RE: A Slow Death...
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This whole situation is hitting my former high school hard. One of my old football coaches passed away and I went to a viewing for him and while talking to the current football coach / athletic director he said that only 3 freshmen came out for football. I was like WHATTTT??? 😳 Back when I played at that same school you would have 20 freshmen minimum.
I guess the problem is even worse with the girls sports. Low participation rates.
Also there are about half as many kids in the school that there was for the previous generation.
Like you mentioned kids will say they have "anxiety" and will be homeschooled or take classes online. It's weird stuff and I have seen a lot of weird things lately.
I guess 70% of the students at the school are in a single parent household.
I just think there is oftentimes no direction and you don't get the multiple siblings coming up through the system and the kid wanting to play ball like their big brother did.
Then they see they can get more attention and fame if they pretend to be a girl and dance around on TikTok.
I think some of these smalls schools might end up having to consolidate again. In the 60s the township schools consolidated and now they might have to consolidate further.
Yeah, back when I was in school and even when I started working here they often had varsity, junior varsity, and freshman team for many of the sports. There was just that much competition to want to play. It's bizarre. You might be right that smaller districts find themselves consolidating. The good news is in less than a year I can retire if I need to. That sounds like a mess I don't want to deal with!
There have been various talks out here for years to consolidate further. Some want it and some don't. Where a lot don't really want it is for basketball. They can all put together a basketball team and there are classes for basketball when way in the past when that first major consolidation happened there were no classes. That's why the movie Hoosiers was so significant. A tiny school taking on the big city schools to win the state championship.
I see both sides of it. Also another weird thing to me is while they are having a hard time getting kids now there are more sports like girls wrestling.
Yeah, that is a good point. I think it's just not as big of a deal to kids like it used to be. I would imagine there are a variety of reasons for that though some might want to point to a single thing. To me though the powers that be are trying to figure out what they can do to fix it when I think they should be changing the way they think about it.
I do think the specialization to just playing 1 sport earlier is a factor that you mentioned. I have seen a lot of burnout from kids doing that.
There are benefits to playing multiple sports, but sometimes kids spread themselves too thin or risk injury, though probably less than people think. Like I said though, I think they are banging this drum more for nostalgia sake than any other reason.