<p>That’s not howit worked in my house. Both D’s played multiple sports, 5-7 days/week. they balanced their academics with the athletic demands. I would say they balanced them quite well – both in the top 10% of their graduating class, GPA’s above 4.0, AP classes, AND well-performing athletes. (Not national-level elite athletes, but county-level all-star athletes.)</p>
<p>Both had part-time jobs. And did some socializing. What they didn’t have time for was “getting into trouble”!</p>
<p>HS sports get more attention from the local press because that’s what readers want. There are multiple contests a week – just send a reporter and there can be a story. Do we really want a reporter present when the teacher grades the Calculus tests? Instead of league standings for the basketball team, a weekly recap of class rank?</p>
<p>Sports, band, drama club, chorus. debate team, chess club, etc. – all of those things are valuable and make for better / more interested (and interesting) students. The fact that the local media does not celebrate all things equally is a business decision.</p>
<p>No one said that the school paper should report on the calculus final or weekly changes in class rank. We’re talking about academic achievements – science fairs, things of that nature – that often aren’t reported, whereas every week sports are reported upon. It sends a message that sports > academics. I personally can easily ignore this message, because I don’t read the sports section of any newspaper and I absolutely couldn’t care less how my kids’ school’s football team does, since they aren’t on it. But that is the message transmitted.</p>
But there are lots of people who don’t have kids on the team who do care about the local sports team–and, I suspect, many fewer who care about the results of the science fair if they don’t have kids involved. The newspapers aren’t all that concerned about what message they are sending–they care about what their customers want to read about, which is sports. And sudoku, I guess.</p>
<p>That’s great, but it’s not typical. While I know a few students who are able to manage such demands, I know many more who struggle to balance varsity sports with demanding academics. And oftentimes, the sport wins out because there is more pressure to succeed at the sport. </p>
<p>The 9th grade son of a friend is currently struggling to maintain an A average in his honors classes while playing varsity basketball - he’s a very good player and thrilled to be playing up. Between workouts, practice, games, etc. he is not home until nearly 9:00 every night. His dad says that he works until one or two in the morning to keep up with his studies. He says that next year, they’ll have to make a choice - honors and AP classes and intramural basketball, or varsity with only one or two honors classes. My guess is that this family will make the unusual choice of dropping the sport in favor of academics, and I’m sure they’ll received criticism for not “supporting the team.” I guarantee that many people in his school community will consider him selfish for making such a choice.</p>
<p>My point is, that sports are reported on every week because things are happening every week. Our local paper just ran a bit about the winners of the Delaware Valley Science Fair. Winners are selected once/year – the paper reported once/year. </p>
<p>For HS sports, in a typical week this time of year there will be two or three games each for girls softball, girls lacrosse, girls T&F, boys baseball, boys lacrosse, boys tennis, boys T&F, and boys volleyball. That’s 24 potential sports stories just this week, versus one science fair story all year.</p>
<p>But so what? Any individual game is, indeed, the equivalent of the calculus test. Why ARE all these individual games so important they require being in the paper?</p>
There’s a demand for it. It’s the same reason the papers give a lot more ink to men’s sports than to women’s sports–it has nothing to do with fairness, and everything with getting people to look at the page with tire ads on it.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that there is such a big demand for articles about HS sports. Our local paper is very thin, and I doubt it will be in print much longer. It rarely prints anything newsworthy or even interesting, and subscriptions are way down. If an extreme focus on HS sports is their business model, it’s failing and they should try something new.</p>
<p>With newspapers online nowadays, newspapers can now market their product in direct response to the number of “views” of each published article. I have noticed that one of our regional newspapers has a very active online message board about sports and local high school sports in particular. As a result, the sports section seems to have become even more detailed. Readers really seem to love following the local competition</p>
<p>Well, at my kid’s school, all they ever talk about are the mathletes. I think the principle was a mathlete. It’s a household joke at this point. </p>
<p>“So,” H says when we all sit down to dinner. “How are the mathletes doing this week?”</p>
<p>It brings us great fits of laughter for some reason.</p>