Everywhere I have taught high school and attended high school football was a big deal. When I attended high school in Virginia, football was what brought the community together on a cool Friday night. The atmosphere was one of my favorite scenes as a young man in Virginia. Even after I graduated, I was still attending many of my high school’s football games. It was entertaining and it gave me a sense of belonging to my roots.

As an educator in Georgia, it is a little different to me. Football in Georgia means producing players to play major college football. However, it is not quite the same here. Almost no school has their own home stadium. Where I currently teach, there is a stadium right in our “backyard.” However, it is a shared stadium with other schools. There are times when our school is actually considered the visiting team. At other schools I have taught at here in Georgia, there is no home stadium in sight. To me, this removes the whole idea of bringing a community together. While football is still important to the schools, it doesn’t have the connection that I am used to.

I am saying all this to bring up an issue we have happening at our high school. Last Spring, our school had an assembly for just our boys. It was used to try to recruit boys to play football. Apparently, we are having trouble getting enough boys to field a varsity football team, much less a JV or freshman team.

The football fan and traditionalist in me is astounded. The good sense teacher in me completely understands. I love the game of football. I love the collisions that it causes. I love the war-like strategies it employs. I love that it forces young men to grow up really fast.On the other hand, I understand the reluctance to play. It is a rough game that can cause many life-long severe injuries. I understand the fear of playing a game that can cause such severe brain damage.

Of course, it doesn’t help the cause that our team has only won a handful of games in the past few years. These facts are further confounded by the fact that a recent graduate of the school is now a player in the NFL.

You may ask why a passionate educator like me is even concerned with this, besides my love of the game of football. First of all, football can be the thing that brings the community together. I suspect this is why our principal believed that this was worth  using school time on this issue. But the real reason I am mentioning this is because the state of sports at the high school level. I feel that sports are becoming less necessary for schools to run them.

Our school has the following varsity sports; football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, lacrosse, track, soccer and tennis. Students are encouraged to play at least one sport. However, almost every sport is offered in club and travel team opportunities in the community. I have heard some students tell me that they have softball practices that are 4 hours long on the weekend. One particular student told me that she no longer enjoys playing the game because of these long practices. When I ask her why she still plays, she said that her parents hope that she gets a scholarship to help pay for college.

This is not how I have developed a love of sports. I played, and play, them for fun and growth. I loved running in the neighborhood and trying to find the nearest pickup game. That’s how I learned and made friends. It is the heart of my fondest and happiest childhood memories. There were great lessons in these games of non-organization.

I mention all of this because I have to ask why we still have high school sports teams. Does it enhance the education of our teens? Have these sports become too much of a distraction to education of our teens? Does it serve in bringing communities together? Is this another way that we chase the almighty dollar? I am not advocating an elimination of high school sports. I am just advocating letting these community coaches run their sports and let amateur coaches, like myself, get out of the way. It just makes me think of all monies spent on these sports could be better served by channeled them into more academic pursuits…Like maybe better teacher salaries and more planning time.