It's interesting how over time things tend to change. Priorities shift, passions fade, or as it seems with a lot of people these days, things become too hard so they just give up. I've mentioned before that I work in the public school system, and as you probably know, we are no strangers to the occasional crisis.
While the threat of mass violence always seems to loom large these days, lately, the focus has been shifted to something some would argue is just as serious.
Let me get this out of the way first. I love sports, I occasionally play them, but I love watching them, and I fully appreciate that they have a place in society. However, I have always been opposed to the way they are elevated (especially at the grade school level) to the point that focus on other more important things is lost.
I encourage you to go to one of your local school board meetings for your public school district and keep track of how much time they spend talking about sports issues in the district versus other topics. You might have to go to a couple meetings to get a feel for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if you quickly see what I am talking about.
I often make the sarcastic comment that sports is the only reason any of us are here (meaning my colleagues). I've also heard the argument that sports is the single biggest intervention for keeping kids in school. Which is just a fancy way of saying, if sports was gone, kids would quit school. While I am not so sure about that, there has been a shift lately that has many people concerned.
I know of at least two or three school districts in our immediate vicinity this year that had to shutter some of their sports seasons due to not having enough kids to play on the team. In one case it was a boys soccer team, in another case it was a junior varsity football team, and then another district had to scuttle their junior varsity volleyball roster.
As you might imagine, this has administrators (not me) scurrying trying to figure out what is going on. One of the suggestions was that kids just aren't playing multiple sports like they used to. For example, 
In the example above, that could leave a basketball team with a severe deficit in players. Thus scrapping the season.
I seem some valid points in that argument, but I also think it is something more than that. I think for the most part, kids just don't care as much about sports these days. Especially in some of those fringe areas where it is highly unlikely the student is ever going to advance to the pro level. Typically, those kids are taking private lessons and playing with club teams anyway.
I also think in bigger cities this is less of an issue due to the fact that you simply have a larger population to work with. A school district of 1200 student is going to have a much harder time filling rosters than a district with 4000 kids.
We've been seeing a large number of students move to virtual learning over the past couple of years. The reason is usually something vague like "anxiety" or something like that. When you only have 1200 students to begin with and then 1/4 of them aren't even physically attending school, that doesn't leave a very big talent pool to work with.
Does it ultimately hamper their ability to get an education (the real reason we are here), if they can't or don't play sports? Maybe, maybe not. I can see where some students might benefit from being part of a team. Many values and lessons they learn on the sports field could definitely be applied to other areas of their life.
The funny thing is, the adults are acting like this is some kind of nuclear event. There are calls to action, we need to brainstorm this, we need to fix this! What are we going to do about this! It's one of those cases where the adults have this vision of their team winning states or their kid being an all star that they just can't let go of. Those dreams will never come to be if there is no team to play on.
It seems this isn't isolated to just my area of the world either. Like I said, you probably don't see it in larger cities, but at the rural area we might be witnessing the death of high school sports. Some might argue it's actually the death of the American dream, but I'll let you be the judge of that.
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