Do We Really Need Every School Sport to Be Year-Round?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder questions the trend of year-round school sports programs that consume 8-11 months of the year and crowd out other activities.
Key Takeaways
- Year-round sports are getting out of hand - Practices spanning 8-11 months leave students no time for other activities or rest
- Multi-sport athletes are disappearing - When every sport demands year-round commitment, students can't participate in more than one
- Schools should set reasonable limits - Protecting students from burnout and ensuring a balanced education requires boundaries on athletic time
Transcript
year-round school sports parents I would love to know what you think about this because I'm seeing that more and more sports school sports teams are now practicing year-round like basketball is starting in March even though the season doesn't begin until you know the winter like what is going on here and like do we need to really do this and I think for kids who really want to and have the potential to go pro or to get significant college scholarships, it makes sense to do travel teams and to do clinics and camps and all the extra kind of expensive things that people do to put their kids in that position.
And without those things, I don't realistically know how much of a shot people have and definitely there are some equity considerations there.
But for the vast majority of our middle school and high school athletes who are not going to get college scholarships for athletics, who are not going to go pro, why are we doing this?
Why are we making kids practice one sport year-round when they could be a lot more well-rounded, they could play multiple sports if they were not year-round, three, four, five-day-a-week practices?
What is the point of all this?
And I get that when...
other teams do it then the pressure is on to match them you know say if you're going to practice for 10 months out of the year then i guess we are too at our school so that we can have a an you know an even shot at beating you but what if we just said instead look this is one sport it does not need to consume everybody's whole life the coaches have other things to do at other times of year maybe they want to coach other sports the players and the families need to have a life beyond that sport and play other sports and do other things that are not sports and just have a break.
And like this idea of like any time away from a sport being a disadvantage, being like something that's going to put you permanently behind.
Like if you want to live that life, if you want to live that intense, you know, whatever your sport is, football or basketball or lacrosse, or I don't know.
If you want to live that life, go for it.
But please don't make everybody else live up to that ridiculous standard because it just becomes an arms race that nobody really benefits from.
If we all just said, we're going to practice for this sport no more than six months out of the year, when it's over, it's over.
If you want to do stuff on your own time, great, but that's not going to be part of school sports.
I just think we'd all be better off.
Let me know what you think.