High school is a very special and important time. High school is a time of growing up and starting to mature into adulthood. The actions and decisions made during this time go a long way in determining the future adults that these students will become. College begins to appear on the horizon. It’s a time in which grades earned in classes actually start to matter. The smarter and more intellectual students begin to be picked out from the average ones. Change begins to take place in adolescents and young ones slowly learn how to adapt to all the change. Not only are academics becoming a lot more intense, but the range for opportunity outside of the classroom begins to go through the roof. The amount of extracurricular activities available for participation by youths these days is as large as it’s ever been. However, the most popular and most sought after extracurricular activity in high school has always seemed to be athletics. 

Everybody wants to be on a sports team. All of the popular kids always seem to be on the sports teams. Not only do athletics seem to be the most popular extracurricular activity in high school, they also seem to be the most important. Athletes can earn scholarships through athletics that can sometimes pay their way through college. No other extracurricular activity can accomplish this. However, along with being the most popular and important extracurricular activity, athletics are also the most time-consuming and physically exhausting out of all of the activities. This could be why some students prefer to stay out of sports and choose other extracurricular activities. After all, some students don’t participate in any extracurricular activities at all. This allows a lot more time and focus to be drawn towards education and an opportunity to get to college based upon academic success. If one were to use all of the time an athlete uses towards games, practices, and workouts and use it strictly just for educational purposes to focus on schooling, they could easily finish atop their class because of the ample amount of time they would have to focus on these things. Athletics seem to take more time and energy away from students than even a drop of academics.

When considering the demand athletics force upon students, one must consider the workload in which is asked of them. Playing high school sports means practice every weekday that there isn’t a game. This means for the first two hours of the day these students are not in school, time that is commonly used by other students to complete homework and studying needed for the day, these student athletes are having to either practice or get ready for game. Over the years those study and homework hours add up. Those hours that could have been used to improve academic achievement, were instead spent playing or preparing for a game. This obviously gives a clear advantage to nonathlete students in the classroom.

Athletics can hinder, nonetheless, set students up for failure in academics. There is certainly not a way athletes can keep up with nonathletes, nor outdo nonathletes in the classroom with all of this time consumption and physical exhaustion being spent on athletics. However, looking deeper into the subject matter this seems to not be the case. School-sponsored sports appear to reap benefits that seem to increase, certainly not decrease, academic success, but this is balanced out by the time and energy athletics require out of students.

“Participation in Athletics and Academics Achievement: A Replication and Extension” by William J. Hauser and Lloyd B. Lueptow goes into details and searches for answers concerning the issue. Hauser and Lueptow explain how early studies concluded that athletic participation had a negative effect on educational achievement. However, they also note that more recent research has produced positive associations between athletic participation and academic achievement.  It was then noted that most early studies on this subject matter failed to utilize data that permits true longitudinal analysis until a study performed by Lueptow and Kayser in 1973. This study sampled 852 senior males in 20 different Wisconsin high schools and compared things such as grades and test scores to athletic participation as well as the extent of athletic participation.

Amanda Ripley of The Atlantic Daily argues in her cover letter, “The Case Against High-School Sports,” that school-sponsored sports programs should be seriously modified and be made much less of a priority. She writes that American schools put far too much of an emphasis on athletics. “Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else,” she writes, “Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.”

American student-athletes earn many benefits from participating in sports, but the costs to the schools could outweigh their benefits, she argues. In particular, Ripley claims that sports crowd out the academic missions of schools: America should learn from South Korea and Finland and every other country in the top tier of international test scores, all of whom emphasize athletics far less in school. “Even in eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports," she writes, citing a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics.

Ripley makes a well-developed claim and supports it solely off of data and test scores, not even needing to resort to blaming the time consumption and physical exhaustion of athletics. She makes this claim, however, not considering that sports are embedded into the American culture and nothing can be done to change that. That is an x-factor. The emphasis placed on sports in America cannot be changed. The only thing that be changed and that could aim for higher academic achievement would be for more emphasis to be placed on academics, but this would be idiotic if athletics are actually determined to be advantageous for academics. With this being considered and without knowing if athletics are advantageous to academics for sure, steps progressing towards better academic achievement in the United States cannot be taken.

Even though there are several experts that totally disagree with Ripley, their evidence isn’t necessarily very useful either. Though they do have solid studies that favor their claims emphatically, these studies do not answer questions as to why athletes tend outperform nonathletes in the classroom. Because of this, it can be assumed that athletics do tend to have a negative effect on academics in certain aspects such as time consumption and physical exhaustion. However, athletics tend to have a positive effect on academics in terms of character building and certain skills obtained through athletics that make athletes superior to nonathletes in the classroom. Overall, a positive correlation is almost always seen between athletics and academics in terms of overall academic achievement and based off of this it can assumed that athletics are more of a positive factor on academics than a negative factor.

