You just don't understand or refuse to address the issue. A freshman basketball teams has a coach and 15 players. The coach is paid $5K. He has a gym available for 2 hours for practice. How does the school deal with 80 kids on the team? Where does money come from for more coaches? Do they build several more gyms?
I think the OP raises an interesting point, but it makes more sense if you come at it from a different angle. Why do US schools only offer sports to the top athletes in the school? I am not saying that there shouldn't be team sports where schools put their best players on a team and compete against other schools. That is fine with me. My issue is why aren't schools offering chances to play for kids who are not at the level of varsity/jv but still want to play? A bad example, but there is a private school in my area that gets such a huge turnout for their golf team that they set up a "developmental" team to allow kids a chance to improve and play some stroke play tournaments against each other. When they added the developmental team, everyone was concerned that it would cost too much and detract from the JV and Varsity teams. But they actually ended up with more money from their fundraisers and tournaments as there were almost as many kids on the developmental team as JV and Varsity combined.
Of course, in public school, resources are limited, especially in lower income areas. But assuming that lawmakers were jerks and came up with additional funds, it would be a great idea to open up sports to all-comers in high school. Most kids who do not have jobs or other activities just go home after school and play video games or flip through tik toks. It would be great if they had a chance to play sports after school instead. I have always theorized that part of the reason we have an obesity crisis is that we have pushed kids so hard at sports that by middle school, only the most athletic kids get the chance to participate in sports and most everyone else is completely left out. The kids who are left out just end up in front of a screen and are a pile of dough by the time they graduate HS.
The lawmakers that set public school budgets are also the ones that deemed P.E. classes unnecessary because there is no standardized testing for physical fitness. Politicians and administrators are only interested in test scores and graduation rates. Fat? Lazy? Addicted to screens? No matter! Just improve reading and math test scores so we can claim success, crow about it, and then rub it in the face of neighboring states.
Do we cut kids from Algebra because there isn't space for them? We in the USA have an obesity crisis yet we have cuts and even some schools without gym classes or playgrounds. Some of these kids will be heart diseased and diabetic in a few decades if we don't change course. I realize that equipping some teams (e.g., American football) can be very expensive, but some sports such as running or soccer need much less money.
I don't know what's worse. Kids who can figure everything out on a phone, master video games, get in etc. of which are all mostly a waste of time and can create unnecessary drama and yes can ultimately create a situation where they are FAT, diabetes, etc......or.... hearing you blame others including coaches, school administration, etc. for creating an obesity epidemic and not their parents. Nice try.
How about you advertise students spend 10-25% of the time they waste exercising and they prevent YOUR obesity epidemic? Never mind people are to stupid to realize this.
Where did Toppee blame “others, including coaches, school administrators, etc.?” Why the hostility?
The problem with cuts is that they often cut players who could become good players by the time they are seniors.
I have seen many kids who get cut or don't get playing time because they haven't matured as quickly as some classmates. Conversely, I have seen the biggest, strongest kid in the 9th grade class get all the playing time, but they stopped maturing and were only average size by the time they were a senior.
It is like the Freakonomics study where the youth hockey players were all born in January or Feb. because they only chose the players who had matured faster.
The solution is to stop predestining teams at such a young age, let all the students play as much as they want and give them all opportunities to be helped by coaches. It doesn't have to be everyday practices, just have someone to help them grow athletically. By the time they are juniors and seniors, they could have much better teams than the old way of designating a few who will become the varsity in four years.
Bingo! Proponents of cuts are usually the kids who were big in 8th grade and eventually became useless athletes once everyone grew and caught up to them. HS cuts are a joke that generally results to bad varsity programs. FM high school in NYS used to have 100s of kids on its xc when they were top of the top. Depth and growth matter if you want a successful program.
The lawmakers that set public school budgets are also the ones that deemed P.E. classes unnecessary because there is no standardized testing for physical fitness. Politicians and administrators are only interested in test scores and graduation rates. Fat? Lazy? Addicted to screens? No matter! Just improve reading and math test scores so we can claim success, crow about it, and then rub it in the face of neighboring states.
