Are High School Sports Bad for Student Character?

Introduction: Rethinking the Sports Tradition

Imagine, if you will, that a strappingly built British fellow were to appear before your school board with a brilliant, if rather odd, proposal. He suggests that your school should institute a modern derivation of several ancient pastimes. These rituals, he explains, have been used in ancient cultures as a way to serve pagan deities, establish political dominance, train warriors, and provide entertainment for the male elders of the culture. This visitor suggests that these games will build character in your high school students by encouraging them to hone their competitive urges, form absolute obedience to their ritual master and compatriots, and increase their social desirability among peers. He suggests that these games could be highly competitive, serving to create a natural pecking order of the elite within the school and motivating all students to compete for a handful of positions among the national or global fellowship of star participants. These rituals, he seeks to reassure the school board, may cost so much that music and art programs will have to be discontinued — but that is a small price to pay for an increase in the mystic force he calls "school spirit."

How would you respond to this proposal? Perhaps, like noted writer Jeff Lindsay, you would attempt to warn the public about this arrangement. As Lindsay cautions: "This cult takes up many hours of student time, imposes physically grueling demands, requires total obedience to shadowy authority figures who exert control over many aspects of the child's life, subjects them to extreme peer pressure to perform and achieve goals for the group, demands that the child obey strict rules of behavior and diet, and even forces the child to wear special ritualistic clothing — often including special underwear (at least for boys)!" (Lindsay, 1).

Perhaps your fearful response would change, however, when the school board was introduced to the modern names of these re-invented rituals. Ancient practices like the Mesoamerican ballgame, once associated with human sacrifice of the losers, have been sanitized by gym teachers and translated into something called "basketball." Other ball games once outlawed by the pope for their pagan associations have been renamed "football" and "baseball." And while the ancient Greek practice of wrestling is still called approximately the same thing, the boys will be allowed to wear clothes. Surely, once you know that these old practices have modern names, you can accept that they are a necessary part of the modern school experience?

One must admit that this scenario is somewhat absurdist. Games are already a vital part of our school system and already receive funding above and beyond that available for the arts. Jeff Lindsay was using the "cultic specialty of competitive sports" (Lindsay, 1) as a spoof of the way in which a biased observer can interpret any institution as dangerous. This scenario is a metaphor for a process that took place over a hundred years ago — Miracle and Rees describe the movement of school sports from Britain to America in the nineteenth century — and with very little protest. However, a modern observer might do well to reconsider the prospect of competitive school sports from the ground up. This essay seeks to prove a simple, and yet very controversial, point: competitive sports, as they currently exist in American schools, are unhealthy for students.