By Bob Cook, Contributor If you’d like to get a roundup of many of the problems you read in this blog, topped with rage about the NCAA, I point you to Luke Cyphers‘ well-reported piece on SBNation.com titled “A Different World: How One Small College Is Quitting Sports — And Might Lead A Revolution.” The story starts out talking about Spellman College killing its varsity sports to concentrate on improving the physical fitness of all its students, and goes from there into pretty much every failing of the high school and college sports system, with some writing that would do Howard Beale proud: Our great nation was just inundated with the Caligula-worthy circus that is the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament. College kids who won’t see a classroom for weeks perform hard, physical labor (for free, at least as far as the IRS knows) on behalf of an American audience that doesn’t give a rat’s ass whether players can read so long as they convert some timely threes, cover the spread and bust someone else’s bracket. The tournament epitomizes what our century-old interscholastic athletics system is all about. March Madness-a tiny, televised group of elites moving at high speeds to entertain great, couch-clinging masses that don’t move at all-is the way sports lives now. But like the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, Cyphers has a point. School sports is a place where “ethical breaches are a feature, not a bug,” he writes. Money and winning trump any supposed lessons sports can teach as part of an educational experience — and the actual athletes see little of the financial rewards. (Then again, looking at athletic department budgets, they’re not making any money, either.) Costs soar for elite and travel sports (done, often, just to make the high school team), making organized athletics the purview of those who can pay the admission ticket, while left out are poorer kids (especially as budget-strapped school require fees to play sports), and youth obesity creeps higher. Actually, people spending big bucks to ensure their kids make the high school team is a fool’s errand, anyway, because the professional ranks are looking at elite play, not school competition, to determine who makes the grade. (U.S. Soccer has even told kids with eyes on international play to forget school completely, putting out in the open what many sports organizations and coaches say privately.)
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2013/04/17/one-idea-for-improving-school-sports-kill-them/