Yet reading and math test scores keep going down. Maybe our politicians are stupid? Most likely they are.
The lawmakers that set public school budgets are also the ones that deemed P.E. classes unnecessary because there is no standardized testing for physical fitness. Politicians and administrators are only interested in test scores and graduation rates. Fat? Lazy? Addicted to screens? No matter! Just improve reading and math test scores so we can claim success, crow about it, and then rub it in the face of neighboring states.
Yet reading and math test scores keep going down. Maybe our politicians are stupid? Most likely they are.
We must double down on getting rid of the distractions hampering math and reading achievement! We killed gym class. Art and band must go next! If the scores are not improved by 2025, then we'll get rid of social studies!
Where I went to college they had intramural sports for students. In many of the larger high schools here in my area they have intramural sports for the kids too. You can practice with your team, play a schedule of games, compete in an end of season tournament, etc. You just don’t have a coach assigned to your team. There is no budget really. Some refs are hired for the end of year tournament. That’s about it. Typically kids that don’t make the team will play intramural and/or club and try out again the following year.
We have 160 kids on the track team. About 25% are legitimate participants who are actually invested in the sport and really want to do well. The rest? P.E. credit, and not because they need a social outlet.
The lawmakers that set public school budgets are also the ones that deemed P.E. classes unnecessary because there is no standardized testing for physical fitness. Politicians and administrators are only interested in test scores and graduation rates. Fat? Lazy? Addicted to screens? No matter! Just improve reading and math test scores so we can claim success, crow about it, and then rub it in the face of neighboring states.
Yet reading and math test scores keep going down. Maybe our politicians are stupid? Most likely they are.
A lot of this mess started or was just made worse by No Child Left Behind (although some states were doing it already). The focus on test scores incentivized cutting things that were not being measured and shifting resources.
The irony is that there is a good amount of evidence that getting physical activity during the day improves academics. For younger kids it allows time to run around, burn off energy and just not have to be structured. The upside is there are often fewer classroom disruptions which means the kids can learn.
Other evidence shows that if you learn something new and then exercise or nap that the learning sticks better.
Google searches can pull up info supporting the above.
Another impact on the focus on test scores was the increase in anxiety on the part of the kids and the perverse incentives of teachers (see the Atlanta school cheating scandal). With so much emphasis on the standardized tests teachers taught to the test and the testing days became such a focus it increased anxiety. Hard to perform well when your anxiety levels are high especially when you don't have a lot of experience in dealing with anxiety or even know what is going on except feeling "bad".
Why is the current generation so weak and entitled? Growing up, I was never good at any sports and would have never made any teams. I played soccer and baseball from about 1st-6th grade, eventually getting decent at soccer but quit when it was going to go from recreational to select teams (I knew I'd be riding the bench a lot). Always hated baseball because I sat on the bench a lot but everyone played so your had to play or you were an outcast. Did basketball one year and sat on the bench for all but about 5 minutes of the season because the coach was an a-hole. By middle school I didn't even harbor any fantasy that I'd make the football, basketball, or baseball teams. I probably could have played soccer but I'd expect to be on the bench and that's no fun. The only "organized" sport I did was ski school but that was not competitive, just organized by the school district. I got very good at skiing and it was a great social event and a good skill to learn.
Meanwhile, over all those years during school we had an hour of PE every day. We played every imaginable sport. After school, we played sports every day until it was dark, out in the neighborhood or in somebody's backyard, or in the playfield at a nearby elementary school if it wasn't being used for something organized. We didn't have adults organizing us or supervising us. Quite often, out riding around on bikes, we'd come across a game going on somewhere and join in.
I sucked at sports and would have been cut for any school team but I eventually did track, which had no cuts, and ended up becoming a huge star for my school, then going on to make a PAC 10 roster all 4 years for two different nationally ranked teams. Having cuts for things like football kept me from wasting time on sports that I wasn't good at and forced me to find one I could be good at. If I was never going to be any good at sports, I could have just played in the neighborhood and then went on to do intramural sports in college like so many other people that I knew.
