How professional sports sabotages students' futures

Taking a break from the technology focus this week:

I teach high school to an under-served almost exclusively Latino community in which a great deal of my students have ambitions of becoming professional soccer players. In fact, many of them are so convinced of their impending stardom that they ignore serious academic pursuits, as well as the warnings of their teachers. Unfortunately, due to their socioeconomic situation and the overall lack of formal education within the community, unbeknownst to them, my students have little to no actual hope of achieving their dream.

Now, this is by no means an indictment of my students' abilities, ambitions, or desires. It is more so a result of the illusion created by sports media and the culture of idolatry deeply embedded in modern sports culture. Mainstream media is masterful at glamorizing hardship while spinning the tale of the downtrodden youth that beat all the odds and made it to the top. It is the drama that sells the championship match-ups, gets made into feel-good movies, and gives us all hope in our mundane lives.

Consequently, many of the platitudes and cliches associated with sports culture permeate society, including the classroom. Analogizing athletic practice with writing practice is certainly one of my staple motivational starting points. However, in doing so, I am starting to question its effectiveness. I am beginning to understand that by casting life in such a simple light I am doing my students a disservice by failing to provide a larger context for these simple motivational one-liners.

This realization started taking shape when my students began developing personal inquiries for a research project and ten of my male students, in two different classes, chose to research "What are the different pathways to becoming a professional soccer player and which pathway provides me the best chance of success?"

In an attempt to provide my freshmen with some context for their dream I looked to the local Major League Soccer team, the San Jose Earthquakes, and focused on one player in particular: Sam Garza. As a youth and college player he was highly decorated at the highest levels of the game. Last year as a pro, he played in five games and averaged just over eighteen minutes of playing time in those games. My point in showing this to my students was to illustrate the level of dedication and commitment they would need to develop instantly, in order to have realistic hopes of just becoming a professional bench-warmer.

In order to make the example even more authentic for my students, I attempted to get someone from the Earthquakes organization (even a teenager from their developmental academy) to Skype into the classroom for a brief session regarding the demands and competitive nature of pursuing such a pathway. As a fan, I was incredibly disappointed by the Earthquakes' response that as an organization, they have chosen to decline such requests.

As far as I am concerned, flatly declining and choosing not to even entertain a simple Skype, so some students can obtain a realistic perspective and save four years of aimless academic endeavors, makes the Earthquakes complicit in the future struggles of not just my students, but students all around the greater San Francisco Bay Area that are under the same illusion.

Keeping in mind, this is a professional team that plays a relatively minor level sport in a college stadium, this problem becomes exponentially greater when applied to the more popular sports in the U.S. The question for me ultimately becomes, how can I support a team, a sport, or an industry, that is unwilling to find authentic and meaningful ways to help younger members of their fan base gain a pragmatic perspective and improve their chances for the future?

Understanding all the positive aspects that school athletics brings to the lives of high school students and campus culture, it is important to make sure we are balancing those benefits with the hidden false promises that are derailing our students as the sports media machine grows stronger every year.

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