Writing for The New York Times, Buzz Bissinger argues that high school sports are going the corrupt and corrupting way of professional sports and big-time college athletics:

... high school sports in America has become an epidemic of win-at-all-costs in too many places, just as corroded as college and the pros; actually more so because none of the ends can possibly justify the means when many of those involved are still too young to vote. No Super Bowl with television ratings through the roof. No Bowl Championship Series games with millions watching. Just millions of dollars spent by certain school districts that cannot possibly begin to explain the millions they are spending. Just booster clubs, like little Mafia families, filling in the gap between what the board of education is willing to cough up and what the athletic department claims that it needs to keep churning out those precious state championships. Just coaches in some places making close to $90,000 a year without teaching a class. Just further social stratification between the athlete and the non-athlete, those who are in and those who are out and feel humiliated and ridiculed with repercussions that can become deadly. Just steroid abuse, including a 17-year-old baseball player in a Dallas suburb who committed suicide because what of his parents believe was depression caused by stopping anabolic steroids.

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But no community, at least no community I would want my children to live in, can justify any of these monoliths. In an age where educational resources are dwindling, how can the building of a lavish new stadium or a field house possibly be justified, much less needed? What does it say to the rest of the student body, the giant-sized majority who do not play football, except that they are inferior, a sloppy second to the football stars who shine on Friday night. How can a community brag about its ability to get financing for a multimillion-dollar football stadium when it can't conjure up the money to hire more teachers that would lead to the nirvana of smaller class sizes? If it's the desire of boosters to pour money into sports, and it usually is, then why not use these private funds for a physical education program to reduce obesity among teenagers?

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It isn't simply money that has contributed to the professionalism of high school sports. As a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, I spent a year uncovering abuses in Illinois as disturbing as anything in Texas - high school coaches recruiting eighth-grade players with glossy pitches and come-ons straight out of the major-college mold, parents getting so many calls from high school recruiters that they simply had their phones turned off, high school basketball coaches siphoning off Chicago's best players just so they wouldn't compete against them. Jump a level down into that emotional hell known as travel team - there isn't a parent of a travel team player who can't recite at least one horror story of another parent going berserk or a coach flipping out in the name of providing 10- and 11- and 12-year-olds with a little extra competition.

In October, the National Association of State Boards of Education issued a report calling for greater oversight of high school athletics because of the alarming trickle-down of virtually every bad college practice. The list of concerns included steroid use, shady shoe agents, mercenary coaches, dubious recruiting tactics and extravagant gifts. Steroid abuse does exist in high schools. As many as 11 percent of the nation's youth have used them, according to a study by the Mayo Clinic. Based on other research, some of the most disturbing users are freshman high school girls, with a rate of abuse at a minimum of 7 percent. "We have a moral obligation to prevent the exploitation of high school students," the national association said.

I have some very fond memories of it, largely because I had so much fun with the people involved--we were a very close-knit team, drawn from all walks of high school life, and would never have known one another had it not been for our shared experience on the team. My high school had 4,000 kids in it, and was so sharply socially divided that girls actually pledged sororities to acquire a social niche, and guys actually determined who they would or would not date based on what sorority a girl was in. The team existed outside of all that crap, and that heightened the experience for everyone there.

That said, my experiences with school athletics--and with the satellite sports programs that surround them, the regional travelling teams, the summer sports camps, and so on--left me with a strong, deeply personal sense of how strange it is that our culture emphasizes school-sponsored competitive sports as much as it does, and how peculiar it is that school-sponsored competitive sports are predicated on the most basic conflict of interest: study or practice? play or learn? There are always some kids who can balance the competing demands on their time--but most can't, and sports is usually what wins when athletically-gifted kids have to choose. I kept my grades up, but I was always keenly aware that I was married to softball, all the year round, and that this was costing me the kind of academic focus I would otherwise have been able to cultivate. I was also keenly aware that it cost me the chance to experiment with other kinds of creative or service-oriented nonacademic activities.