Why does everyone need some adult to set everything up for them? You guys have instant communication with your friends (cellphones) whereas we had to go out on an expedition trying to find our friends somewhere in the neighborhood to set something up. Just call your buddies and put a game together somewhere.
If the OP is an adult, why don't you get the local kids together and set up a game of football or basketball or whatever? Or do you just want the school to do all the work so you can sit on your fat butt at home and complain on the internet?
There is so much wrong in this thread. Look at this: "My school makes cuts in XC. The number is around 75 boys and 75 girls. How do you propose managing 75 runners doing a long run when some run 6 minute pace and some run 9 minute pace? Sending 75 girls out into the community in shorts and tanktops with only 2 coaches to monitor them is not a good situation."
Cuts in XC? Why would they do that? York High School in Elmhurst, Il regularly has 150 boys run XC and close to 100 girls, and has one main coach for each team with a couple of assistants. And has done so for 50 years. No different at Saratoga Springs, or at FM or any other competitive XC team across the nation. And would they cut disabled runners? Because they are slow? XC has traditionally been non-cut. I refuse to believe any public school is cutting XC runners. Private ones are free to do what they want, but even here if I were a parent I would be in their face over cutting runners.
As to that quote above, if this is the case, the coaches are poor coaches if they cannot figure out to set paces for runners of different abilities.
this sort of policy just leaves kids with nowhere to go to get exercise and make friends;
On the one hand, I sympathize. But kids can be encouraged to get exercise and hang out with friends on their own. Not everything has to be coached and chaperoned. Is being a free-range kid really not allowed anymore? That was the best part of being a kid for me, playing by exploring the neighborhood and messing around with bikes for hours every day after school from K-10. That was good exercise. I became good enough at cycling to immediately be the top climber on my college team.
I recently looked up my high school and came across a list of famous people who went there. One guy after school playing led to become a famous skateboarder:
Nick Garcia calls it "one of the greatest video parts of all time" and we have to agree. Two songs, a relentless barrage of hammers, and an ender for the age...
Big throwback this week 🤣 Subscribe for POV 10 ;) Join: https://bit.ly/2YX5It7Watch the newest videos: http://bit.ly/2zNUHwfFollow STORRORSTORROR clothing: ...
The other thing people haven't mentioned on here yet is the battle team sports coaches have to fight over playing time, with players and parents. It is much easier to rip the bandaid off during tryouts and only keep the kids you are absolutely sure you are planning to play in games. For basketball that might mean only keeping 8-9 kids on a given team (varsity, JV, C etc), and 10 is about the upper limit.
I used to coach basketball (in addition to track), I love the sport, but the playing time issue drove me away. I've had angry parents in my face after games because their kids didn't play or didn't play very much. I've also had parents in my face because we lost a game because I didn't keep our best 5 players on the court the whole night too. I'll never go back to coaching a team ball sport.
I have never understood this. Particularly now where rates of teen depression and suicide in the US are on the rise and it is well proven that participation in school sports reduces rates of depression and suicide. It seems like Americans want to kill off the kids who don't quite cut it at the age of 15; usually it is a size things for dumb Americans as well. I understand it can be a budget thing, but not really. It really would not cost that much to expand roster sizes at schools in order to encourage as much participation and the best student health outcomes possible. Americans and American athletes seem crazy and and delusionally focused on elitism and winning at the expense of the health and lives of many of the students. No wonder Americans are so skittish and crazy. WHy do they do this to themselves?
You, sir, obviously know nothing about high school sports in the USA. The dead giveaway is you thinking sports are for the kids. High school sports are operated for the adults who run them. I've coached for 25 plus years. Our AD was also the baseball coach so for each away game his team would travel in a coach bus. The track team got stuck traveling in a 25 year old school bus. One year at the annual coaches meeting I asked the AD why his team traveled coach and the track team traveled in a school bus. His response was basically that he was teaching his kids to be winners, I was teaching my kids to be losers.
