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A GDST about whether school sports should be a thing
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You can just pay kids to play sports for you without forcing them into a weird limited educational component that doesn’t actually provide what it asserts to.
Other countries have been doing this for decades, mostly with soccer. It seems to work okay?
yeah gotta cosign this right here. Highschool football and basketball is serious fuckin business. It's also a way out of poverty for a subset of the HS athletes. It's also generally a good thing for kids to participate in a team, whether it be physical sports or robot wars or quiz bowl or band or whatever other thing brings people together to achieve a common goal of excellence. Or at least competence.
Similarly, club frisbee in college was essentially my entire social life.
Keep sports.
So don't do that. Some shitty schools do! But lots don't. I don't see how this is an argument for sports, where being bad at it just entirely excludes you from participation and often other opportunities that come with it.
'K. But while phys ed might sometimes involve contact sports, sports leagues usually do. Again, not an argument for keeping sports.
Sometimes, yes. But a sport offering child care after 3pm doesn't really help if your kid can't make the team. You want the school to offer after school care, have that be a thing of its own. Meanwhile many schools make you pick up your kid from sports instead of bussing them, and of course the games themselves are travel and time that the parent has to spend. That pretty heavily outweighs the benefit of after care, in terms of whether it makes things easier or harder for parents with work commitments and limited transportation. To say nothing of the considerable cost barrier of equipment and uniforms that is often at the parent's expense.
I don't think teaching is as big of a priority, no. If the goal is to win, you want kids that already know how to play, and that are already good at it.
Injuries are simply less likely in a 20 minute game of volleyball during PE compared to spending three hours three times a week doing full contact competitive sports! That really doesn't seem at all contentious.
Scholarships don't exist in PE...again, don't think I need receipts for that one..
As for transphobia...I want to be careful in making it clear that transphobia is always transphobia. But while I think it's a bigoted nothingburger for someone to wring their hands over a 14 year old trans girl having an unfair advantage against 14 year old cis girls in a highly competitive full contact sport, it's even more clearly just bigotry if someone starts complaining about a trans girl in a co-ed casual volleyball game during PE.
As a side note, the example given by the transphobes is talking about some hulking giant of a trans girl beating up on poor little feminine cis girls. To which I say any student of any gender could have the situation where they are just vastly outmatched physically. I don't want my daughter or my son to get beat up by someone twice their size, no matter the gender identity, which is why I don't plan to involve them in hyper competitive sports where such physical advantages are sought out and students are recruited and transferred so the school can win games.
Played fairly serious tennis for a number of years and that absolutely wouldn't have been available in my community without school supported sports
A few years back, there was a case where a high school baseball coach had his life thrown into disarray because one of his players had a bad slide into a base and the resulting injury had his ankle joint go necrotic. Which resulted in the kid's father suing him over it, saying it was his fault since he called for the slide. In the end, the courts sided with the coach that it was a fluke accident, but it illustrates that no matter how much we do to reduce it, we cannot eliminate risk in sports.
As for wrestling, the big issue there is weight cutting, which is why wrestlers are a male high risk group for body dysmorphia and eating disorders. I've talked about an incident that happened at the college level when I wrestled in high school, where three collegiate wrestlers died while cutting weight in the span of a week - which put the fear of God and liability into both the NCAA and the high school governing boards. Which is how I wound up having my BMI calculated properly (which involves using a caliper to measure points on your body.)
If by "works okay" you mean "is a system notorious for all sorts of abuses, especially with regards with minority players from impoverished nations."
This isn't "intense pedantry" this is basic "setting the terms of what is actually being discussed" necessity.
The trans bans on sports by Republicans are about banning trans kids from participating in sports regardless of what grade that sport is played in. Blanket bans, from pre-K to collegiate athletics.
When this conversation about privatizing sports spun out from the discussion of trans bans, it would naturally follow that we are continuing to talk about it along the same terms as the conversation had been going along. Blanket bans, from pre-K to college.
