Should High School Sports Be Mandatory

Words: 1395
Pages: 6

Maddy Widmann
5-11-17
English 3
Research Paper Having high school sports in school can be great. It allows students to socialize, get active, support the school, and get known for colleges for potential scholarships. Many students participate in school sports because they chose to do it and believe it is the best choice for them. However, faculty members are recently encouraging sports in schools to become mandatory because of all the benefits it gives to the students. Surprisingly, that is not the reason the teachers want every student to do sports. Sadly, schools everywhere rely on sports to make their school number one instead of academics. Having more students participating in sports will make the teams better and win more competitions.
…show more content…
With evidence from scholarly sources and a picture to represent what schools are becoming, one can conclude that high school sports should not be mandatory for all students because most students don’t have the time, aren’t interested in it, or don’t have the money. If everyone had to do school sports, school would become athletically focused instead of academically focused. Competitive sports in school is not about exercise. If it were, the United States would have the fittest children. However, schools need to wake up from this fantasy and see that schools are not about the sports but learning. Having mandatory school sports will turn schools from a learning environment into a gym for athletes. By mixing sports and academics, it will make it seem as if it is acceptable that learning is not as important as getting the trophy in the sport. Amanda Ripley, a journalist of the New York Times discusses that kids are shaped into believing that the trophy is more important than learning math or English by their teachers too, “Kids notice when they have a sub in math class because the football coach (I mean teacher) has an away game” (Ripley, para. 6). Students in school …show more content…
American kids need to be more physically active, and schools are in a unique position to provide them with programs that will instill the values of fitness through a positive experience. Without physical fitness, it could possibly become harmful to the child’s development and be affective in the future for them. Having school sports can instill the health of kids at an early age and become a daily habit as they enter adult-hood. Developed nations such as the United Kingdom and China are facing the same health problems as the U.S. and have centralized sport activities to boost physical fitness. From this, the countries have noticed the children became more active, social, and became happier in school and out of school. School sports could also help financially for parents who can’t afford those after school sports that require a lot of money for elite teams making the students sit on the sidelines and not do sports. Johanna Sorrentino wrote about the importance of physical activity and school sports and how they impact a student’s life. According to Sorrentino, “But, even for affluent kids in programs, focused solely on specialized skill development and measurable indicators of progress, may not encourage a healthy relationship with physical fitness…” (Sorrentino, para. 6). This statement discusses how the students who focus on