As Culture Shifts So Do Sport Interests

“Football is doing a slow fade in Seattle Public Schools. Two decades ago, fans packed Memorial Stadium for big games. No more.”

These words topped an article on the decline of football. It’s happening all over. Elementary and middle schools have dropped their programs because of funding limits; others have changed their perception of “healthy sports.”

What we are witnessing is a cultural shift that will eventually reach all amateur sports programs.

Coaches are quoted as saying low turnout is due to kids working after school, but fans have faded as much as potential players. Another problem is eligibility; some school districts require 2.0 grade-point-average. Some coaches want to drop it to 1.0. A new mix of students, Asian, Hispanic are less interested; football is not cool anymore. Even a winning season doesn’t help. Ingraham High School won the Washington State title a few years ago, and still saw its turnout cut in half the next season.

Some school boards want to restore their football programs with privately raised funds. Schools across the state with more robust programs want to protect their future. But, the battle is over in most ways, and the long fade-out has, in fact, begun.

High school football is waning not because of funding, even though that hastened its decline, but because we are redefining the nature of work.

Childhood games have often been the training ground for adult success. If the skills an adult needs to succeed change, then eventually the games will also change. Football, even with all its refinements, is a hunting-and-gathering ritual - guys chasing a pig. The cheers, led by fertility goddesses, are the cheers of battle.

My father was a middle-weight champion of the London Police Force before we immigrated. I grew up watching him, in his lounge chair, fight the Friday Night Fights on television. He would be sweating at the end, having followed every punch, Ring magazine at his side.

Now Muhammad Ali raises funds for the Parkinson’s disease he has, which scientists believe may have generated by boxing. Boxing was once the way real men settled differences - remember John Wayne in “The Quiet One?” Now, boxing is two guys doing brain damage or occasionally killing each other.

We will always have athletics - we have an athletic body - but we are no longer traditional hunters and gatherers. All the growth in amateur sports is in activities that pit individuals against the elements or a standard, not combat sports. We want to stretch our bodies, but we don’t want to beat someone else up in the process.

Watching the 1996 Olympics, it became clear that the attention was increasingly directed toward gymnastics, track-and-field and diving, and away from boxing, hockey and wrestling. Discipline remained crucial, team work remained important, but the sports were oriented towards finesse as much as strength, towards stretching the possibilities of the human body more than pitting two bodies against each other in direct contact.

Knowledge workers need different skills and personalities than the farm and industrial workers of a generation ago. Knowledge workers need high-level communication, negotiation, information retrieval and reflective intelligence skills. Teamwork has been redefined to engender cooperation among equals. A quadriplegic with good technological and communication skills is a more valuable worker in 1996 than an able-bodied individual without those skills.

Combat sports teach discipline, responsibility and teamwork, but some sports are a better fit with the developing world of brains, technology and services. The techno-nerds will inherit the earth, and they play and learn in different ways.

One coach, working with 12-year-old students in a private school league told me he was thinking of giving up. “These kids have had four years of mediation, arbitration and conflict-resolution training - I can’t get them to tackle anyone.” A key skill for the future is the ability to limit violence not just organize it.

Many of the superintendents and teachers I work with welcome the demise of combat sports in their schools. They tell me it’s too hard to educate future workers and citizens if they must walk down halls, in adolescence, being humiliated by the heroes of the past.

What will fill the void if we lose the combat sports that have helped young men grow up, that have brought communities together for shared victories and defeats?

That is the real question school boards must address - not how to save football. How can they channel and discipline the energy of their young men? How can they inspire community participation and support of schools in a way that fits the next century?

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jennifer James The Spokesman-Review