from The Case for High School Sports / Kai Sato

The following is a portion of an article posted on HuffingtonPost.com in response to Amanda Ripley’s essay in the Atlantic. Kai Sato is the cofounder and chief operating officer of FieldLevel, Inc., a social network that, according to its website, “makes it easy for recruiting coaches and pro scouts to find players who fit their needs.” He enters the Conversation with Ripley by drawing on his personal experience and disagreeing with some of her assumptions.

While it’s imperative that we constantly strive to improve the educational experience for America’s youth, the article’s representation of high school sports in our country is short-sighted. It suggests that high schools should not subsidize sports teams, stating, “(in other countries) most schools do not staff, manage, transport, insure, or glorify sports teams, because, well, why would they?”

Here are a few reasons, well, why they would.

The goal of high school is to educate our young people so that they may become productive citizens, not to simply score well on the “international math test” to which the article makes several references.

The benefits of sports as part of the education process are abundant and sometimes beyond quantification, but the article merely brushes them off with only a slight acknowledgment. Today’s employers, however, recognize those benefits in evaluating potential employees.

5 “We try to recruit people that can work in a team environment, are competitive and driven, and it is not a pre-requisite, but many times athletes have those traits,” says Ken Marschner, Executive Director of UBS.

“In my 30 years in the business world, I have found that what an athlete brings to the workplace is discipline, teamwork, a drive for success, the desire to be held accountable and a willingness to have their performance measured,” says Steve Reinemund, former Chairman & CEO, of PepsiCo. [. . .]

In 2002, a study by mutual fund company Oppenheimer revealed that a shocking 82% of women in executive-level jobs had played organized sports in middle, high or post-secondary school. Moreover, nearly half of women earning over $75,000 identified themselves as ‘athletic.’

There is a long list of proven leaders that can attribute part of their development to sports like Jeffrey Immelt (General Electric), Meg Whitman (Hewlett Packard), and even President George H. W. Bush.

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The article states that sports are overly emphasized in American high schools, commanding significant budgetary dollars. Yes, sports are a big deal in America, and it affords Americans the freedom of choice. In other countries, sports and academics are often mutually exclusive. In China, for example, a girl who wants to pursue competitive gymnastics must be identified at a young age, may then be removed from her family, and thrust into rigorous habitual training. Academics become secondary. The same happens around the world in soccer, as Lionel Messi, now one the world’s best players, was plucked at a young age and placed into a soccer academy.

10 Thanks to high school sports, American children can be both students and athletes.