Why are you still teaching sports units?

Like almost every PE teacher I know, I loved sports growing up. I played baseball, soccer, and football in leagues, organized pick-up games of basketball and hockey on the asphalt in front of my house with my friends, ran track all through high school, and spent much of the time I wasn’t playing sports watching them on TV. So when I became a PE teacher, I immediately looked to the games I loved growing up for class activities. In the summer before my first year, I sketched out lacrosse units, over-the-line tournaments, and more. I was sure the kids would love it.

I was not prepared for how lame it was.

For one thing, I did not yet understand that play is a skill -- and that many of my high school students had not developed that skill in the same way as did many PE teachers growing up. Further, I quickly realized that the students who wanted to play sports in high school were already playing sports in high school. A competitive, organized, after-school sport will always be better than a PE class for students who are predisposed to athletics. The result was that a minority of my class -- made up mostly of JV and varsity athletes -- would dominate games that the rest of the class had no real interest in playing. I would inevitably end up with large swaths of my class idly standing on the field/court while a vocal and active smaller number would play games that devolved into what looked like chaos: flag football became tackle football with surprising speed and consistency; 3-on-3 basketball players would take full-speed charges; kickballs would be bouncing through a busy traffic intersection moments after starting the games; etc.. (While I would now be able to recognize these behaviors as the natural result of experienced athletes playing in teenage-appropriate ways, in the context of a school class, some of this play was and is overly dangerous.)

After hours spent analyzing where and why things were going wrong, I came to an alarmingly simple conclusion. Sports are supposed to be fun, and when they’re not, they’re useless.

There are a million reasons a student may not want to play sports during PE class. From fear of making a mistake in front of friends, to shyness around new peers, to a lack of desire to engage in competition, to fear of injury, the reasons for sports avoidance are legitimate and powerful. Even when I tried to control for ability and experience by organizing games according to students’ current playing levels, the non-athletically-inclined often participated only lethargically in order to get credit for their grades (which are, by the way, harmful in and of themselves). Meanwhile, setting expectations and norms for “safe” play came off as “boring” play to more advanced students.

So take a step back and ask why we play sports at all. We know that the fastest path toward fitness goals is by relying on a systematic, comprehensive plan that addresses all the elements of fitness: strength, muscular endurance, cardiovascular endurance, mobility/flexibility, etc. Elite athletes perform specific exercises for specific sets and reps, with specific assigned rest intervals, on specific days. Why not just copy them?

Again, the obvious answer: because for many of our kids, sports are the most fun way to exercise. Rather than run laps, many students would prefer to play tag. Rather than perform plyometrics, many students would prefer to play volleyball. And if kids want to play games and sports, more power to them. Keep teaching those units. But realize that even if sports are fun -- a big “if,” as we’ve identified -- they leave a lot to be desired. A lot. Here are five big problems:

-The version of sports played in PE represents a largely one-dimensional view of fitness

The state of California has identified five components of fitness: cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility and body composition. (Body composition is a questionable addition, as it’s reliant on genetics, nutrition, sleep, activity levels, and a combination of the other components, but it is listened nonetheless.) Muscular strength is often considered the most important physical trait because it is very trainable and makes almost any other trait easier to attain. Further, if we define strength as the maximal amount of force we can generate in a single instance (for example, during a one-rep-max bench press test) we know that any other task represents a percentage of this capability: the lower that percentage, generally the easier and safer the tasks of our everyday lives become. This is a big deal for health and longevity. But inspect games played in high school PE -- flag football, basketball, capture the flag, whatever -- and it’s obvious that while they may impact cardiovascular endurance and, to a lesser degree, some muscular endurance in the core and lower body, they neglect other components of fitness, most notably strength. Similarly, upper-body muscular endurance is largely ignored, and the range of motion required even during an activity requiring maximal athleticism (driving to the hoop for a layup, or leaping to catch an overthrown football pass, for example) are too limited to develop flexibility in any systematic or reliable way.

-Games and sports are too chaotic to predict students’ progress

The unpredictable nature of sports and games -- the very thing that makes them fun to watch -- makes it very difficult for us as teachers to understand, measure, or plan for students’ progress, regardless of the component of fitness we hope to effect. The student playing goalie during a soccer game certainly isn’t taxed aerobically the way the midfielder is; the defensive player on the stronger team runs less than the defender on the weaker team; the running a forward does Monday can’t be compared to the running he does Wednesday because we didn’t measure either session, and even if we did, we can’t program overload because the game dictates his pace and not the other way around. High level athletes overcome this randomness by relying in large part on carefully monitored strength and conditioning training for their physical development; their games then merely display this physicality.

-PE games and sports are heavily biased toward certain body types

In PE, almost every game or sport rewards agility, running speed, and hand-eye coordination. These are desirable attributes for most of us, to be sure, but they’re also sometimes unattainable. While a varsity high school football team is able to find positions for players of all sizes and athletic predispositions, this is not the case in the PE variant. What games exist for the student who could deadlift a truck but has a hard time keeping up with the league champ in the 100m in a running-based game? There aren’t many. Further, if we do hope to move students forward athletically, we usually have to rely on -- you guessed it -- more systematic approaches to adaptation and progress. Again, the way elite coaches and athletes do.

-A years-long emphasis on sports ignores the ways most of us will exercise after leaving school

Yes, adult sports leagues exist in many cities as a way to exercise into adulthood. But what about residents of rural areas, or students who prefer a sport not commonly played by adults? More importantly, what about students who never liked sports at all in high school? Most adults who exercise -- and there are increasingly few of us, which says a lot -- will choose to pursue individual activities that we can do on our own time. We may run or lift weights or follow along to YouTube fitness and yoga videos. We may take the dog on hikes, do calisthenics in a class at the YMCA, play with our kids. If we have access to more resources, we may rock climb, swim, paddleboard, or join a jiu jitsu or CrossFit gym. Exactly none of these life skills are taught by assigning a traditional sports unit in a high school class.

-Sports lack an easy method for acclimating to speed of play, increasing injury risk

I can program single leg step-ups in a workout, and that exercise can be adapted for a child with cerebral palsy or weighted and scaled for a sub-10-second 100m sprinter. I can watch kids work through something like Dan Pfaff’s “Rudiment” series to gain an understanding of kids’ movement capabilities and deficiencies, and assign strength and conditioning programs accordingly. But with sports units, there’s only one fun gear: full speed. We can toy around with drills and practice to start a unit, but unless those drills include spending 4-8 weeks on tissue health, postural strength and mobility, tailored to the needs of individual students, none of that will prepare sedentary kids for full-speed cuts on a turf football field. Injuries are a predictable result.

At the risk of belaboring an obvious point, it’s easy to forget that sports were originally intended to be a means to an end, and never an end unto themselves. Basketball, for example, was invented in 1891 as an alternative to football during Massachusetts winters. Football was a spin-off of soccer and rugby. Variants of soccer can be traced back thousands of years, to ancient China and ancient Greece, where sport was used for exercise, training for soldiers, character development, and celebration.

So if sports aren’t the end-all-be-all too many teachers treat them as, what are we preparing our kids for? Where should we be aiming? That's the topic of our next essay.