Everything's bigger in Texas, from the world’s largest gingerbread house to the tallest house of cards and now the new 62.8 million dollar stadium for Mckinney high school. This is just the most recent construct of Texas’ ever increasing number of mega stadiums for high schools. The city has agreed to build a 12,000 seat stadium.”Down south, football is a really big deal, And playoff football is a really big deal” said Jennifer Gray--chairwoman for a group who wants the stadium.
Considering Texas’ 42nd ranking for chance of success and overall state grade education--out of 50 states and the district of Columbia according to Education week’s “State of the States” report card-- many questions have been raised over what we should be funding in our education systems.
The divide surrounding athletics and academics around the country is growing. Massive stadiums and football games generate revenue; University of Texas generates over 100 million dollars alone a year from its football program. For really competitive games, high schools can generate an excess of 10,000 dollars a game. This money is used to keep improving the football team and the rest goes back to the community in some cases. On the other hand, people argue that if less emphasis was placed on sports then the United states would be ranked higher than 14th (according to Ranking America) in education globally.
American children spend over twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics. South Korea topped the charts in education rankings. In the United States the graduation rate is up to around 82% (a 2 percentage point increase since 2011-2012 http://www.governing.com). With only 2-3 percent of those who graduated actually getting a scholarship to play sports in college, the benefit of funding high school sports just does not seem to outweigh the cost. Marguerite Roza--the author of Educational Economics-- “analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader” (theatlantic.com). The sample size is extremely small, but the statistics are still startling. The cost of high schools having a football team towers that of having a cheerleading team. “For example, when teacher-coaches travel for game days, schools need to hire substitute teachers. They also need to pay for buses for the team, the band, and the cheerleaders, not to mention meals and hotels on the road. For home games, schools generally cover the cost of hiring officials, providing security, painting the lines on the field, and cleaning up afterward. “Logistics are a big challenge,” says Jared Bigham, until recently the supervising principal of two schools in Copperhill, Tennessee, and a former teacher, coach, and player. “Even though the coaches are in charge of the budgets, I still have to oversee them and approve each expenditure. You’re looking at 10 different budgets you have to manage”(theatlantic.com).
In school districts where money is tight and passion for football is high, districts will chose to keep their football teams and cut gym, art, and theatre classes. According to the CDC, adolescent obesity has quadrupled in the last 30 years. 2012 statistics show that 21% of teens 12-19 are obese. In most cases, these are not the kids who are willing to join a football team or participate in high school sports, making these other programs an integral part of their experience.
On top of all of this, the number of football participants has been steadily declining since the 2008-2009 season(academic year according to the NFHSA). 10% of the most common injuries among those youth who play the sport are concussions (Source: Youth Football Safety Study by the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention during the 2012 and 2013 youth football seasons). With more and more information being released about the impacts of concussions, parents are becoming more hesitant to allow their kids to play football. The research is even starting to impact the highest level of football, the NFL. Players are retiring because of concussions--and the risk of concussions-- earlier than ever before leaving millions on the table for the sake of their health.
On average, 12 high school and college players die each year on the field or in practice from football injuries according to nydailynews. Most of these are preventable: dehydration, heat strokes, and of course concussions. Studies are starting to show that teens brains do not fully recover from the effects of concussions from season to season. “We are seeing damage not just to neurons, but also to the vasculature and glial cells in the brain,” says Eric Nauman, professor of mechanical engineering, basic medical sciences, and biomedical engineering at Purdue University. “I was particularly disturbed that when you get to the offseason—we are looking somewhere between two and five months after the season has ended—the majority of players are still showing that they had not fully recovered.”
“We found that in the preseason for the football players in our study, one part of the brain would be associating with about 100 other regions, which is much higher than the controls,” says Thomas Talavage, professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering and co-director of the Purdue MRI Facility.“The brain is pretty amazing at covering up a lot of changes. Some of these kids have no outward symptoms, but we can see their brains have rewired themselves to skip around the parts that are affected.” These injuries can have long term effects for children ranging from alzheimer's to advanced CTE at the age of 25. Such was the case of a former Division 1 football linebacker whose brain was studied after his unfortunate death. “There is a common perception that CTE affects only professional athletes; this case as well as many others shows us that contact sports athletes at the amateur level are also at risk for the disease,” lead study author Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University said by email.
Congratulations Texas on your mega stadiums. Is the sport of football worth the costs of its existence at the high school level? Probably not. Will anything change in the near future? Probably not. Then again, the United States ranks second in ignorance globally so this is to be expected.
