CONGRATULATIONS, America, you just got fatter. According to the results of a study released last week, Americans have reached a new milestone. For the first time, overweight people outnumber "normal-sized" people, which means fat people are now "normal-sized," if you follow.
The reason? Our physical activity (lifting the remote control) hasn't kept pace with our eating (Happy Meals). Sign of the times: One researcher lamented the use of the TV remote, as if walking five steps to the TV and back had constituted one of our last acts of regular exercise.It seems pretty clear that the fitness boom in this country is an illusion. The study noted that obesity is increasing even among our children.
All of which caused me to wonder, as I do from time to time, about the wisdom of our traditional school athletic programs, which are apparently failing as badly as our math programs (if success is defined as making exercise a lifetime habit).
At all levels of school sports, from junior high to high school to college, ours is a system for an elite few. In a given high school, for instance, there is one team in each sport for thousands of students, and only a limited few actually get on the playing field. In a school of 3,000 students, there is a 15-player varsity basketball team. And many of those players are also the school's football and baseball players.
Then there is our collegiate system, in which athletic scholarships are awarded to an even smaller group of athletes.
The result is this: All those millions of dollars, all that effort, all our facilities and resources, are utilized for a handful of athletes, and the rest of the students sit and watch. We even award scholarships and prestige to cheerleaders to help us watch.
It continues beyond school into the professional ranks, where people support professional teams by spending millions of dollars on tickets to watch the elite play games.
No wonder we are a nation of watchers, not doers. Curiously, sports have never been more popular than they are today. Athletes are paid millions of dollars. Americans pay millions to watch them play. Games are televised daily. Entire radio stations are devoted to sports gab. Athletes are as recognized and revered as movie stars.
But there is little to indicate that we truly "Want to be like Mike." We watch games, but we don't play them, if our waistlines are any indication.
The current system of school sports, steeped as it is in tradition and so widely accepted, will never change, but should it? Every time I read that American youth are getting fatter, or when I hear about rising teen crime, or when I see idle youth, or when I observe the crushed hopes of kids who couldn't make the school team, I wonder if we would be better served by a system that fosters mass participation in our schools.
If we were to start over, would we be better off with, say, a mass intramural system in the high schools? What if the situation were reversed and the best athletes, rather than the less gifted, played their games for private clubs or in city leagues?
What if we removed athletics from schools completely and instead employed a club system, as is done in Europe. Soccer is a popular club sport in this country.
If the original intention of school sports was participation, haven't we failed? The current system might have worked in the days when schools consisted of 200 or 300 students, but not when enrollments are commonly 2,000 to 3,000. For most kids, participation in sports is what happens in the 45 minutes or so of P.E. class.
Ideally, every high school would establish an intramural program like the one at BYU, where anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 students participate in basketball, flag football, indoor and outdoor soccer, floor hockey, ultimate Frisbee, water polo, softball, volleyball, wallyball, racquetball badminton and tennis.
When it comes to intramural sports, high school administrators readily acknowledge the need but usually point to logistical problems (lack of facilities, supervision and time). Others have used their own creativity and energy to make intramural sports a reality.
Mountain View High has started a small intramural program to provide more opportunities for participation in a large (2,500 students) school. In a variation on the theme, teams from Mountain View, Timpview, Orem and Provo high schools compete in a city rec basketball league.
The champion of the intramural cause is Steve Downey. As Orem High's athletic director, he already had a full-time job overseeing the school's traditional sports programs, but that didn't stop him from starting a large intramural basketball and flag football program several years ago. Each winter, some 20 basketball teams compete against each other, with the championship game played in front of the student body. The players coach themselves and buy their own uniforms.
"I've tried to talk other schools into starting a program like ours so our No. 1 team can play theirs in a playoff, but it's a monster to take on, especially initially," says Downey, who, without an intramural budget, raises money for the program himself. As for the difficulties, Downey says, "You can look for ways to not let it work, or look for ways to make it work. I've had kids and parents write letters thanking me. It's been worth it."