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We attribute a lot of moral virtue to successful athletes: because you must work hard to get to that level we recognize that as an achievement. But that's... not a huge part of the explanation of who gets to be an athlete. At professional levels you must be extremely gifted physically in ways you obviously don't control, but even to be competitive at the level of high school teams that hold tryouts, you've got to be physically gifted compared to your classmates, and different sports require different types of gifts. Then after sorting everyone by height and mass and speed and strength we award the outliers (but only those in particular sports and positions) scholarship deals and have official school functions celebrating them that are obviously more important to the school and to the students than any scholastic recognition. I never had to go to a pep rally for the mathletes.
Sure, those scholarships are a road to higher education for a few poor kids, but have you considered:
- they mostly go to privileged kids anyway because we created competition around them that parents can pay to influence
- it's obviously insane and unfair to pick who goes to college based on physical gifts they don't control in any event
- the way they are treated by the colleges that offer them the scholarships and then profit off their unpaid labor is inhuman, and
- most end up getting little more than a flimsy diploma in a field they don't care about and athletic-career-ending injuries
While I think schools should leave competitive teams to leagues and exclude themselves from that deeply ridiculous atmosphere, I'm well aware that's an unpopular opinion and I'm unlikely to get a lot of traction if I start a campaign to ban it at the federal level. I would much prefer to focus on fixing the things that put the incentives in place for high schools to act the way they do. In a lot of ways those are "bigger" problems, like how can we make a society where not going to college or leaving high school a year early doesn't seem like a life sentence to poverty, or whether there is a hex we can put on the NCAA to force it into some kind of magical thought prison.
It's also why I think being angry about the tiny handful of trans athletes is completely stupid, because the ostensible argument is "it's unfair to let someone with too much of a biological advantage into the sport", which... yeah, obviously? If you like competitive sport then aren't you in favor of that? What do you think we're doing here? Obviously the real argument is "you're not really girls and you're really gross".
Unfortunately, this is not feasible with popular large group team sports. They have to be exclusive to work
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Yeah, I think we can all agree that schools should ban debate club
Are those problems essential or solvable?
Oh yes - the Pedantry Team is a blight on the school landscape.
Yeah, as was said, it works okay.
it's not perfect, and we don't have to look to hard to find "all sorts of abuses" in the current US model either.
But if we're looking to decouple sports from schools, stop giving schools perverse incentives, and not make people work for free to enrich said schools, then yeah, it works okay.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age [Switch] - Sit down and watch our game play itself
Some of the things kids at my high-school did to make weight...
Let's just say intentional dehydration is both the least of it and something teenagers shouldn't be doing to themselves.
I’m not saying you can’t have PE or intramurals. I’m saying we can’t keep tying such huge amounts of money and payouts and malfeasance to higher education while being so terribly limiting in all the ways that actually matter.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Which maybe doesn't justify the abuses of college football and the ncaa, but at least shows a positive that came from it?
Tennis would not have been a playable sport in my community without school support.
ok come on now.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to this, honestly. A school can still offer tennis without it turning into a “I hope if I give up all my academic achievement and other scholastic pursuits I can get good enough to get a partial scholarship to a tepid D2 school in Indiana,”
I want people to be healthy and fit and active. No one should have to give up their futures for it.
From my experience, any sport that offers scholarships is prone to these kind of abuses and limitations.
Scholarships have to go, that’s something I’m implacable in. I’m fairly open to a lot of other arguments and I’m even open to keeping school athletics if it met the criteria I outlined earlier.
Yes, they can. And do!
In other places, pitches and courts are a mix of open public areas, and the rest are owned by clubs.
These clubs are part of the community, draw their membership from that community, and are owned by them.
