When I became a school board member, I shared the attitude I’m sure many of you have about school athletics – that the emphasis and support school leaders grant it should instead be redirected toward academics.
Full disclosure: I’ve never been an athlete. In fact, I was the kid who was always picked last, and deservedly so. I wouldn’t have picked me, either. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I viewed the role of and resources for school sports through a wary eye.
It didn’t take me long to realize that almost everything I thought I knew about school athletics was wrong. The more I learned, the better I understood the important role athletics plays in the lives of the students who participate. (And before parents of students in other activities jump to scold me, the same things apply to what your kids do, so please calm down and let me continue. Thank you.)
By my second dinner celebrating students who topped their classes in academic performance, I noticed that most were not only athletes, but held leadership roles like being their teams’ captains. How did they manage to get such great grades while spending dozens of hours in practice and competition each week? Self-discipline and time management, and how many of us could use a hefty dose of both? (Especially those swimmers – if you’re in a hiring role and an applicant was a varsity swimmer, grab ‘em.)
I’ve had innumerable conversations with adults who shared variations of “if it hadn’t been for football, I would have dropped out.” That’s another role athletics and those other extracurriculars play: they give students an excuse to endure the drudgery of classes. Just as important, athletics provided a seat at a lunch table with peers who understood and even liked them.
Despite the positives school athletics delivers, it’s the subject of frequent attacks, most of which are based on myths that just aren’t true. The biggest? People think money gets diverted from classrooms to fund athletics, but that’s flat-out illegal in Indiana. Schools can use tax dollars to build facilities and pay the tiny stipends coaches and other extracurricular leaders receive for their hundreds of hours of extra work, but that’s it. Game equipment, jerseys, officials … none of that can come from taxpayer dollars. That’s why schools have ticket sales, concession stands, and booster organizations.
The myth that schools put more attention toward athletics than anything else ignores the real source of that attention: pressure from the community. A school board can adopt a new program that will dramatically improve academic performance, and the public yawns. Let the basketball coach have three losing seasons in a row, and board members will be showered with angry comments.
The fact that basketball games are more well-attended than band contests or whatever activity means more to you isn’t because the schools promote one over the other. It’s because our population in general embraces sports more than the arts or whatever activity means more to you. And within athletics, the fact that more people attend boys’ basketball games than girls’ games isn’t because of the school, either. Just compare average NBA attendance over the past few years to the WNBA’s numbers. Do the same with professional soccer. While women’s athletics are catching up, society still has more interest and spends more time watching males compete.
You might be surprised at the two biggest challenges local school athletic directors face. The first is a fast-growing shortage of officials. The average age has been increasing, and younger folks aren’t stepping up in sufficient numbers to replace retirees. When you don’t have enough officials, you can’t have a game. The second? It’s getting harder to find coaches. It isn’t that schools lack people who love athletics and would make great coaches. It’s that the behavior of parents and fans makes coaching – and officiating – extraordinarily unpleasant these days. Many coaches I’ve known who stepped down specifically cited that behavior as a key factor in their decision.
During my school board tenure, I fielded complaints about nearly every coach of every sport … and when the complaint came from a parent of a team member, there was usually a curious correlation. Was it just a coincidence that the complainer’s son or daughter had recently been benched? When I asked, the response was invariably, “Well, yeah, but what they’ve been doing has been bothering me for a long time and I thought I should finally speak up.” Ah, gotcha.