Organized Sports: America's Academy

Philosophers have been thinking about the impact storytelling has on society since ancient Greece. Socrates famously outlines rules and reasons for a strict censorship in Plato’s Republic, and more recent philosophers such as Sartre employed playwriting as a way to explore philosophical concepts.

Today, many thinkers and writers are beginning to pay more attention to how our culture understands people of different genders and races through the stories we tell. It seems implicit that the movies we watch, or the video games we play, have some sort of impact on who we are as a community. Possibly the biggest fear of storytelling, as well as the biggest reason for censorship, is how it affects children. Like Socrates argues in The Republic, people often fear that allowing children to bare witness to bad behavior will increase the chances that the children will behave badly themselves.

While examining film and literature seems like a valuable way to understand and mold a given culture, it seems investigating America’s modern obsession with athletic competition can offer a similar type of knowledge. Socrates suggests that allowing children to watch good people do questionable things can potentially lead to confusion. If children see a good person do something bad, then they might think it is good to do bad things. The underlying assumption is that children form important and lasting opinions about how to behave at an early age. It follows, then, that we must be careful about what we teach them, about what we allow them to see.

But what, if anything, do America’s children learn from sports?

According to statistics gathered by usafootball.com, 7.6 million High School boys play football in America. So many people watch the Super Bowl each year that airing single commercial costs millions of dollars, and a single ticket to the game is worth thousands. It is hard to deny how popular sports are in America, but perhaps we should continue to think about how this continuously growing obsession is impacting our culture, particularly our youth.

To explore the life of one of the 7.6 million Americans currently playing High School football, we must begin at the age of eight. The third grade is a common time to begin playing football in America, although that age is diminishing. By the time a young athlete hits High School, playing football becomes something more like a full-time job. The season ends in the fall, sometime around Thanksgiving, if you make it to the championship. The pre-season, which typically consists of weight lifting, conditioning, and “student-lead” practices, begins in the spring. Practice continues throughout the summer, and some time in August almost every High School football team will begin practicing two times a day.

If a High School student wants to play two sports, say baseball and football, their schedule becomes even more intense. Travel baseball season begins as soon as High School baseball season ends. Each summer, two-sport athletes commonly find themselves balancing football practices with the roughly 100 baseball games they play as well.

This intense dedication doesn’t simply start in High School. To offer a personal example, I began playing travel baseball when I was 13 years old, and that was a year or two later than many of my friends. It is also important to note that this type of commitment is not only required of young men. Just like boys travel baseball, girl’s soccer and volleyball teams travel the country playing a multitude of games during the High School off-season with equal vigor.

Why are these trends significant? Having our youth dedicate so much time to athletics calls us to entertain an interesting conclusion: various sports and sport cultures are raising many of America’s children. Things become more interesting when we challenge this conclusion with a question raised earlier in this article. What do our children learn from dedicating so much effort and time to sports?

Just like with literature and film, this question becomes difficult to answer as soon as you begin. Because athletics now require so much time and dedication to succeed even at the lowest levels, athletes have begun “specializing” at young ages. This has allowed many of the most popular sports to develop their own unique cultures. Some parents and families spend their summers traveling the country to play baseball and others travel the country to play basketball. It seems to follow that a young boy might learn different things from playing baseball his whole life than if he had played basketball; he would have been surrounded by different people and immersed in a different game.

There are, however, some characteristics that apply to all sports in general. One of the more discussed and obvious examples is competition. In sports, there is a winner and a loser. Teams or individuals compete with the goal to win—the point of playing the game is to try and win the game. With this in mind, we can see how raising children to play sports means raising children to compete. Almost as soon as they are old enough to run, kids are signed up to begin competing against one another.

            The possible negative ramifications associated with raising our children to become over competitive have not gone unnoticed. Youth sport leagues now usually give out participation trophies of some sort to each player, regardless of whether or not their team won the championship that year. The term “ everyone gets a trophy these days” is a running joke amongst mothers and fathers in the stands of their children’s games. Our culture has already grown more sensitive to the often-ruthless nature of competitive sports, and many parents have begun taking measures to guard their children against harsh realities.  

The possible negative ramifications associated with raising our children to become over competitive have not gone unnoticed. Youth sport leagues now usually give out participation trophies of some sort to each player, regardless of whether or not their team won the championship that year. The term “ everyone gets a trophy these days” is a running joke amongst mothers and fathers in the stands of their children’s games. Our culture has already grown more sensitive to the often-ruthless nature of competitive sports, and many parents have begun taking measures to guard their children against harsh realities, but the debate continues. The New York Times ran an article titled “ Losing Is Good for You” this past fall, and many parents currently resent efforts to minimize competitive attitudes in youth sports.

(see NY Times Article). 

          While discussions about our children being raised in an over competitive environment are happening around the country, the impact sports have on our culture reaches far beyond a single concern. The potential downsides to our fascination with athletic competition (e.g. extreme time commitments and pressure to succeed) shouldn’t be considered without remembering the positives as well. Sports teach our children how to struggle and compete to achieve a goal, and I suppose we live in a world where such skills are useful. Many of America’s best thinkers dedicate their time to exploring how the books we read impact the people we become, but perhaps we should focusing more of our efforts on examining something many children spend hours doing every day: playing organized sports.