In a June 5 Perspectives piece, Skip Chalker, a teacher for the last quarter-century and a coach for nearly as long, urged readers to muster the political courage to consider eliminating school sports as a way to provide taxpayer relief. I agree that every community would benefit from a critical look at its sports programs, but his assessment of the value of sports and his solution of turning them over to clubs outside the schools, seem to me like a cynical leap.
I need to admit to some biases. I was an athlete in high school (football, hockey and baseball) and in college (hockey), and after college I took up running and competed for many years. I grew up in a family of teachers. I taught at the high school level for 43 years and over those years coached athletes of both sexes in several sports — football, hockey, cross country and track. At Strafford Town Meeting, I will always vote for the school budget if I believe it has been thoughtfully prepared, but a budget eliminating art or music or drama or school sports would lose my vote even though my children are beyond their school days.
The club sports that Chalker offers as an alternative to school sports are already with us and growing. My grandsons play soccer and ski in programs that their parents pay for, but I look forward to the day when they are old enough to play on school teams because club sports are for the elite, children whose parents can afford the fees and who have the means to drive them to practices and games. If we eliminate high school sports, we take away opportunities for the less affluent and for second- and third- tier athletes, who grow and develop as much as or more than their highly skilled classmates. School sports are democratizing. Differences of race and class and intellectual prowess quickly disappear, and children see their peers through a fresh, clear lens.
When my wife and I were in school, there were very few opportunities for girls to be athletes, but our daughter grew up in a very different world. Title IX, passed the year after she was born, presented her with opportunities I never could have given her, even with my passion for sports. Title IX has been a triumph for civil rights, but it came to be only because we had publicly funded school sports.
Chalker used negative examples to question the values of health, character and discipline often attributed to sports. While I’m tempted to point out the flaw in this kind of reasoning, I actually agree that sports themselves don’t build character, teach discipline or ensure lifelong health because these qualities come from within. Sports give our children a window into themselves and an opportunity to model the character they already have, and in sports they can feel almost immediately the benefits of hard work, persistence and bodily health. Whether or not they take these qualities forward in their lives is a choice, but they are better off for the experience. Finally, school sports provide an opportunity for dignity and accomplishment for young people who will never excel in the classroom.
My argument may sound a little rosy, so let’s admit that there are also problems in school sports, particularly when we lose sight of our purpose and allow our values to be distorted by excess. The trick is in careful management — in changing what is not working well and in replicating what is — and for an example of what I think is working well, let me suggest the Woods Trail Run at Thetford Academy.
Every year on the first Saturday of October, hundreds of teams and thousands of athletes from all over New England come to run through the state forest in a series of cross country races administered by volunteers.
There are races all day arranged by seed times, so each runner has an opportunity to compete in a race with others of comparable ability. The last two races are for the fastest boys and girls, and some of them will go on to run in college; but most of the athletes throughout the day are just ordinary kids trying to run well. They come from all kinds of families, rich and poor, and on the starting line they see a racial mix they may not experience in their own schools. Some athletes show up with fancy warm-ups, and some of their uniforms look tattered, but when the gun goes off, they are all in the same race from front to back, all of them a little apprehensive about what they will discover about themselves when they reach the hills. Throughout each race they hear an endless roar of encouragement from the spectators for the runners ahead of them, for them, and for the runners who trail behind.
Chalker’s point is that cutting school sports would save taxpayer money, and here I admit I offer no alternative. But in the Upper Valley we are not like Texas, where the city of McKinley has unveiled a plan to build a $63 million high school football stadium; when we think about cutting, we should ask whether the savings would be cost-worthy. In his essay he cites the statistic of 40 percent involvement in school sports; I think it is a critical mass of our young people and probably more than will take French or European history or A.P. physics.
Rather than cut, why not ask how available our school sports are to the entire spectrum of students, a tricky question because it may seem to pit inclusion against excellence. Do boys and girls have equal opportunity to play, and do we support them equally with good coaching, safe equipment and imaginative scheduling? Do we have mechanisms in place to make sure athletes who cannot afford the proper shoes are provided for? Is there an entry level in at least some of our sports for eager and promising athletes with no experience? Ask these questions, and you will see that the obscenity of the McKinley, Texas, football stadium lies less in the cost than in the lopsided celebration of a single, male sport.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.