Though the studies supporting the positive correlation resulted in straightforward results as far the relationship between athletic participation and academic achievement, none of them supported, however, a causal interpretation of the relationship. Researched interested in the matter now wanted to know why athletes seemed to outperform nonathletes in the classroom, if they seemed to do so. To answer part of this question studies concluded that differences between athletes and nonathletes are due to initial dissimilarity, not to the socialization effects of athletics, meaning the biggest differences tend to be personality factors. Stevenson’s 1975 study showed that the personality factor consistently found to differentiate athletes and nonathletes was the ‘dominance’ factor, which would in turn result in higher competitiveness and greater success in the classroom.

Relating sports to academics in a broader spectrum, considering other extra-curricular activity involvement, in “Linking Exracurricular Programming to Academic Achievement. Who Benefits and Why?”, Beckett A. Broh establishes early on that according to longitudinal studies of Fejgin (1994) and Hanson and Kraus (1998-1999) sports participation raises grades and test scores. However, just like Hauser and Lueptow, Broh determines that none of these studies used nationally representative samples and many failed to control background differences between athletes and nonathletes such as race, family income, and parent’s educational attainment. As a result, none of these studies were able to provide evidence that the relationship between athletics and academics is causal. However, it is pointed out that more recent studies have incorporated in nationally represented samples as well as background differences between athletes and nonathletes. A study by Miracle and Rees in 1994 concluded that by teaching characteristics such as strong work ethic, respect for authority, and perseverance, sports develop educational values and thus help students achieve higher educationally. 

In “Participation in High School Competitive Sports: A Subversion of School Mission or Contribution to Academic Goals?”, Naomi Fejgin uses longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of 10th graders to assess the effect of athletic participation on student outcomes after controlling for student background and 8th-grade measures of the dependent variables. The analysis shows positive effects of sport participation on grades, self-concept, locus of control, and educational aspirations, and a negative effect on discipline problems. Analysis also shows that athletic participation is unequally distributed across gender and socioeconomic status groups. Males, students from higher socioeconomic levels, students attending private and smaller schools, and those with previous experience in school and private sport teams are more engaged in high school competitive sport.

In “Sport Involvement and Educational Outcomes of High School Students.”, Seunghyun Hwang considers a study observing the relationships among sport participation and social and personal influences on high school students’ educational expectations and attainment, using National Education Longitudinal Survey-88. Athletic engagement, educational expectations of significant others, support for academics, parental involvement in academics, and academic and athletic identities were measured in the 10th grade. Educational expectations and attainment were measured in the 12th grade and 8 years after high school. Socioeconomic status, academic ability, and school size were controlled. Results indicated that athletic engagement was related to youths’ formation of identities, but only their academic identity was associated with later educational outcomes. Athletic engagement and identity were not related to educational outcomes. This suggests that perhaps there is no correlation at all between athletic participation and academic achievement

Therefore, experts tend to stand by both claims. Amanda Ripley cites credible studies in her claim that there is a negative relationship between athletics and academics. Her argument is heavily supported by other countries outperforming the United States in academics. However, it is unfair to base a bold argument like this on such evidence when no other country puts near as much emphasis on athletics. That is something that cannot be taken away from America. Sports are embedded into the nation’s culture. To say that such a big part of the country’s culture takes away from the academics of the country is an unfair argument. If one were to try to make this argument off of such evidence, they would be better of comparing the United States to countries more similar to it.

Amanda Ripley claims there is a negative correlation between athletic participation and academic achievement. Seunghyun Hwang takes an even broader approach and claims there is no relationship between the two matters. If this is the case, then the two have totally no effects on each other and students have their own academic abilities that they have whether they are an athlete or a nonathlete. However, it is very hard to rely on this argument for answers when it is based off of only one study. Arguments supported by multiple studies and an ample amount of analyses seem to present more evidence to support their claims and these arguments seem to be the ones supporting a positive correlation between athletic participation and academic achievement.

All of these researchers referred to many studies and the majority of the studies pointed towards a positive correlation between athletic participation and academic achievement. Amanda Ripley brings up the superiority of other countries towards the United States in academics and completely blames the country’s strong emphasis on athletics as the culprit to the country falling behind to all these other countries and bases her claim solely off of test scores, without referring to a single study because there is not one single study to back up her claim. 

The United States is, however, falling behind to other countries in academics, but there are studies that show that athletics are not the reason for that. Many other reasons can be determined for this lagging behind, any American can tell you that. As a result, if this country wants to start making leaps past other countries educationally, it must put more emphasis on academics. This does not mean putting less emphasis on athletics for they seem to reap benefits that give athletes advantages in the classroom, but this also means nonathletes need to step their game up as well and attempt to outperform the athletes in the classroom since they have advantages in time and energy. It all balances out. Athletes obtain more willpower and perseverance in the classroom from athletics, but this is balanced out by the all of the time and energy nonathletes obtain from not participating in sports. There is indeed a positive correlation between athletic participation and academic achievement, however when looking in the broader spectrum of things the time and energy saved by nonathletes allows them to keep up with, if not outperform athletes in the classroom at the end of the day.
