After School Sports are Bad for Education

by David Safier

In what must seem like a neverending crusade to piss off every high school coach, high school athlete and couch potato – oops, I meant to say, sports fan – in Arizona, here is part three of my reasons why after school sports should be cut before we think of closing schools or cutting back on any part of our schools’ curriculum. (Part 1. Part 2.)

After school sports programs distract students from their studies.

U.S. students don’t rank well in world wide testing. Actually, that’s putting it nicely. We suck in world education rankings. Scholars rack their brains to find the reasons for our lagging scores, but strangely absent from these discussions is that, so far as I know, we’re the only country whose schools run what can only be described as sports farm teams for teenagers.

Our students involved in after school sports spend as much as 15-20 hours a week in practice or in competition against other teams. Students in other countries don’t spend nearly that kind of time or effort on sports. Could that emphasis have something to do with our students’ lack of focus on academics?

A number of years ago, I had an exchange student from Sweden in class. A few weeks into the year, she told me she went out for the school volleyball team. “I played volleyball at home,” she said, “and I loved it. We all got together Saturday morning, practiced for a few hours, then played against the other team. After that, we went out to lunch together. That was it. Here, they want me to practice every day after school. And the coach takes it so seriously. I’m not sure I want to spend that much effort playing volleyball.”

I did some online research on high school sports in other countries.

In Finland, which has some of the best student achievement in the world, high school students on average spend an hour in physical exercise during each school day and about 90 minutes on their free days. If they want to play competitive sports, they join sports organizations.

In France, secondary students spend about three hours a week in physical education and can join sports clubs if they want more.

In Germany, only a few schools have sports teams which compete against other schools, and most students aren’t even aware of the team’s existence.

In Japan, about a third of high school students take part in sports clubs. I couldn’t find information saying how much time per week the students spend.

I even went to Google Earth to look at aerial photos of school grounds in other countries. Conspicuously absent were the multiple sports fields that take up half or more of our high school campuses. In most countries, schools are where students go to school, not where they pretend to be professional athletes.

Are we actually harming our students’ educations by overemphasizing sports in school? That’s impossible to say. But it’s hard to argue that our students are better able to compete in a world market because they can throw a better body block, shoot a more accurate three pointer or smack a small ball farther with a stick than students in the rest of the world.