there being too much time and money being poured in it. That effort could be better spent on what the actual focus of school should be, students’ education, not training and games. In Mark Edmundson’s Do Sports Build Character or Damage it? he

As Amanda Ripley said in an interview with the MPR News staff, “Schools promote sports over education, they fail to prepare students for future careers.” With schools valuing sports more, students lose the chance to gain useful advantages that could help them later in life. Clark Power in his article Athletics vs. Academics states that “60 percent of the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) football and basketball players read below the 8th grade level, and eight percent to 10 percent read at or below a third grade level.” It is very likely that those players, because of their athletic ability, were pushed through the high school system. That is a very misguided precedent to set, as those athletes lost the chance to learn. In the documentary, Schooled: The Price of College Sports, the disturbing question is raise about the tactics used to keep up academic progress rates. In the documentary, Domonique Foxworth, a graduate of Maryland, and the President of the NFL Players’ Association notes, “Your [college’s] challenge is to get them eligible; it’s not about educating them.” There is no favour done for the student athletes by admitting them into academic programs that they are not qualified for. They become extremely unprepared for life in which they need their academic education. In Amanda Ripley’s article School Should Be About Learning, Not Sports she wrote, “The problem is the dishonesty. By mixing sports and academics, we tempt kids into believing that it’s O.K. if they don’t like math or writing — that there is another path to glory. Less obvious is that this path ends abruptly, whereupon they get to spend 50 years in an economy that lavishly rewards those with higher-order skills and ruthlessly punishes those without.” There is a reason each lesson is taught in school. And for schools to