Sports and Their Impact

As the final whistle blew, Ko Seung Ho’s team breathed a sigh of relief as they cemented their position on top of the table. After scoring two goals he couldn’t be more happier as he went home to sleep, at 11 pm. The morning after, at school, e-mails were sent to Ko’s parents from his humanities teacher, in which he was labeled, “uncommitted, lazy and unwilling to put in effort”, as a big history project was uncompleted.

Is it really Ko’s fault that he couldn’t find time to finish his project when he came home at 9pm four times a week? Should his teachers have helped him when they saw him struggling in class, looking tired and bored?

And most of all, can sport have any positive impact on one’s academics, or is it like the Montagues and Capulets, forever at odds for no real reason?

According to the University of Missouri, sports require repetition, memorization and learning, all skills directly relevant to the classroom. Hence, they are advocates for college students and teens playing sports. Nancy Brown, Phd. at Palo Alto Medical Center, and another advocate for teens playing sports, argues that “playing a sport forces you to organize your time so that you can go to practice and finish your homework.”

Researchers at the university of Missouri continues on that train of thought and says that, “sports builds your focus, helps develop your resilience and improves your work ethic, all of which are very important skills required in the real world, They add, “Fighting for a common goal... teaches you how to build a collective team synergy and effectively communicate the best way to solve problems en route to a victory.”

Sports can be very useful before class to prime the brain for learning. An experiment in Naperville, Illinois, involved setting up a program which allowed students to to exercise before school started and the results were astounding. The kids who exercised not only had improvements in their academics, their capacity for learning drastically increased. So why is that?

In the words of Dr. John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Education and the Brain, “Exercise is miracle grow for the brain”. He goes on to say that “exercise sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another”. Now, for the brain to learn, the connections must be made, so why not get fit while doing it?

But it’s not all great news for sport lovers out there. As Ko puts it “Sometimes, I get so excited that I forget that school should be priority. I find it hard to strike a balance between my football and my school stuff . So what is a healthy balance between sports and academics and how can you go about achieving it?

A healthy balance is when you don’t feel stressed when you are playing your sport, worrying about your assignments due, and you don’t feel that studying is hampering you from practising or competing with your peers. Sounds like a fantasy of your imagination?

Well, there are steps you can take to achieving this healthy balance that eludes thousands of student athletes around the world. Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is very clear and some may argue, very harsh, when it comes to her reasoning of Sports vs Academics. “School always comes first”, she says. “Most kids won’t go on to become professionals in their sport”, she pens in an article on the university’s website.

This may seem harsh to the vast majority of student athletes, but it is true that only 0.03% of student basketball players make it to the NBA, and 0.09% of football players make it to a professional league. So doting parents are proud when their child wins a little league baseball tournament, they must know that their academics will offer better job prospects.

Jeanne Goodes, a US military wife, former marine who specialise in training and helping condition student athletes, has some top tips to balance your time between schoolwork and your sport. She says that the most important thing is organization. Organization of your timetable, organization of your schoolwork and practice timings, and mostly organization of your energy. You need to have enough energy left over after a game to come back and finish a math worksheet.

Another one of her most effective tips is to maximise the weekends. She says, “Use your weekend as preparation time for the week ahead. Start homework for the upcoming week. Use this time to plan for and prepare for projects and papers that are due.

Now, Ko takes his school books along for games and he reads them on the bus to his football games. He tries to talk to his teachers as much as possible, and get enough feedback. He says that the biggest thing he has learned though is that “getting a good grade in my classes is as important as winning a football tournament”.

by Adwaith