Although many people believe that schools are placing a bigger emphasis on athletics than academics, this is not entirely true.  Our school has made many budget cuts over the past few years, but they have affected all aspects of Whitman life.  Yes, the district had to end the nine-period day and many electives, but schools sports are still lacking funding.  How many people in our school know that we have a swim team?  What about the bowling team? Golf? These are just a few of the sports that nobody seems to care about.  These teams don’t even have the facilities to compete at our school, so they have to be bused to other areas. It doesn’t seem like anyone is concerned about their successes because they aren’t sports deemed “important” in our society like soccer and football are.  They receive barely any funding and are struggling to get by.

As a member of the Whitman Volleyball Team, I had seen the lack of funding in athletic programs firsthand.  Cracking, shrunken uniforms are passed down year-to-year as there is not enough money available in the budget to purchase new ones.  Every game, we struggle to put up torn nets that look like they were bought ten years ago, and we play with old, flat balls.  My freshman year on the team, we were forced to sell cookie dough in an effort to raise money.  With the proceeds, we were finally able to buy new uniforms for the Varsity team.  But should it be the job of players to be buying essentials that are supposed to be provided by the school? Isn’t it the role of the booster club, or the entire athletics administration, to pay for our needs?  It has become up to the students, rather than the district, to take care of these problems.

And Pep Rally, while seen as pointless by some, is not just to recognize the sports teams of Whitman, but to foster a sense of school spirit among students.  Students are pulled out of classes to attend, but it is only an annual occurrence.  Most students can agree it is one of the few times during the school year that everyone is gathered together: students, teachers, and staff.  There is such pride in getting to watch your peers do what they love and spend hours a week practicing.  It is unfair to say the Pep Rally is only about sports, as the student body watches performances by the dance team and step team, and sees the hard work put in school clubs such as Robotics.

I do agree that getting a proper education is essential for a teenager preparing to face the real world.  But school can’t just be about academics.  High schoolers are feeling extremely stressed out trying to manage a schedule of AP homework, SAT prep, and constant studying. The average teenager only gets 6 out of the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep for a healthy lifestyle.  Approximately 10% of students suffer from an anxiety disorder due to the overwhelming amount of pressure put on them.  These kids need to be able to have some break from schoolwork.  Sports are an excellent way to momentarily escape the pressures of everyday life as they get to exercise and share the experience of being on a team.  Studies show that playing a sport has so many positive effects on the mind and body.  Participants in sports have higher self-esteem, are in better shape and have a decreased risk of diseases and becoming addicted to toxic substances. Most importantly, they actually do better in school and loosen up from stress.

Overall, it might be true that some schools value athletics over academics.  However, the positive effects of playing a sport are greatly influential on the average stressed out teen.  It is easy to justify the cause of spending money on sports after looking at the benefits of athletics. It may seem like sports are held on a pedestal, but they are often overlooked when the district decides which areas need money the most.

In twenty-first century America, there is a big emphasis on academic success, being at the top of your class and going to a prestigious college. However, are these just empty expectations? Do our schools really care about our grades and achievement in the classroom? At first, you might say of course they do, they are, after all, a school. But if you look at the state of American schools today, you just might find a shocking truth.

Take a look at our school, Whitman, for example. At the beginning of each school year, students are taken out of their math, English, science, and social studies classes to congregate in the gym for “Pep Rally,” a celebration of not the upcoming scholastic year, but the upcoming athletic year. Learning about quadratic functions and Shakespeare is suspended in favor of watching the varsity football team jump up and down on the basketball court. Our nine period days are gone forever, electives are disappearing every year, the language honor societies have had to be combined, and yet the football team just got a new scoreboard. If you look on our website, you would see picture upon picture of our sports teams, and yet almost no one knows that our school newspaper has gone online. In fact, Paw Print recently became recognized by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and yet the school cares more about the football team that lost at homecoming.

This past year, New York State decided it was better to shuffle taxpayer money into officially naming cheerleading a sport, and yet 80% of New York City school graduates lack basic reading, writing, and math skills. Participation in high school sports continues to rise every year, but somehow 25% percent of high school freshman fail to graduate on time. Some may say that schools are putting more money into sports for our benefit because it gives us a better chance of getting athletic scholarships. However, if the school is trying to better our chance of getting a scholarship for sports, they are doing us a huge injustice. The truth of the matter is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, there is more money in academic scholarships than athletic scholarships. Every year, colleges award $9.5 billion in academic merit scholarships as opposed to the $1 billion they spare for athletic scholarships. With those statistics, Whitman probably should’ve brought back sign language instead of redoing the track.

If you were to go to Europe and tell someone at a sports game that in the US, some college stadiums can hold over 100,000 fans, they would think you were crazy. This is due to the simple fact that everywhere else in the world, school sports are secondary to learning. In other countries, school sports are just a fun activity, not huge competitive events that devour all of a school’s budget. Some of you athletes may be happy at the big role sports play in American schools, but while our periods are shortened for Pep Rally, European students are already learning their third language by the age of eleven.

Today in America, unemployment rates are frighteningly high, and yet, American companies are still forced to outsource jobs because American workers simply can’t compete with other countries in the fields of math, science, and engineering. In 2009, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to students all across the globe, found that only 32% of American eighth graders were proficient in math.

Ever since America was founded in 1776, it has been the country that all other countries aspire to be like. However, if the American school system doesn’t shift its priorities from athletics to academics soon, we might just be the laughingstock of the world.