MonarchMom wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 7:05 pm
Slimshandy wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 6:08 pm
That would make it so that only the children of affluent adults have a chance of succeeding competitively.
Students coming from underserved communities would effectively be written out of professional sports.
MonarchMom wrote: ↑Sat May 04, 2024 5:41 pm
My unpopular opinion - we should eliminate scholarships for sports. All students in a school should get to play any sport they want. Expand the teams or create more teams to accommodate all. Everyone gets equal time to learn and play if the school is taxpayer funded. If parents want "competitive" teams let them find them outside of schools.
Stop basing scholarships on sports. What has that got to do with education? Expand scholarship opportunities to include leadership, volunteer activity, the arts, and the humanities. Help students develop their own skills and find the post-high school path that suits them best.
Too many kids are shut out of sports. And too many kids get injured, hurt or harassed by team mates. I don't see these competitive teams as a positive experience for most kids. Let's focus our school resources on the kinds of physical education and physical skills that will serve them for life; swimming, golf, yoga, weight training, tennis, martial arts, etc.
That can be the case in many places already. Kids who have a family that can afford coaching, travel teams and sports camps outperform those without those advantages.
A better system would be for professional sports organizations to sponsor sports camp admissions and other training opportunities outside of the public school system and scout talent that way. Those who profit the most from the professional sports industry should finance the pipeline. The public is already underwriting stadiums and fields so this industry can make profits.
If you look at the top high school football teams in my state, the majority are in high income suburbs - one suburban area has 3 top teams. It's the same for basketball - same schools, same suburbs. If you look at the top high school players in the country in both sports, they come from a handful of states/schools and some of the repeat schools are sport prep schools (which in itself is kind of weird). Private corporations such as Dick's Sporting Goods puts a lot of money into these school programs, especially lower income schools, as it sure isn't being covered by local taxes.
I know that recruiting for other sports leans towards higher income public schools, travel teams, and private schools.
Athletic scholarships themselves are really complicated. An athlete is considered to be receiving an athletic scholarship no matter what the amount and NCAA highly regulates how many scholarships in each sport can be offered. I think a lot of people assume if someone has an athletic scholarship, that it's a full-ride but only 1% of college athletes are on full ride athletic scholarships and full rides can only be offered in specific sports (football, basketball, tennis, volleyball, and gymnastics). Also, if a student can't perform, their scholarship is usually rescinded. A medium to lower income student who is not on a full ride scholarship is generally going to be living rough and considered living in poverty.
I'm not denying that for a lot of kids and their parents, sport is the only imaginable way out of poverty. It's just incredibly sad and it doesn't have to be that way.