Sports as Education
There is one thing for which I am extremely grateful – the day my boys decided to participate in sports and to continue participating in sports. Although it’s a wonderful experience and a ton of fun to see your children excel, that’s not the reason I am grateful. It’s really not an ego thing for me, but I am very proud of their accomplishments. Why? Because they chose to work hard, because they enjoyed the challenge, because they desired to excel. Those are things I can relate to. For better or worse, it’s also proof we set examples for our children and that apples don’t fall far from trees. My real gratitude, though, is the introduction to life lessons that sports provide.
Through sports we get to learn life lessons without having to suffer the consequences of real-life; we get to learn consequences within a game, especially a game that involves teammates and working together. After watching a disappointing loss to end a disappointing season of our favorite college football team, my youngest and I had an interesting discussion about life, sports, ego, leadership, and teamwork on the way home. The best part of it was he was leading the discussion. I just followed along and contributed my thoughts from the perspective of an old man who had been there.
He started by relating conversions he had with his friends about the homeless and how the police must deal with them. We live in a very liberal city that, in my opinion, does the opposite of what is needed to help these people. The city wants to leave them be, to let them abuse public safety by providing society’s least productive with free everything, somehow thinking enabling bad behavior is doing them a service. Funny how the rest of us are not offered that same freedom from the same elected officials.
The real consequence is many of these people are not capable of choosing for themselves. They do not have the mental capacity to do so. They need to be placed in a state facility where they can be helped or where they can at least be cared for. The rest are either looking for a place to restart or a handout. Eighty percent of them, yes the facts bear this out, are looking for a handout to continue pursuing their bad habits without responsibility or consequence. Where I live the government condones and supports that behavior. Sports teaches us that kind of misguided care helps neither us nor those around us. In sports, enabling means losing because it promotes weakness and condemns growth.
Sports teach us discipline. If we are paying attention, they teach us to subvert our ego to what is best for the team. They teach us to learn about our failures and work to improve so we do not fail again. They show us our weaknesses and give us opportunities to make ourselves better. It’s not the drills we learn or the skills we obtain that make us better people; it’s the concept of learning to think about ourselves outside ourselves, beyond ourselves. Internalizing the concept there is something greater than us means we have obtained the capability to cope with challenges that will enter our domain throughout our professions, our relationships, and our lives. People who do not participate in sports often never realize or experience the two great lessons of sport – overcoming ego and overcoming adversity, in both the personal and team contexts.
Unfortunately, the highest levels of many of today’s sports elevate individual ego over team. Many of those athletes have been coddled for years, with others looking to benefit from the athlete’s success. I put that down to coaching and temptation. The foundations of character are important to sport, as they are in life. Coaches who neglect to teach that do their players a huge disservice. Integrity, humility, and the servant-leader or servant-warrior mindset are all important to a productive career and a self-fulfilled life.
That’s where our conversation headed. I am so impressed with where my sons have been and where they are going. And I know, without a doubt, that sports played a big part in setting them on the courses they now pursue. All this leads me to my final point – that Sports are an important part of education, of school spirit, and a sense of community. There are those who discount sports in schools as unnecessary, as a superfluous extravagance that serves no real purpose in educating young people. I completely disagree. I believe sports are as important to education as the three Rs. There are many kids whose only reason for staying in school is their love of sports and the chance to play. Getting that chance still involves some effort to maintain grades (and therefore, learning) in the rest of school’s academic disciplines. So, if anything, it provides those otherwise marginalized by the education system a way to still be part of it, to still learn, and to even learn lessons to which others choose not to be exposed.
Sports help round off the educational edges. They smooth and polish those ‘learned’ lessons and give them a format to be practiced or ignored, all the while teaching that, good or bad, there are consequences to every choice. I love sports. I can’t imagine life, or a school, without them.
