Don’t overlook lessons learned in prep sports

If you write about high school sports for any length of time, you will occasionally be challenged to defend their very existence.

Sometimes it’s by a childless homeowner bemoaning the fact that his or her tax dollars go to pay for public education at all, let alone pay for such things as playing fields, gymnasiums and weight rooms. Other times it’s by someone who believes that all that competition is bad for anyone, let alone impressionable youth.

Such conversations go with the territory. I’m sure food writers are occasionally challenged to defend the brussels sprout (I’m for them, in case you’re wondering, but I’m the lone vote in their favor at our house).

That said, I wasn’t surprised when a friend passed along a link to an article in The Atlantic Monthly on Facebook recently. Published in September 2013, it’s titled “The Case Against High School Sports,” and was written by Amanda Ripley, the journalist who wrote the New York Times best-seller “The Smartest Kids in the World – And How They Got That Way.”

I admit, my first thought was that this particular friend never played high school sports (we went to high school together), but the same cannot be said for Ripley, who played soccer through high school. She points out, at the top of her piece, that she readily understands the arguments in favor of, and the lessons learned from, having competitive sports in our public schools.

An interesting read, Ripley points out that sports are embedded in American public schools at a level unlike those in any other nation – pointing to students who transfer to U.S. schools from countries like South Korea and are shocked at how big sports are at their new schools.

And yet, Ripley writes, that fact is never brought up in the conversation about America’s mediocrity in education.

High school sports are not cheap, and Ripley takes pains pointing that out. In one example, she points to a Pacific Northwest school where cost of a cheerleader is four times that of a math student.

One of the conclusions Ripley draws is that if we eliminate high school sports and use that money to fortify things like math education, we would have overall math scores similar to those in South Korea, which ranks No. 4 in the world.

But there’s a variable that’s not factored into that overly simple equation.

Students in South Korea are not steeped in the culture of sports the way students are in this country. In the United States, they are so finely engrained you could almost find evidence of them intertwined in our DNA.

Think I’m overstating it? There are young girls out there named Espn. (And yes, they were named after the sports channel.) Check out the local department store, where you will find all sorts of clothes for infants with your favorite sports team logo. Your toddler can chomp on a Seahawks pacifier while wearing Cougar colors. Unless you prefer a Mariners binky and Gonzaga sleep set.

Ripping sports out of high schools would require microsurgery.

Former Washington State men’s basketball coach Len Stevens made a stir a couple years ago when he, too, suggested taking sports out of the schools and investing in the same kind of club sports programs favored in European countries.

Again, it’s an interesting idea. We already have a strong presence of club teams in this country. Soccer, volleyball and gymnastics all are dominated by club programs – so much so that college recruiters more closely follow the club season than they do high school. Part of the problem there is the fact that the high school and college seasons overlap, making it easier for recruiters to follow the long list of club tournaments that fill the college off-season.

Winning back-to-back state soccer championships will look good on each Central Valley player’s educational resume, but to get recruited by a good school, they will have to play club soccer.

Talk to the athletes themselves, the ones who play both the high school and club season, and they will tell you that it means something different to pull on the school colors and represent their community, their school and their classmates. You don’t get that with a club team.

Still, the economics of high school sports can be daunting. Even colleges are taking a serious look at the price tag and some are balking. The University of Alabama-Birmingham announced during the fall that this year’s football team would be the school’s last, and Ripley points to a school district in Texas, where high school football is so big it became a weekly television series, decided to cut all sports.

Having the conversation is a good thing, and when I’m invariably asked about it, I generally answer by saying that a strong, vibrant society invests in its future by investing in young people. What our youth can learn from playing sports are life lessons we, as a society, place at a high value.

How we pay for it all – education, the arts and athletics – has become a political football (no pun intended), and it deserves to be treated as the serious and significant investment that it truly is.