They do exactly what schools seem to do in the US, but without all the things 'mika dislikes (and that I'm quickly coming around on)
So when people say without school sports I wouldn't have had X. they're not wrong, but it doesn't have to be that way.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age [Switch] - Sit down and watch our game play itself
I can see how that would color how we both differently view the topic
Is this actually common? I've never met anyone who's school was like this for any sport. The couple people I know that were putting this much time into sports in high school were potential Olympians and it was largely parent driven with huge outside of school involvement.
In the places I’m from, it’s all anyone cared about. Didn’t matter which sport, you were there to win a scholarship and move on to the next level.
And a huge part of the US is exactly the same way. Probably most of the US, I’d wager.
If your coach isn’t sending kids to college on scholarship, they can’t defend their exorbitant salaries, the boosters (parents and weirdo community diehards) withdraw support, and then they get fired.
Texas A&M’s boosters got their head coach fired a couple of years ago and those dudes don’t even work for the school. He just wasn’t winning fast enough, the fans with the most money made a stink, and duder was out on the street just a year or two into his contract.
Its fairly hard to on a post to post basis figure out what policy it is you're actually advocating for. You switch back and forth between a maximalist argument and like vague complaints about scholarships.
German school had physical education. Every week of every school year. Much more than the American system, including for example everybody doing swimming for a year in second grade. When I came here and learned there were people who couldn’t swim, it blew my mind.
However, none of the PE was competitive against other schools. If you wanted competitive sports, you did that in clubs outside of school.
Here, and I like many aspects of the American system, the attention school paid to competitive sports was bizarre. The school had a sports mascot and a fight song. It had sports teams. It had pep rallies that interrupted instruction (WTF?). It had a football/soccer field and a baseball field with bleachers and score boards.
School management was obviously and continuously enormously distracted by the performance of the relatively small percentage of varsity athletes.
If you want to make the argument that there should be government-funded youth sports leagues, I can see the argument. Tying it to education seems like an obviously bad idea based on my comparative experience.
I think you’re the only one still accusing me of maximalism here. I’ve given my caveats and accommodations several times, feel free to engage with them directly.
My high football team alone sent 12 kids to college on scholarship, including myself, and we were a little farm town outside of Shreveport, LA
The marquee sports (and if we're being serious, it's pretty much football) are an outlier stemming from the organizational logistics involved. Most sports require elite participants to be working on the sport from an early age with family support. This is why there was a scandal about a decade back when the Ohio State AD got a contractual bonus when a Buckeye wrestler won his weight class at the NCAA championships - anyone who knew how this works understood that he got a 5 figure bonus for something that he really had no involvement in.
I think you have a distorted view of this given your experience in high school and college sports. Based on Google results, fewer than 2% of high school athletes receive college scholarships. The vast majority of highschool athletes are just playing for fun and aren't even remotely in the running for a scholarship.
In the Midwest there’s less emphasis on softball and baseball, I feel, but then they have hockey and wrestling whereas the South largely doesn’t.
The West Coast seems to be almost completely centered around Football with a little baseball and basketball thrown in.
Everyone does track and field. Almost nobody gives a lot of support to soccer or tennis, though a few places are magnets for them.
Not being in the running doesn’t have anything to do with not striving for it.
Every kid on those teams wanted a scholarship.
A 2% scholarship rate is pretty damning, don’t you think? For everything those kids give up and put themselves at risk for?
Other countries exist. Look at the top-performing secondary education systems. How much emphasis do they place on competitive sports? There’s your answer.
Our approach is bread and circuses. The bread is necessary because of our inadequate welfare system. The circus is pure distraction.
Youre taking your experience and applying it to everyone. If we take that 2% and an average team size of 50 then there are 11 schools where no one on the football team got a scholarship. I'm going to take a guess that the vast majority of those 11 schools aren't taking football as seriously and aren't sacrificing academics for it. It's unfortunate if the school you went to sacrificed academics for sports, but I don't think that the norm and we shouldnt throw out all sports because a few taking it far too seriously.