Academics vs. Athletics: Developing Well-Rounded Students Requires Teamwork

It never fails! Just finished my last post this morning and I find the timing of my main message coinciding with these THREE articles from the New York Times in their ROOM FOR DEBATE columns from yesterday and today. 

So, even if you haven’t taken the time to read my post from Wednesday; PARENTS +COACHES: Teamwork for Building Character, I urge you to read these 3, short articles. I am sure you will find room to debate the positives and negatives of High School Athletics that each author points out and take the time to evaluate your local High School programs on the issues discussed in these columns. 

It takes involved parents, coaches and school administrators to create a positive “infrastructure” for learning and personal development that is consistent throughout all the programs offered in each school. That includes Music, Performing Arts, Remedial and Honors Curriculum and, of course, Physical Education AND athletics.

Do your homework and see if your local schools truly meet all the developmental needs of their students with academics and accompanying student activities that are staffed by qualified, well-educated and caring instructors. 

Now Women Are Seeing the Benefits of School Sports

Nicole M. LaVoi is the associate director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport and the co-founder of the Minnesota Youth Sport Research Consortium at the University of Minnesota.

October 21, 2014

Unfortunately there are plenty of examples of bad behavior that challenge the belief that sports build character and develop life skills to help young people grow and thrive. Sports do not automatically provide contexts for youth development. It depends on the coaches, parents and the degree to which ethical values are explicitly taught.

Title IX opened up athletics to girls,helping them advance in the corporate world.

But when done right, sports can positively affect lives. Boys and men have long known that sports can lead to social, psychological, moral, physical and health benefits, and lead to business success at a very high level.

Girls and women began to enjoy those benefits too, with the passage in 1972 of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that guaranteed equal opportunities in schools for both sexes.

Prior to 1972, 1 in 27 girls played sports. Now that number is around 1 in 2.5, an all-time high.

The effect of that participation in school athletics can be seen in executive suites. About 55 percent of women in top executive jobs played sports in college – presumably after playing in high school – compared with 39 percent of other female managers, a 2013 study by Ernst & Young found.

Sports provide lessons in teamwork, leadership, performing under pressure, conflict resolution, executing a game plan and knowing one’s role. Thanks to Title IX, those lessons are available to all girls and women. Educators, administrators, coaches, mentors and parents should work together to ensure that more young women take advantage of them.

            ROOM FOR DEBATE

Make Sports an After-School Activity, Not a Competitive Team

Earl Smith is a sociologist and the author of "Race, Sport and the American Dream" and co-author of "African-American Families: Myths and Realities," which includes a chapter on sports.

Updated October 21, 2014, 10:15 PM

No, high schools should not have competitive sports teams. And especially not in under-resourced inner city high schools where academic programs are often sacrificed to finance sport teams. And not in their current form. Like in colleges and universities, the once “extracurricular activity” of an after-school sport (especially football) has gotten out of control.

The primary mission of high school has been supplanted and replaced by sports, especially for those young men playing football and basketball.

High school teams going to preseason sport camps (often out of state); coaches that have no academic connection to the school; the building of huge, expensive stadiums; the opening of the sport season before school even starts: these are all indicators that the primary mission of high school has been supplanted and replaced — especially for those young men playing football and basketball — by sports. Even the student bodies in many high schools have developed cultures that glorify sports at the expense of the scholar, as in the Jocks vs. Puke mentality that sports columnist Robert Lipsyte has written about.

And, for those who defend this system by invoking it as a route to a college scholarship, the social science research has shown (over and over) that the chances are slim to none, especially for young women, who are often dismayed to find that even when they are talented enough to win a scholarship, it is usually a fraction of what they need. Even in football and basketball, only 2 to 5 percent of young men playing on their high school team will earn a college scholarship.

Let's return high school sports to the simple after-school activity it once was, like the drama club or the science club. Give young men and women an opportunity to develop holistically, in moderation, and with realistic expectations for their college and professional lives.

High School Athletes Gain Lifetime Benefits

Kevin Kniffin teaches leadership and management in sports at Cornell University as part of the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Updated October 22, 2014, 10:18 AM

Ask a group of healthy college students in their 20s if they know what they had for lunch three days ago and you’re not likely to see many hands go up. But ask them for memories of competitive sports they played when they were younger and suddenly you’ll hear stories about when they pitched for their school baseball or softball team. Sports offer formative and life-long lessons that stick with people who play.

Research shows that people who play high school sports get better jobs, with better pay. Benefits that last a lifetime.

Those lessons presumably help to account for the findings that people who played for a varsity high school team tend to earn relatively higher salaries later in life. Research to which I contributed, complementing previous studies, showed that people who played high school sports tend to get better jobs, with better pay, and that those benefits last a lifetime.
Hiring managers expect former student-athletes (compared with people who participated in other popular extracurriculars) to have more self-confidence, self-respect and leadership; actual measures of behavior in a sample of people who had graduated from high school more than five decades earlier showed those expectations proved accurate.
We also found that former student-athletes tend to donate time and money more frequently than people who weren’t part of teams.
In other words, there are clear and robust individual and societal benefits that appear to be generated through the current system of school support for participation in competitive youth athletics.
With respect to whether youth athletics should be part of educational institutions, it’s certainly true that there’s no necessary relationship between the two; but, what would happen if schools were to drop all of their interscholastic sports programs?
Any policymakers who took such action would effectively be privatizing – and, in turn, limiting – an important set of opportunities that schools presently provide in a significantly more democratic and open fashion than likely alternatives would. Beyond raising a basic barrier for anyone to gain the kinds of experiences that appear to be rewarded in the workplace, the privatization of competitive youth sports would also create the largest barriers – and cause the greatest long-term losses – for those whose families are not able to bear the costs of participation outside of the public school system.