Sports and School

                Athletics within the world of education has become a norm for students today and is an essential part of their schooling career. Giving high school students the opportunity to do something that they love while being able to actually choose the activity they participate in implies that they want to be there.  Electively participating in something ensures that there is passion, drive, and motivation towards the activity. Children simply cannot have passion for something that they are forced to do. Adding the fact that you can’t fail more than one class makes it a little easier for kids to open their notebooks and binders after practice. This extra motivation makes athletes think about what they need to do in order to continue playing. Sure there are the kids that still don’t care to do their schoolwork and don’t care if they don’t play on the team and don’t care if they graduate high school or not, but those kinds if kids are few and far between.  Ultimately, the passion that the students have towards their sport is shifted towards schoolwork when the possibility of being kicked off the team comes into play.

                Being a student-athlete myself, I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without sports. I have learned discipline, respect, and what it’s like to be on a team. There are just some things that they can’t teach you in school. Sure, teachers can tell you all about graphing quadratic equations or what metals react with each other, but how is that going to be useful when I’m working a 9-5? Sports have often put my critical thinking to the test. Okay, we’re down 2-1, what formation will best improve our offense while still keeping our defense intact? Who is the other team’s best scorer and how can we eliminate her from their offensive attack? Being able to work things out with my team to achieve a common goal is the best feeling in the world. Even when we don’t succeed, we are learning an important lesson about failing. Sometimes kids are brought up thinking that they’re always going to get that “Participation Award” and are always going to win in life, but in sports there is a winner and a loser and you have to be able to take the defeat and better yourself and better your team because of it.

                Sometimes people who are over-active and have anger problems thrive when they begin to participate in sports. I know for a fact that if I didn’t play sports then I would be the angriest and pent up person; I would get in so much trouble from fighting and lashing out at people. This is true for a lot of student athletes. If sports were eliminated from high schools then teachers would have a lot of angry teenage meat heads on their hands, and they would not enjoy that. In order to have more attentive, motivated, and all-around better students in school, then athletics must be an available option for the students within the school.   

 

Works Cited

Ripley, Amanda. "The Case Against High-School Sports." Atlantic Oct. 2013: 72-79. Print.