Checking the score
on sports and education
Most of us love school sports, supporting hometown teams even when they don’t win state championships or post winning records.
But just as it is becoming apparent that transfer portals and name, image, and likeness payments are ruining college sports, signs are that other school sports are facing immense challenges.
And, no, we’re not talking about transgender athletes.
Waiting for my dinner to arrive last week at a local restaurant, I listened to a student worker talking to her employer about whether she would be available for an activity the employer planned this fall.
Already, the student was overloaded with conflicting responsibilities — to her schoolwork, to her job, to her church, to her family, and to a myriad of sports and other activities that pile on top of these.
She isn’t alone. Other students I’ve talked to locally experience the same thing. Even my own granddaughters far way in Northern California feel the pressure.
In small towns, there’s other fallout. Planned seasons like Marion’s softball and Peabody-Burn’s girls’ basketball end up being canceled. Swimming teams from Centre, Hillsboro, and Peabody-Burns end up combined with Marion’s. Peabody-Burn’s baseball and softball teams are merged into Hillsboro’s. The list goes on.
Combined teams mean more time spent moving from town to town for practices. Already, sports travel consumes a huge amount of students’ schedules.
This month alone, Marion teams will travel at least 1,563.6 miles to various competitions, spending more than 26 hours on the road.
The cost of all that travel is measured not just in fuel and drivers’ pay but also in hours lost to studying, working, playing, and doing all the other things young people should be doing. And that’s with an unusual number of home games for some of the sports this month.
Perhaps it’s time to begin considering fewer sports and fewer trips.
Years ago, state rules required that coaches had to be certified teachers, handling regular classes not just coaching athletics.
This not only naturally limited the number of sports that could be offered. It also ensured that those coaching were aware in ways that coaches drawn from the community can’t be of the multiple other responsibilities their athletes face.
Marion County has five school districts. Yes, they range in size, but the desire to limit competition to schools of almost exactly the same size may be a luxury we no longer can afford. Limiting sports travel to within the county or, at least, to no more than 30 miles one-way, as frequently was done in the past, still would give us ample competition.
It’s important to note a watershed change in student attitudes. As we’ve reported, students seem less interested in team sports and more interested in individual sports. With team sports less important, the relative size of schools becomes less important. So, too, does one of the long-term reasons for having sports — their ability to encourage students to work as teams.
The current glut of sports offered by many districts is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of Marion’s history in baseball and softball, teams were part of summer recreation programs that also drew large numbers of visitors to town. Now they are packed into the school year and sometimes, as happened this year, at least partially canceled because of lack of players willing to put in the time needed.
Moving sports that attract smaller crowds out of the jam-packed school year back to the less activity-filled summer might actually improve the community’s sports lineup both for participants and for spectators just as keeping opponents closer to home might intensify healthy rivalries.
If you ask around, you’ll find that a lot of the pressure for more and more sports isn’t coming from students. It’s coming from parents, sometimes in the mistaken belief that dozens of activities will make their kids look better on college applications.
Take it from someone who spent time evaluating college applications. That isn’t what colleges are looking for. What they’re looking for is whether a student’s activities seem to fit well with the student’s intended major, and not always in ways easily understood.
Journalism programs, for example, don’t pay a lot of attention to kids who participate in literary journals. They’re more concerned about finding kids who perform in public — as singers, in bands, or as actors. The psychographic profile of a successful journalism student is of someone who puts himself or herself out before the public and understands that the public may or may not always appreciate the performance — a point this writer might well want to consider when touching the third rail and doing anything other than cheering on sports teams.
Other majors have other things they look for in student activities. Leadership roles are important in business and advertising, for example. Scut jobs can be important in areas that essentially have long apprenticeships.
Schools are important sources of recreation and entertainment both to their students and to their communities. But we must never forget that their primary purpose is education — not just to prepare students for further study or jobs but also to prepare them as fully engaged members of our democratic society.
Given the political polarization and malaise that has gripped both our community and nation, we may need to do some work to get back to having winning seasons in that regard. Limiting the disruptions of trying to field too many teams that travel too far may need to become part of that game plan.
— ERIC MEYER