The current policy allows any student a chance to sign up for competitive sports with no previous experience or knowledge of the game.

An ametuer athlete produces many problems for a team that involves highly competitive events and a lot of dedication. It poses the question; should every sport require a compulsory learning class before taking competitive athletics?

Those who join these challenging sports with no knowledge of how to play argue their wish to learn more about the sport. However, they don’t acknowledge the way they’ve set back the team as a whole. A student could create slower intervals in workouts, less reps, less difficulty for the entire squad. This overall establishes poor conditioning for athletes who need a solid workout to improve their performances and move up levels.

Without a pre-requisite class, though, anyone can sign up. The problems a beginner athlete creates can be settled with the simple addition of a training class or a mandatory outline and training course before the sport’s season starts. This way, the school can provide an alternative to someone who wants to be a part of a sport, but isn’t quite ready for competitive levels yet.

Some students even sign up for elite sports assuming it can be used as simple P.E. credit. The thought, for any respecting athlete, is degrading to the sport itself. Seeing people assume a sport is easy enough to put on the level of basic physical education is insulting to an athlete.

I have been a part of my school’s swim team since my freshman year, and have been able to blatantly recognize the tough competition that the program has to offer. If a student does not have the mental stability and physical strength to swim eight 50-yard laps on an interval of 45 seconds, then maybe competitive swimming is not the place for them. However, exercise is only one small part of a sport. Factor in the actual competitions, scholarship opportunities, and career goals an athlete has for themselves, and you have the entire life of a person outside and inside the school.

Overall, people like coaches and counselors can help resolve this problem. If changing courses around is not an option, then small efforts like explaining the difficulty of a competitive sport to students, just as they would explain an upper-level class’s difficulty, could benefit coaches in their decisions with cutoffs and a team’s athletic growth.