Deviance in High School Sports

            If one were to map out the sporting populous, it would look like something of a pyramid. At the very top, the smallest piece would be the professionals—the athletes who are paid to play sports. The next section (think meat and dairy on the food pyramid) would be collegiate sports. This piece would still be very small; both the population of college and professional sports would not even come close to the amount of participants who follow. The bottom half of the pyramid would be High School sports and below. I group these together because this is the last level of athletics to which there is equal opportunity to play and sport. Why make this analogy? We need it to visualize. We need to visualize just how big of a portion of the sporting world we are blatantly mishandling.

            High school sports have become something of a spinoff to collegiate sports. When TV shows have great success, they create spin off to keep gaining capital on their product; the same goes for amateur sports. We are at a point in our sporting culture to which we value rankings of players who are not even old enough to vote, but we find their categorical placement to be something we take into consideration when choosing them to be part of the big-business world that is college sports. This unfair emphasis on High school athletics had led programs around the country to alienate students who aren’t participating to either; develop poor sporting moral; quit all other sports except for one; feel a sense of false bravado; or even simply decide to not play sports at all.

            If I were to choose one problem in today’s sporting culture, it would be the issue of limited participation—illuminated by Jay Coakley in Sports and Society. Coakley quotes, “when high schools emphasize power and performance sports, they discourage participation by some boys and many girls who prefer sports emphasizing pleasure and participation.” This idea Coakley explains called “power and performance” stems from the schools stresses on winning, and becoming recognized for their performance standards. If we are to truly abolish these issues, recruiting for sports needs to be strictly enforced to only seniors, as well as diluting the media coverage—as far as spotlighting certain athletes, to a minimum.