Unhealthy Sports

~ Laura

When I was in high school, the track team gave me more than a cardboard box of medal and plaques in my basement. I gained confidence and grit that carried me into adulthood. I’ve always been a huge supporter of sports for kids for that reason. But, lately, there have been a series of disturbing stories about high school sports.

All those knocks to the brain in football makes me question whether or not that sport should exist. Soccer goalies may be getting cancer from the artificial turf.

And there’s all the weird and inappropriate behavior that happens in the locker room. A local football team was doing pretty awful things to the freshman on the team.

My oldest kid is on the high school cross country team. He’s a sophomore who is running on the varsity team. They do eight miles every day. His coach just chewed him out for skipping the Sunday practice. I thought that running seven days a week was excessive, so I told him to skip Sundays. The coach didn’t like that and cursed him out after practice this week.

People need to chill out.

Published by Laura

17 thoughts on “Unhealthy Sports”

  1. I’ll be interested to know what the result it. This is very upsetting. No coach should be cursing out high school students, but of course he’s gotta show he’s in charge and I’m sure your son can’t complain or have you complain without insults. Is this something you can call the principal about, quietly? If this was younger than high school it would not be acceptable at all. Why is this ok? My high school lacrosse coach never cursed at us: we were just girls though. Gross. You are right. The coach is wrong. Let him curse.

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  4. Second that. Training 7 days a week is a recipe for injuries. Is the coach a certified phys ed teacher?

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  8. That’ll be the day when ANYONE is cursing at my daughter no matter what the circumstances. All that does is teach her that it’s okay for people in authority to curse at you.

    And training 7 days a week? You can get away with it when you are young but at best the impact will show up in his 40’s.

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  9. I found a book on cross-country skiing that says intense workouts should be limited to about 4/week (they seem diminishing returns after that). Didn’t read carefully enough to know what “intense” means, and, of course, it’s skiing, not running. The book, Handbook of Sports Medicine and Science, seems to have a running volume, too, which might be interesting to look at if J is running cross-country seriously.

    I don’t know about the running 7 days a week. Do people who adults who run for exercise run that much (7 X week, 8 miles/day)? Does J want to run that much? My kiddo does 4h/week of basketball, 4h/week of hockey, 1h/week of tennis, and 2-4 games/week (in addition to running around like a crazy boy at whatever recess/PE is available). That seems to be the right level of activity for him. Older kid does 6h/week of basketball, and she would benefit from adding another 4h/week of some other kind of exercise. Neither of them are competitive athletes.

    I’m not as troubled by the “cursing out” as others are (though the football hazing story is awful, am neutral on the turf/soccer goalie/cancer connection without further evidence, but my kids don’t play soccer). If I remember correctly, L told us that her coach use to take his girl’s team out for beers, which is way worse than cursing in my book!

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  11. 8 miles, 7 days a week? I’m no coach, but as someone who just had meniscus surgery as a result of too-much-running, I’d say be careful!!! (and I *never* ran 7 days a week. ever.)

    The most disturbing part of that article, to me, was the angry reaction of the parents when the football season was cancelled. Really??? Maybe the journalist was twisting the story, but they seemed to focus more on the loss of the season than the alleged horrible bullying. I don’t get football. It’s like a gladiator sport to me.

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      2. Absolutely. Perhaps I should have used the word “surprising”. The assault part is certainly the most disturbing. It just really creeps me out to think, “yes, that’s how one raises a kid who will do such things….by being more upset about a football game than a crime.”

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  12. This story has been all over the local news. The parents of the football players are outraged that their season was cancelled. The local news has been showing them up in arms at school board meetings. They bring their kids in football uniforms to these meetings, and boo the school board members that criticize them. Crazy-town.

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  13. Well. High school coaches.

    You have to understand that high school teaching in America doesn’t get the A students. An unfortunate state of affairs, but this is the society we’ve chosen. And of those who go into teaching, the coaches are the bottom of that already nearly-empty intellectual barrel. The C minuses at best.

    So, you can try to explain to one of them that running eight miles a day seven days a week isn’t productive or healthy, that that training schedule would be unwise for anybody but a serious professional runner (and even a professional would structure the training better), and that even if it had a chance safe or productive that the upside of this is so marginal that it is all but worthless (High school athletics? Who cares?). You can try, but none of them have the intellectual capacity or the motivation to understand. You might as well be speaking Serbo-Croatian for all the good it would do. You would have a more productive time discussing this with your goldfish.

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  14. I must disagree about the relative intelligence of coaches, especially track coaches. I had this guy as a math teacher, and he was wonderful. Let’s see if your son can take down the CBA team in the coming years.

    http://www.nj.com/hssports/blog/boyscrosscountry/index.ssf/2010/12/nj_boys_cross-country_cbas_tom_heath_is_state_coach_of_the_year.html

    That said, he was known to run boys’ legs into the ground, and at least some of his all state runners did not have any meaningful runs in college.

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