The importance of after-school sports so those of us who were lost in physics and pre-calc had a place where we could go and be a part of something, have fun, and shine. And coaches who gave leadership opportunities and put trust in us and held us accountable.
DR (former student)
My response:
When I first started teaching at TA I was surprised there wasn’t a grade requirement for participating in sports (no D or F’s, no incomplete grades, …). I thought how could you get a student to do the work if you didn’t have that threat of no sports to hang over their head. I was so wrong. Why would we ever take away the one bit of success, the one thing a student enjoys about school?! Why would you take away the one thing that, as you said, they could go and be a part of. I found that letting a student know that you watched them play had a much greater result for their academic success than refusing to let them play.
More on school sports and all extracurriculars:
“What can you coach?”, was one of the first questions I was asked when I interviewed for teaching jobs. While I thought it odd, I am very happy that it was introduced to me this way. Coaching kids (soccer and golf) allowed me to see my students outside the classroom in ways that were different from an academic setting. I was able to see what motivated them, how they responded to adversity and disappointment, and I saw how they responded to both success and failure.
A good teacher tries to see the whole person in their students. The quicker you connect with them, knowing their likes and dislikes, the sooner you can start asking them to take chances in the classroom. The room only feels safe to a student when they know the teacher has their best interest at heart. And that only happens when the student feels known.
Sadly there may be some students whose passion for your subject is not as strong as yours. Yet, you still need to reach that student and bring them along. Hopefully you will spark that passion through the year. But how to start?
Seeing a student in another element like a sport is one way to do it. If you want a student to be successful in the classroom, it is easier to connect where you see them at their best. Or if not at their best, at least in a place where they are putting in an effort and seeing an effect from that effort. I am using sports as an example here, but there are many opportunities to see students beyond the classroom. There is Music, Theater, clubs like Debate or Robotics, Student Government, and so many more. Each of these areas is an opportunity for a teacher to see their student in a different light. And it’s an opportunity for the student to see their teacher actively showing interest in them as more than an academic.
It is easier to encourage someone to dig deep on a word problem when you have seen them already struggle in another area like taking a corner kick on the soccer field. And you can use that as an example or an analogy to get them to see that all successes, whether athletic, academic, dramatic, … are littered with failures along the way.
When you comment about seeing a student in a game or a musical performance they will perk up in your class. By noticing them performing in other areas you validate their effort.
I am not talking about wins and losses when I say a student should be on a team. It is so much more than that. I encouraged my students to join teams telling them that their best memories will probably be the bus rides. It’s being in a group with shared experiences and inside jokes that make being on a team so much fun.
My experience is supported by much of the recent research on school athletics. They are a positive influence in a student’s overall experience. Scholar-Athletes tend to have higher academic performance, greater resilience, better time-management skills, and a stronger sense of belonging at school. None of that surprised me. I had been watching it happen for years.
I always encouraged my students to be as active as possible in all the things a school has to offer. More often than not, when a student told me he was taking a season off to concentrate on academics, his grades did not improve. Sometimes they even slipped. When playing a sport, time for homework is limited and has to be scheduled into the day around practices, games, and bus rides. A student not doing an extra curricular will look at his homework at 6 PM and think, “I have all night. I’ll start at 7.” Then at 7, “I will start soon, after I watch this show. I still have all night.” By 10 PM, the night is over with no homework being done.
We also have to remember that “Too much of anything is a bad thing.” Sometimes athletic identity can overwhelm a student’s academic identity. There is too much stress on the athlete part of student-athlete. When this occurs, the positive effects of sport become detrimental to the student experience. There are two areas where I see this effect the most. They occur with the increased number of club teams and with the hiring of coaches for a high school team who have no other connection to the school.
I am not a big fan of club teams. This comes primarily from being a teacher who is focused on the whole student. I know there are many club coaches and programs that do this, too. Sadly it’s the ones who don’t that stay in my memory. There are too many club/travel teams that pay no attention to the academic schedule. I see zero value in a student missing three days of school in November to go play lacrosse across the country. Taking kids out of school to travel in tournaments sends the message that academics are less important. Students tend to take less challenging courses and parents expect greater accommodations for work missed.
The strongest coaches I knew had connections to the broader life of the school. They understood students not only as athletes, but as members of a community. Again, I know what I am saying comes with certain biases and prejudices. I am sure the majority of outside coaches still see their players as more than just an athlete. If they are on the campus for one reason, some can have a tendency to focus on only that one thing– the athlete and winning versus the student and learning. I feel that every coach should have some connection to the school they are at. This doesn’t mean they all have to be teachers. There are many adults other than faculty that make a school run well.
So, should sports be encouraged in schools? Yes! Should it be the only aspect of a student’s identity? No! The key ingredients to good sports programs are having students feel they belong to a group. They have adult mentors/role models demonstrating core beliefs of working honestly toward shared goals and showing that effort fuels success, and being accountable to one’s peers. And they have another group of fans (friends, parents, teachers, and staff) who are there to cheer them on. If those ingredients are not there, a sports program can become toxic and take away the advantages they purport.
The question is not whether sports improve learning. The question is under what conditions they improve learning. Sports appear most beneficial when they connect students to school, provide strong mentorship, and reinforce academic expectations. When athletics become overly time-consuming or disconnected from educational goals, those benefits can diminish or disappear.
You can now go back to the beginning of this essay and replace the word “sports” with “music”, or “theater”, or “speech”, or …
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