Life is not Sports, Sports is not Life

[lockmat]

I thought this was a very good article and worth a read. A portion of it...

New York - In December 1999, just eight months after 15 people died there, Columbine High School won its first state football championship. Americans love a happy ending, and this one was made for TV. National newscasts ran footage of the celebrations at Columbine, which followed a predictable media script: Athletic triumph tempers human tragedy.

And surely, Columbine High School needed any good news it could get. But the impulse to take comfort in sports reflected a larger problem, too: American high schools put far too large a premium on organized athletics.

As we pause to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Columbine murders, we should also reflect on the sports-crazed culture that helped produce them.

Let's be clear: Nothing can excuse the raw malevolence of the two boys, who gunned down 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives. And they didn't go looking for "jocks" to kill, as early media reports claimed. But they were bullied by athletes, who stood at the top of the Columbine social ladder.

...

But sports victories don't signify strength, or resilience, or anything else; they simply mean that one team scored more points than another one did. Today, 10 years after Columbine, we are still confusing athletic success with the moral and intellectual kind.

We need some brave school leaders to stand up and state a few simple truths: Sports are not life, and life is not sports, and all of us need to relearn the difference. Any takers?

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0420/p09s02-coop.html

Of course sports gets all the pub, but everyone puts a higher value on things they probably shouldn't like music, work, hollywood etc.

[editor]

In high school I was the editor of the school newspaper. I got it shut down when I published an editorial about the importance the school placed on its football program. Guess I touched a nerve there.

[crunchtastic]

I was ridiculed by jocks all throughout high school for covering every inch of my letter jacket (I triple lettered) with patches for super-nerd, non-sport UIL tournament wins. but I didn't hatch a sociopathic mass murder plan to get back at them. I just waited for the 20 year reunion to see how many former a-hole jocks turned into fat, balding, downwardly mobile, bitter, divorced dads. YMMV.

I do think there is a lot value in school sport, but not as much as the cult of Texas high school football would have us believe. If I were a parent and my child wasn't interested in sports, I would want them in an academics-only school.

[TheNiche]

I do think there is a lot value in school sport, but not as much as the cult of Texas high school football would have us believe. If I were a parent and my child wasn't interested in sports, I would want them in an academics-only school.

Nah, that would deprive them of the opportunity to witness and observe jocks and what ultimately becomes of them, much as you were able to do. I can understand being all protective of a kid through elementary and middle school, but by the time they're in high school, they need a taste of the real world. That doesn't necessarily mean sending them to Stephen F. Austin HS in your nabe (which is demographically similar to the HS I attended), but it also doesn't mean that HSPVA, Kinkaid, or The Woodlands is a good idea. Maybe Reagan, Dickinson, or La Porte.

If they're reasonably intelligent, then it'll serve a purpose later in life to understand how stupid their peers are. And if nothing else, it ensures that they don't have to work very hard to rank highly in their class.

[lockmat]

Just for the record, there are plenty of non-jocks who are just like the jocks. And there are jocks who are nice and/or intelligent people, too.