There is nothing wrong with playing a game. But there is a lot wrong with a culture that turns kids' playing of games into something bordering on a job. I was reminded of this when I went looking for work last year at an independent school. Many private high schools require kids to play at least one season of sports each year, whether they want to or not. And these schools were interested in me because they saw me as someone who could coach their softball team when I wasn't teaching English. But I wasn't in love with the idea of coaching girls who had been forced to play, and I was pretty thrilled to find the school where I am now--where there is only one organized sport (soccer in the fall), where that sport is optional and open to anyone who wants to play, no matter what their skills, and where kids have plenty of time and opportunity to try the kinds of things that sports too often squeeze out of their lives: painting, dance, creative writing, pottery, chorus, orchestra, even drumming and welding.

I'm interested in readers' thoughts on the place of competitive sports in American high schools--on their experiences with actual sports programs at actual schools, as well as in their more general philosophical stance on the prominence of athletics in American education.

Democratic education should be of the body as well as the mind. But to me, that means as much dodgeball as it means education in nutrition, sex ed, etc. What it doesn't mean is big budgets spent on competitive sports. I see no reason for tax money to be spent on the school's basketball team or football team. Such pre-professional sports teams have absolutely nothing to do with the mission of education. Like Little League baseball, such sports should be organized outside of school.

As long as public schools see a decline in music and arts classes, for instance, I see no reason why the boys swim team or girls crew team should be funded.

I wonder about those kids who are subjected to abusive "motivation" from coaches. Do they learn that this is the way to get people to do things, and apply similar techniques with their future employees/kids/students/whatever, or do they react against it and resolve never to treat people that way? Probably some of each..

It would be a worthwhile research project for someone to study the motivational approaches of high school coaches and get some idea of how prevalent these problems are.

The notion of "abusive" motivation is a strange one, indeed.

When I was a high school athlete (the 1960s), the link was still clear between military preparedness and athletics. The motivational style of all athletics was the drill sergeant. This was thought at the time to be what had to be done to prepare young men for the inevitability of war. The great coaches of the time, inevitably including Vince Lombardi, were famed for their "abusive" motivational tactics and military metaphors.

I think that Erin is a product of the expansion of women's sports. When women entered the public arena in great numbers, they didn't really argue for equality. They argued for a change in the rules of the game. Men, I don't think, ever considered changing the law of the jungle rules of sports. We expected the coaches to bully and humiliate us. There may be a positive contribution to character development to this that escapes easy detection.

Although high schools are public arenas, I think that the dominance of sports and the passion of parents and spectators for sports is a market phenomenon. In other words, it can't be changed because it is in fact what people want. I know that the basketball team at the U of Ill, my alma mater, is for all purposes a professional team. I'm more concerned with how we are doing, and I'll point out with pride that we are #1. If we are not, I want to cure the problem by becoming #1. It's not rational, I know, but then why should it be? This is the arena of heroics and mythology, not the arena of dry theory and practicality.

I believe that physical education has a vital place in high school, and in the years leading up to it for that matter. I also believe that competitive sports ruin physical education, providing an exclusionary alternative in which exactly those children who least need physical education recieve the lion's share of attention, resources, and praise. This is most felt in those situations in which membership in one the H.S. sports teams counts as fulfulling one's P.E. requirement.

The ninth-grader who doesn't know the rules of basketball, weighs three hundred pounds, and can't afford to spend hours after school and on weekends at practice isn't going to get into his H.S. basketball team, especially is that team is 'competitive'. Instead, he or she will languish in P.E., neglected by the teacher who is inevitably one of the team coaches and who's concern in the actual class will be to identify which students are 'good' enough to be on the teams. When team membership doesn't pre-empt the P.E. requirement, members of teams, especially high-profile teams, are elevated into a hierarchy of achievement and bullying and condescension. The purpose of P.E. should be to help those students find enjoyment and personal fulfillment in strenuous activity who find it most dull. Instead, as it's handled now it's a machine for making sure that those who are already fit are extensively 'taught' and those who have no idea how to make themselves fit or why they'd want to be so are practically ignored.

In my opinion, sports should be privately funded, entirely, and denied the use of school facilities. They've no place in public education.

-Seth

Seth, you must live in a city. Where I live (a town of 4000) the only athletic facilities are the schools'. Your idea would mean no indoor athletics at all for any kid here.

That said, I'm reasonably certain that if a vote were held in the community, giving the choice between improving our schools so that they were in the to five per cent academically in the state, and winning one state football championship, football would win.

