Sports and Education Sports
Are a Kind of Education For many young people in my part of
the world (suburban America), the first brush with organized athletics comes on
a Saturday morning in early spring. The weather is getting warmer and the school
year’s end is imminent, and moms, sensing the approach of summer vacation and
too much free time, pile us into the backs of minivans and drive us to our
town’s local sports and recreation center. In my hometown, Egg Harbor Township,
New Jersey, kids converge each year on the EHT Youth Organ Building, a
cinderblock shack in the middle of a handful of baseball and football fields.
There lines are waited in, forma filled out, birth certificates examined and
photocopied, health insurance waivers furnished and signed. At the end of the
morning, kids are signed up for little-league baseball and an instant summer of
activities has been created. Then it’s time to go to Burger King.
For parents seeking productive ways to occupy their children’s time,
summer sports leagues offer a convenient and time tested outlet for overabundant
energy. In my case that meant baseball. America’s pastime: nine weeks of pitched
fastballs and sore elbows, grounders up the, middle, digging it out to first
base. shagging flies in the outfield and swatting mosquitoes in the infield.
Then, after six innings, back to Burger King. A couple of weeks
after the signups at the cinderblock shack, we kids would be rounded up into
teams and coached in the fundamentals of pitching, catching, hitting, and
running bases. We’d be supplied with color-coded jerseys and mesh baseball caps,
and then we would play a season’s worth of games against one another. Playoffs
would be held and champions crowned. At the end of the season an ail-star team
of the league’s best players would be assembled to play against the best teams
from neighboring towns. Back and forth across the country this
system repeats itself from town to town and sport to sport with little
variation. Some leagues have storied pasts: baseball’s Little League or
football’s Pop Warner League. Some are newer. In cities it is often the
Policemen’s Benevolent Association or the YMCA that assumes the sponsorship
role. Always, though, there is the underlying idea that organized sport is a
valuable and productive use of a young person’s time. Sports, in short, are a
kind of education, teaching important life .skills that can’t be learned in
school. Ideas about the educational value of sports vary widely.
For some, sports foster the social development of young people, teaching kids
how to interact with their peers outside the classroom. Sports teach kids what
it means to compote—how to cope with losing, how to respond gracefully to
success. Sports are about teamwork, how to work together toward a common goal.
Sometimes they’re about developing a sense of self-esteem. Sometimes they’re
simply about finding a healthy way to tire hyperactive kids out so they’ll sit
still in class or get to bed at a reasonable hour. Some bolder advocates claim
that their games build character. Given the prevailing
educational undercurrent, it’s no surprise that many kids’ second brush with
organized athletics takes place in a school. Junior highs and highs schools
sponsor their own sports programs and field teams of football, basketball.
soccer and tennis players. There the educational theme is given a more direct
and tangible form as squads of student-athletes travel. around the state
representing their schools on the field, court or diamond. Yet here, strangely
enough, is where a bit of the educational component begins to niter. High school
teams are necessarily more selective than their youth league predecessors.
Tryouts are held. and less promising players are cut. Coaches receive salaries,
and there is an expectation that the teams they shape will win. In sum, there is
a slight change in emphasis away from education and toward out right
competition. Competitive Sports Build Character
Education is an important theme in youth athletics in the US. Young kids,
energetic, rambunctious, cooped up in class, yearn for the relative freedom of
the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. They long to
kick and throw things and tackle each other, and the fields of organized play
offer a place in which to act out these impulses, Kids are basically encouraged,
after all, to beat each other up on the football field. Yet for all the chaos,
adult guidance and supervision are never far off, and time spent on the athletic
fields is meant to be productive. Conscientious coaches seek to impart lessons
in teamwork, self-sacrifice, competition, gracious winning and losing. Teachers
at least want their’ pupils worn out so they’ll sit still in reading
class. By the time children start competing for spots on junior
high soccer teams or tennis squads, the kid gloves have come off to some extent.
The athletic fields become less a place to learn about soft values like teamwork
than about hard self discipline and competition. Competitiveness, after all, is
prized highly by Americans, perhaps more so than by other peoples. For a child,
being cut from the hockey team or denied a spot on the swimming is a grave
disappointment and perhaps an opportunity for emotional or spiritual
growth. High school basketball or football teams are places
where the ethos of competition is given still stronger emphasis. Al though high
school coaches still consider themselves educators, the sports they oversee are
not simple extensions of the classroom. They are important social institutions,
for football games bring people together, in much of the US they are e vents
where young people and their elders mingle and see how the community is
evolving. For the best players, the progression from little
league to junior high to high school leads to a scholarship at a big name
college and maybe, one day, a shot at the pros. College athletes are ostensibly
student-athletes an ideal that suggests a balance between the intellectual
rigors of the university and. the physical rigors of the playing field. The
reality is skewed, heavily in favor of athletics. One would be hard-pressed to
show that major US college sports are about education. Coaches require far too
much of players’ time to be truly concerned with anything other than performance
in sport. Too of ten, the players they recruit seem to care little about school
themselves. This was not always the case.
Universities—Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, Yale—were the birthplaces of American
football and baseball; education—the formation of "character"—was an important
part of what those coaches and players thought they were achieving. In 1913,
when football was almost outlawed in the US, the game’s most prominent figures
traveled to Washington and argued successfully that football was an essential
part of the campus experience and that the nation would be robbed of its boldest
young men, its best potential leaders, if the game were banned.
The idea that competitive sports build character, a Western tradition
dating from ancient Greece, has evidently fallen out of fashion in today’s US.
Educators, now prone to see the kind of character shaped by football and
basketball in a dark light, have challenged the notion that college sports
produce interesting people. Prominent athletes, such as boxer Muhammad Ali and
basketball star Charles Barkley, deliberately distanced themselves from the
earlier ideal of the athlete as a model figure. Today’s US athlete is thus
content to be an entertainer. Trying to do something socially constructive, like
being a role model, will make you seem overearnest and probably hurt your street
credibility. When I was a kid, my heroes played on Saturdays:
they were high school players and college athletes. Pro football games,
broadcast on Sunday afternoons, were dull and uninspiring by comparison. After
all, why would God schedule any thing important for Sunday You’ve got school
the next day. Although I certainly couldn’t have articulated it
at the time, I think I must already have sensed that throwing a ball or catching
passes was a fairly pointless thing to be good at. In the grand scheme, it was a
silly preparation for a job. Yet playing sports was not pointless; the point,
however, was that you were learning something—a disposition, a certain virtue, a
capacity for arduous endeavor—that might be of value when you later embarked
upon a productive career as a doctor or a schoolteacher or a businessman. The
optimism of those Saturday afternoons was contagious. I still feel that way
today. Denied a spot on the swimming team is a serious failure to a kid but it can also be regarded as ______ .