{"id":537,"date":"2005-01-07T10:21:59","date_gmt":"2005-01-07T14:21:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/01\/07\/please-explain-the-benefits-of-team-spo"},"modified":"2005-01-07T10:21:59","modified_gmt":"2005-01-07T14:21:59","slug":"please-explain-the-benefits-of-team-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/01\/07\/please-explain-the-benefits-of-team-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"Please Explain the Benefits of Team Sports?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There’s an article in the Boston Globe today about yet another father getting violent at his son’s sporting event. This time, the man grabbed an 8-year old boy’s neck and swore at him (the boy he assaulted was not even his son….not that it makes any difference). A few years ago a father KILLED another man when he got upset during his son’s hockey practice.<\/P>
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So, I’m aksing…what is the benefit of team sports\/gym class? From what I can tell, it creates hostility, rage, jealousy, violence and an often times unhealthy competitive nature (as opposed to a healthy competitive nature). If you say team sports are good because they provide physical fitness for our children, there are better methods. Perhaps, our school’s gym classeses could focus on actual calisthenics as opposed to football, baseball, basketball, and the time-honored tradition of dodge ball. Because inevitably with team sports, the less-sporty just stand along the side lines and avoid the football\/baseball\/soccer ball anyway and receive no benefit from the class. During the one week per year in my childhood when our gym classes actually focused on physical activity, I felt a sense of accomplishment at doing X number of sit ups or Y number of pull ups. I also liked the challenge of climbing the rope to the ceiling of the gymnasium.<\/P>
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You might also say team sports help promote teamwork and team-building skills. Again, I beg to differ. My recollection of high school gym class consisted of the jocks showing off by monopolizing the ball and\/or trying to humiliate the weaker\/less skilled students. In high school sports, there somehow really is an “I” in Team.<\/P>
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Once again, there are better ways of creating team work, such as spotting each other during push-ups and sit-ups. Even better, how about team sports that aren’t focused on the rage\/bully factor. You never hear about a swim team brawl…and that’s a sport that focuses on your actual physical strengths and not your ability to pounce a person 1\/2 of your size. An even better way of promoting team work is through intellectual team-building exercises (which are much more relevent in the adult world anyway, are they not?). So, why not let gym focus on health and leave the team-building to other departments?<\/P>
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Another side effect of team sports is that it creates an us vs. them attitude. At my school, there was a very clear disitinction between the jocks (who happened to also be rich\/preppy*) and “the rest of us”. The movie Heathers did an amazing job are portraying this. This mentality followed off the football\/baseball field and into the lunch room and class rooms. I saw the Breakfast Club. I know what can happen (Emilio Estevez taping that kids hairy butt cheeks together, Anthony Michael Hall bringing in a gun to kill himself). And let’s not bring up Columbine.<\/P>
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Gee? Do you think I might not have been a sporty lad in school? But with parents attacking other parents (and now children) at their children’s sporting events, with cheer-leader Mom’s plotting to kill other cheer-leaders and with riots in the streets after every Super Bowl and World Series game, I’m just unable to grasp the benefits of team sports.<\/P>
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*Karyn – speaking of rich and preppy, remind me to send you a picture of my cousin, Peter (she had a crush on him, if I recall). He got married recently and, man, did he age badly.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an article in the Boston Globe today about yet another father getting violent at his son’s sporting event. This time, the man grabbed an 8-year old boy’s neck and swore at him (the boy he assaulted was not even his son….not that it makes any difference). A few years ago a father KILLED another man when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}