My program started out real small, probably 12 kids, boys and girls. In a couple years we had 60 kids. The problem was we only had 50 uniforms. The AD flatly refused to buy any more uniforms and wanted us to cut kids. I refused, then he wanted me to only bring 50 to a meet and keep 10 different kids home each time. The way it got resolved was that uniforms had to be shared. A kid would run the mile, then he would go in the locker room and a different kid would put the same uniform on for the 400 etc.
The other problem was that a bus only fits in 52 kids. The AD flatly refused to spend money on a second bus for away meets. The first time we had more than 52 kids going to an away track meet, the driver said there were more than 52 kids on the bus and he wasn't driving unless we took kids off until we were down to 52. I had to tell 7 kids they had to get off the bus and go home. we "solved " the problem after that by having the extra kids jump in the bus in the back when we opened the back door to put the pole vault poles on. The kids would then hide until we were enroute.
a couple things. expenses are very real. it is not unreasonable to have to follow some sort of budget
management of kids is a very real issue. some kids should have more attention than others. if the number of coaches allotted can't give that attention because of high numbers, the numbers need to change.
if you are going to have a huge team that the school will support financially, those kids on the back end better be very good at managing themselves, assuming they are given good and clear direction.
I have never understood this. Particularly now where rates of teen depression and suicide in the US are on the rise and it is well proven that participation in school sports reduces rates of depression and suicide. It seems like Americans want to kill off the kids who don't quite cut it at the age of 15; usually it is a size things for dumb Americans as well. I understand it can be a budget thing, but not really. It really would not cost that much to expand roster sizes at schools in order to encourage as much participation and the best student health outcomes possible. Americans and American athletes seem crazy and and delusionally focused on elitism and winning at the expense of the health and lives of many of the students. No wonder Americans are so skittish and crazy. WHy do they do this to themselves?
You, sir, obviously know nothing about high school sports in the USA. The dead giveaway is you thinking sports are for the kids. High school sports are operated for the adults who run them. I've coached for 25 plus years. Our AD was also the baseball coach so for each away game his team would travel in a coach bus. The track team got stuck traveling in a 25 year old school bus. One year at the annual coaches meeting I asked the AD why his team traveled coach and the track team traveled in a school bus. His response was basically that he was teaching his kids to be winners, I was teaching my kids to be losers.
My program started out real small, probably 12 kids, boys and girls. In a couple years we had 60 kids. The problem was we only had 50 uniforms. The AD flatly refused to buy any more uniforms and wanted us to cut kids. I refused, then he wanted me to only bring 50 to a meet and keep 10 different kids home each time. The way it got resolved was that uniforms had to be shared. A kid would run the mile, then he would go in the locker room and a different kid would put the same uniform on for the 400 etc.
The other problem was that a bus only fits in 52 kids. The AD flatly refused to spend money on a second bus for away meets. The first time we had more than 52 kids going to an away track meet, the driver said there were more than 52 kids on the bus and he wasn't driving unless we took kids off until we were down to 52. I had to tell 7 kids they had to get off the bus and go home. we "solved " the problem after that by having the extra kids jump in the bus in the back when we opened the back door to put the pole vault poles on. The kids would then hide until we were enroute.
My son grew up crazy about baseball. Rec league, travel ball from t-ball up. It was all he cared about so he was emotionally destroyed when he was cut during tryouts for our middle school team. They had 16 spots and about 30 boys at tryouts. The coach suggested he go out for track instead. Fast forward one year and he wins the state 1600 and 3200 for middle school. By the time he finished high school he was sub 4:10,9:00, 14:50. Ran Footlocker Nationals, multiple state championships. He ended up running D1 on a good scholarship at a great school and made many trips to nationals. I have no doubt if he had made that middle school ball team he would never have discovered running and all the doors that it can open. He has a degree from a top 5 public university now rather than our community college. Sometimes the hard things in life can steer us in the directions we need to go.
It's not ideal but schools only have so much budget for uniforms and transportation to off site competitions. A middle ground would be to have no cuts and only hand out uniforms to the kids good enough to compete and let the others practice. But if you had 65 kids come out for soccer, how do you have enough time and staff to give everyone a chance to improve?