Friday Feature: Do Sports Hurt Academics?

Earlier this week, I came across an October 2013 article from The Atlantic entitled, "The Case Against High School Sports." In this piece, Amanda Ripley expounds on this idea:

The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student—unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?

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As an educator whose daughter has been involved in our community/district's basketball program for eight years as both a player and a manager, I was immediately sucked in by the teaser, and, as I read the article, I found myself nodding along with Ms. Ripley's points.

As I went in search of the article to use it for this post, I came across something interesting.

A counterpoint.

In their article, "High School Sports Aren't Killing Academics" (published in the same month in the same magazine), Daniel H. Bowen and Colin Hitt argue just the opposite. Citing studies that correlate athletic excellence with academic excellence, the authors provide a completely different take on the same subject.

Fascinating.

Whichever side of the argument you come down on, I urge you to read both pieces, especially if your kids are involved in sports. Both articles are compelling and the authors do an excellent job of backing up their points, but more important, both raise questions we should be asking about excellence in both programs. Written in 2013, both pieces predate the recent findings of the negative lifelong impact of concussions in kids, evidence we need to factor into the way programs are run if we want our kids' futures to be as productive as their high school years.

If you'd like to share your thoughts, leave a comment. I'd love to know what you think.

Friday Feature: Kids' Sports and Concussions

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Before my daughter played sports, I never thought much about concussions. But then I watched her friends get knocked to the floor in basketball, and the concussion diagnoses began to add up. Suddenly, it wasn't just about professional football players any more.

Last summer, stories about concussions in youth soccer and youth football made headlines as researchers tried to determine when and how kids are most vulnerable.

As it turns out, it's not just about headers and high school ball. While head-to-ball contact accounts for some concussions in soccer, head-to-head contact is (not surprisingly) dangerous as well. And the kids most at risk in football aren't the big kids in high school, but the little kids playing football at the elementary school level. Not only are they colliding with each other, but their hits to the head are colliding with a time that their brains are still developing, making them more likely to suffer long-term effects.

The more we read, the more tempting it is to wrap our kids in bubble wrap. Fortunately, no one is suggesting that, or even sounding alarms just yet. But, as the research on brain development continues to advance, it's easy to be optimistic that the research on concussions will, too, and that we'll be able to protect our kids from the fate suffered by some of the sports heroes they idolize.

Even without bubble wrap.