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.

Once the Cheering Stops: The Life of a Retired Pro Athlete

A professional athlete has in one-way or another devoted every piece of their existence to their chosen sport. So what happens when athletes lose their sense of existence? It is a heavy term set inside an all to real of a question. Professional athletes in the modern world of sport, make enough money to support the average American life style, ten times over. Yet, many athletes find themselves checking their bank statements and asking themselves, how? Imagine hearing about a friend who has just lost their job. The first thing you would do, as their friend would be to ask, “Are you ok? Anything I can do for help?” They might respond in a variety of ways, varying in expression of their emotion, but there will come a time to which they will need to get another job. Maybe your friend searches for a job in a similar field, or uses their degree they earned after attending college for four years to earn a job based on their acquired skills. If all works out, they get a new job, and the world keeps spinning. Now imagine this scenario as if your friend was a professional athlete. Your previous friend did not devote his mind, body, and soul to become an account manager for Best Buy. Yet, your professional football player friend did…and nobody seems to feel pity for them. Sure, they may have made millions of dollars and led the life style of the rich and famous for what? 8 years? Athletes do not fall on this type of money aimlessly, but they do enjoy it—that is all we see. We fail to realize the aftershock of players entering the real-real world. We only see their salaries posted up on the city newspaper. Again, we subconsciously ask ourselves, why should we feel bad?

            The short answer is, you are not supposed to feel bad, but rather find understanding. Facts will show that most of us are not receiving the amount of zeros on the back of our paycheck that professional athletes do, so naturally we do not sympathize with their sudden loss in funds. Players go from receiving big checks week after week, to receiving nothing once their career is over. These players are now left in a world with possibly no marketable skills, no working world experience, and little concept to anything other than sport. There is blamed to be shared in this situation, and our American sports culture has been behind almost all of it. Athletes’ competitive nature and monetary zealous cause them to spend money at will on things that the average American may or may not find valuable—so we can assign some blame there, but why is this the case in the first place? We see on billboards, Internet cites, and TV shows that the rich and famous need these overpriced trinkets to be successful. So when a competitive human being sees what it takes to be considered successful—while also having the means to prove so—spend frivolously to keep up with those in a similar monetary state. Contrast that with the business world on Wall Street. How many times do you think the white-collar workers playing the stock exchange try and out muscle and out shine the other brokers in their field? My point being, whether or not you deem what an athlete sees a valuable to be valuable in your eyes, you need to understand that it is the nature of our culture to try and attain these things…you do not need to necessarily feel bad.

            My opinion on it all? I understand. I have watched sports my entire life, as well as pay attention to the business side of it all. These young athletes, some of whom have grown up with next to nothing, are now rewarded for their life long efforts with a colossal amount of money. Sure, I don’t really strive to wear the gold chains and drive the Ferrari down the city streets, but I understand why they do. When they go broke, I understand. Would I do it differently than some have? I sure I would, but only because I wouldn’t want people to feel sorry for me when it was all over.

Sports, Politics, and the Olympics

            In 1990, the US city of Atlanta, Georgia was selected to hold the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Just narrowly beating out the sentimental bid from Athens, Greece to host the Centennial Olympics. This would be the first time that the International Olympic Committees’ decision to separate the games into winter and summer segments—rotating every even-numbered year. Atlanta was the fifth American city to host the games, yet the international community did not fall naïve to the previous success of the US…they remained diligent, and were never slow to scrutinize what would later be deemed, “The Commercial Games.”

            When preparing for this massive onslaught of visitors coming into Atlanta, the city turned to its most prevalent corporation for sponsorship—gargantuan soft-drink company, Coca-Cola. These sponsorship dollars became a competition of their own, with both the city’s organization committee and the IOC competing for its funding. Coca-Cola became the official (and exclusive) drink offered at each of the games 25+ venues. The city also gave license to various street vendors to boost sales, offering merchandise that was not part of the official Olympic sponsorship. This sparked an outrage in the international community, claiming that the US and its system of capitalism were marring the essence of the Olympic games.

            Amidst the quarrel was a far more violent demonstration of economic disapproval, the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park—the “town center” of the Olympic Village. Eric Rudolph, responsible for a total of 4 political terrorist attacks, planted a pipe bomb under a bench—taking 2 lives, and injuring more than one hundred. In a statement he gave in 2005, he claimed that his attack was meant to force the cancellation of the games and “eat into the vast amount of money of invested.” He recalled the games celebration of “socialism,” even quoting the song “Imagine” by John Lennon; his claims were also rooted in his anti-abortion views—the US being his intended target.

            The bombing coupled with the commercial fallout, stamped the games with a print of disapproval in the international community. People from various parts of the world felt as if the United States was using these games as means to demonstrate their economic system. Sage and Eitzen’s work on politics in sport highlight political demonstrations from a host nation to be one of their five uses for politics within the sporting realm. Often paired with violence, claiming, “At virtually every recent Olympics there have been political demonstrations, threats, and violence by disaffected groups,” citing the Atlanta games specifically.

            An event like the Olympiad is constructed to be a pure and honored tradition, which brings nations together to compete in sport. However, it is not just the athletes that have their sights on these games, big money has its green eyes planted on events like these every year. It is not just the Olympics, either. American sports have become a cash cow for large corporations—sticking their logos atop stadiums, eating up hours of commercial times on TV, and monopolizing sponsorship deals to increase sales. There is no way, in our capitalist society, to which sport will ever be completely devoid of political interference. That is American nature, and it is here to pay stay.

Colin Carmody

Sociogenesis of Team Handball

       Possibly dating back to the Greek antiquity, Handball has been a long-standing fixture in the sporting work. Practiced predominantly within the European nations, Handball features two teams of seven attempting to get the ball inside a six-foot netted arc. Handball forbids the use of any equipment including gloves, helmets or pads—thus the title, Handball. According About.com on their comprehensive “Olympics” page, the game was introduced by the Germans at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. It was deemed a “demonstrative sport,” as was their right in being the host that year, but the game did not receive much support due to its previous lack of popularity, and the already-proven mastery by the Germans. Its first appearance as an Olympic sport was at the 1972 Munich games, where Yugoslavia stunned Romania in the gold medal match—cementing the game as an official Olympic sport.

       The origins of Team Handball, as previously mention where found in Greek society, as portrayed by the legendary poet Homer in The Odyssey—using a ball of purple yarn. It also had origins in Egypt, Greenland, and medieval Europe, but the games most direct ancestor is the German game called fangballspiel, which translates to “catch ball game.” Denmark’s Holger Nielsen and German physical education teacher Max Heiser are credited with sharpening the rules of the modern game of Handball in the early 1900’s. The most important change in the games rules came when the International Handball Association (est. 1946) switched the game from outdoors to indoors, most probably due to the snowy conditions of the more northern European nations. The IHA still is the official governing body of Team Handball.

        Although an Olympic sport, Team Handball is still slow to catch on in the US. Being that there are no major college programs for Handball, the amateur circuit has yet to produce an US Olympic team that can compete for a gold medal. This is most certainly due to its lack of national exposure, and the already established dominance of other super-sports in Football, Basketball, and Baseball. At the 2012 London games, France defeated Sweden 22-21 in the gold medal game, and Croatia defeated Hungary 33-26 in the bronze medal game. Both credited as excited matches, and hopefully a spot of brightness for the US to see in the excited game.

Colin Carmody