I can only, at this point, nod my head at much of what you have all said. I am pleasantly surprised, I must say, that I'm not the only or even the most "radical" when it comes to ideas about how high school athletics should be handled. Thanks for the perspective, all of you.

A perspective from another country: here in Canada, the equivalent national sporting obsession to football (or basketball) in America is hockey. Up here, however, the high schools don't really act as hockey factories. The best teenaged players are drafted to play in "major junior" leagues. They are drafted at 15 or 16, move to their team's city, are billeted by local families, and attend local public high schools, usually. Major junior hockey is considered the best stepping stone to the NHL (although U.S. universities are nowadays another viable route).

My high school was the home school of one major junior team. From what I could tell, hockey owned their lives. Many of them had no real plans for post-secondary education.

(We also had a varsity hockey team - a very good one - at my school, but playing varsity was, according to the conventional wisdom, no way to attract pro scouts' attention. Most of the varsity guys had more reasonable expectations - maybe to play college hockey here or in the States.)

So, even without a crazy, hypertrophied high school sports culture (high school sports in Canada are totally laid back compared to in the U.S. - it's just another world) we still have a similar phenomenon where a small group of young athletes live lives completely dominated by their sport.

It all comes down to, I think, the state of professional sports in North America. If professional salaries were not completely ridiculous, than perhaps youth hockey, football, and basketball cultures would be a little saner and healthier.

To follow up on Seth's comment, as I said, high school sports in Canada are relatively sane. The schools in my hometown (and surrounding region) fielded a wide range of boys' and girls' teams. One of the most successful programs was rugby. (Rugby is HUGE in high schools in Ontario.) We consistently had three boys' teams - freshmen, sophomore, and junior-senior/varsity - and a girls' varsity team which some years fielded two XVs (ie, an "A" squad and a "B" squad.) This is a pretty big program, but we were not even considered one of the "factories" in our division. Still, we had only 1300 students at our school, so that means about 7 percent of the student body were rugby players.

I'd say that the program (and similar ones like soccer and lacrosse) made a huge contribution to student life. It cost very little, anyone could join the team, and with about 20-30 players on a squad in a game where you need 15 on the field, chances were that you were going to see significant playing time.

It's really about encouraging both excellence and balance. (I think our schools should aspire to produce Renaissance men and women.) I think we've lost sight of the "balance" part and are have too narrow a view of "excellence". I do agree with Seth that a LOT of kids miss out on the benefits of organized sports, but I think that's an argument not for ending high school sports altogether, but for opening the system up to even more student-athletes. And I'd argue we were close to achieving that at my old high school.

A school's ideology should be opposed to the culture of Television which is focused on sport and light entertainment. Therefore a school should make it possible for students to live their lives without any sport.

I thought I'd comment from Plano, Texas.

Plano High School (not to be confused with the other high schools in Plano) used to win state championships.

These days it is doing good to win a game.

The big difference: steroids.

In the early 70s the NFL had three players in the "real" 300 lb category. Now we have Texas high schools with players of that size. We have people in the metro area dying from steroid issues. But not at Plano, where the football team loses fights with other students, not to mention losing games.

We had to make a decision, and we've kept the coach who loses, but doesn't kill kids.

I'm from Austin, Texas. I can tell you that I wish my son had never gotten involve in high school basketball. The amount of verbal abuse, is horrible. We have UIL rules and our coach breaks most of them.
He pushes kids to play with injuries, alters grades for his favorite players, and pits player against player. He also controls summer and spring leagues. Now after putting up with this crap for 4 years, my son hates basketball. Hates it to the point of turning down offers from colleges.

I am a coach myself, and though I have only been a coach for two years, I can comment on the coaches side of things. I played high school basketball for four years and was going to continue to play in college but decided not to. I think that the reason that I decided not to was because all the unnecessary shouting that I got from my coach. Yes I don't think that the shouting was correct, but I do think that it made me a stringer person. Also, though I think that it made me a stronger person, I would never coach like that. I think by a coach yelling at his or her player is degrading and is counterproductive. I think that some coaches, especially if you get into the higher levels of basketball, are hired to win. That being their only goal, some coaches don't know how to coach any onther way.