Should High School Sports Be Funded Essay

High School Sports Should be Funded
Every year 300,000 students are participating in sports (Gould 1). The School District has been funding the athletics program, which has been benefiting many of the students’ lives for several years. The discontinuation of high school sports will cause many students to loose the health, social and educational benefits provided by participating in athletics. The School District should continue to fund sports because they benefit students. A major reason is that sports keep kids healthy. R. Dawn Comstock, an investigator at the Center for Injury Research and Policy stated “We have an epidemic of obesity in this country, and sports is one of the ways for kids to incorporate exercise in their lives” (qtd. in Perkel 2). Most kids don’t get active anymore. They stay inside

This notion is supported by Dr. Daniel Gould, who believes that “Children who participate in sports have increased educational aspirations, closer ties to school and increased occupational aspirations in youth” (1). People against the funding of high school sports think that parents and society are placing more emphasis than ever before and, “[P]ressures athletic personnel to deviate on winning from the athlete- centered educational and personal development mission” (Gould 1). However, athletes strive to do better in class. Michael Lorenc, a high school basketball coach believes that “those who seem to have an overwhelming schedule where they’re playing maybe multiple sports, and high academic schedules, they tend to do better than those who don’t do anything extracurricularly” (Gray). Balancing sports and school makes athletes put more effort into keeping up grades while playing the sport they love. Sports motivate athletes to be better students, so funding sports would just keep kids inspired to do good at school, not cause them to get