High school sports should be fun
Pitching with Pritch
By Larry Pritchett
As the new school year gets underway and the students get back into classes and activities, I found a little article on why students play school sports or why they don’t play.
I found it interesting, but not really surprising. I do think that maybe rural school students have some advantages in their ability to participate in more sports than in a larger school system.
As a coach, I really preferred for my basketball players to be three-sport athletes. Most of the time that wasn’t a problem and sometimes I knew that maybe the home situation just would not allow that and that was understood, but the article on why they play sports made sense.
Why they engaged in high school sports was led by the fact that they wanted to have fun, and of the 6,000 students who took the survey, wanting to have fun was picked 81% of the time. Other reasons included 79% competing for the exercise. The third place reason was learning and improving skills, with 66% stating this. In at fourth place at 64% was the ability to play with and make new friends. Lastly, 59% were competing and 53% picked winning games.
On why they didn’t play sports, the number one reason, with 42%, was school work. Another 32% didn’t enjoy sports, and 26% said there were no sports offered that fit into their area of interest. Twenty-five percent of the students didn’t think they were good enough, 22% had a work schedule after school, and 21% said family responsibilities that kept them from participating.
The thing that I took from the article, and hoped that had happened when I coached, was that the players had fun. Not sure that always happened, but most of the time I feel fairly confident that it was present.
This past week, the high school activities got started. PCS got off to a good start and that is good. The football team hung in their tough and won a close game, and the volleyball team picked up a win and had one loss.
I am writing this on Saturday, Aug. 27, and have not seen the results of any other PCS activities. I try to follow PCS and Malcolm in the high school sports, and Nebraska, KU and Fort Hays on the college level. Sometimes it is difficult to find info, especially for Fort Hays, but I try to keep up with the Tigers.
The Nebraska football season-opening game made all the Kool-Aid that people had been drinking concerning how good the Huskers might be taste kind of sour. I don’t know what to think about the first game, but it looked a lot like all the other games in the past few years. I thought we had things going our way and then the fake kickoff came around and the game changed. I don’t think that one play always causes a loss, but that decision, which didn’t work, certainly changed the momentum in the game and we came up with another less than 7-point loss. I hope that tendency changes very soon.
The UNL volleyball team looked very, very good on Friday. They are certainly a quality program that can compete on a national level at Nebraska. I don’t get Big 10 Plus, so I didn’t see the Saturday game but I am pretty sure the good play will continue.
Good luck to the Plainsmen teams as they continue their schedules!