Sports Have Changed How We Do School

Lisa Baker, English

It’s early on a Sunday morning and Jack Hughes, a forward for the US men’s hockey team, has just scored the overtime goal to secure the Olympic gold medal for the United States, their first since 1980. Earlier in the game, he took a stick to his mouth, knocking out his front teeth. Now he grins, a bloodied, jack o’lantern smile, beaming with victory. We cheer like crazy.

I grew up watching sports, and the Olympics were staple-viewing, my family marveling at the undeniable beauty of top-tier athletes, soaked in grit and determination, achieving the unimaginable. From middle school on, I also played sports, captaining teams in high school and then playing soccer and lacrosse in college, even finding my way into international competition. As a teenager and young adult, athletics educated me with an immediacy that little else can replicate: an understanding of the strength and limits of my physical body, a commitment to feedback as a vehicle for progress.

Athletics taught me early lessons in morality, too—how grace matters most in defeat, how fairplay defines victory’s sweetness. A team’s success most often depended on the health of its relationships; if we treated each other with respect and support, we had a better chance of showing up and kicking ass at game-time.

And as an athlete in the two decades after the passage of Title IX, the landmark 1971 legislation prohibiting sex-based discrimination in educational programming, I experienced playing sports as freedom and choice. On the field, I experienced a kind of radical democracy, driven by merit. No matter where you came from or what you looked like, if you could contribute to the team’s success, you had a place on it.

I saw the efficacy of this education from the flip-side when I went on to coach after college. Athletics uniquely allowed students to demonstrate mastery of their learning through the authentic assessment of a game, the lessons of failure—poor defensive play, inaccurate passing—immediately self-evident. And I saw first-hand the power of educating students across the different spaces of a boarding school: the field, the dorm, the classroom, each cross-fertilizing to shape a student’s development.

But for all of the benefits of my own athletic education, and for all the important work and play of coaches and athletes here at Milton, I have also witnessed radical change in the culture of sports in schools over the last two decades—change that has gone largely unchecked and unquestioned.

At the heart of this change is the evolution of year-round, for-profit club sports—a “pay to play” corporate model—driven, generally speaking, by a parent culture dedicated to optimizing children for future success, defined most often as recruitment to elite colleges. The numbers are startling. According to the Aspen Institute, the youth sports industry now generates about $40 billion in annual revenue, with private equity firms scrambling to capitalize. Sixty million children play club sports, with an average US family spending over $1000 on its child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46 percent increase since 2019, and some families spending up to $20,000 annually—numbers that fuel a system that gains advantage for people who can afford it. Private coaching is the new frontier in youth sports, according to a recent New York Times article, with families now racing to hire their children personalized instruction, another insurance policy. Fear of scarcity has propelled this change; with colleges seeing record applicant numbers, parents scrap for any form of access, betting on sports started early in childhood as a smart investment.

All of us in independent school education over the last twenty-five years can see the direct impact on our schools’ athletic programs. An investment in club sports now heavily influences whether a student will ever play on a varsity team, as junior varsity teams no longer centrally feed our varsity programs. At the varsity level, coaches are rarely classroom teachers anymore; instead, graduates of successful college athletic programs are better equipped to deliver wins. For the more seasoned faculty-coaches who have translated their skills to this new model, workload has risen exponentially, with hours spent recruiting athletes to campus, and more hours spent then marketing them to colleges. Meanwhile, less resourced schools that can’t invest comparably in their athletic programs lose out, their teams unable to compete at the same level—a narrowing process that sorts for wealth.

In this new model of professionalized play, the stakes for athletes are always high, their athletic futures always on the line, even though statistically the vast majority of them won’t ever play in college. Even while playing on high school teams, many continue to participate in club practices and tournaments, their weekends consumed with travel to play. They must constantly document and update their successes, managing their public image for possible recruiting, with the help, in some cases, of sports agents who track and package their progress. In the stands, college recruiters sit and take notes—surveillance that drives anxiety and self-consciousness in athletes. The possibility of name, image, and likeness (NIL) money for high school athletes now heightens the stakes, the undeniable allure of financial earnings corrupting innate motivation.

But we have also seen a clear impact on school more broadly. Prospective families of private schools have meaningfully invested in club sports and want to see high school teams deliver results; operating within a marketplace where clients have power, schools know they must prove strong returns. Admissions offices must work to fill teams with successful student-athletes. College counseling offices benefit from recruited athletes boosting matriculation numbers to elite schools. Development and communications offices calculate that successful teams are more likely to attract alumni dollars, a point the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has long exposed in his writings about athletics in the Ivy League; our own school pep rallies and Nobles Day tailgates, well-publicized by these offices, have come about amidst such change—school spirit and community newly yoked to athletic success.

Not surprising, this new version of athletics shapes our academic program. The athletic calendar drives how schools structure their class day. Here at Milton, we shorten class time but not practice time when we have a special schedule. We hold game afternoons sacrosanct, our winter exam schedule an example of this. Student-athletes miss class-time for games and tournament play, sometimes leaving school for longer stretches to compete at higher levels; play for boarder athletes guts our dorms on the weekends.

Simultaneously, our classroom experience shifts. Who can blame a sophomore or junior already committed to college for not investing fully in a discussion about reading or in writing his lab report? For student-athletes, broadly speaking, high school has become necessarily specialized, a shift from the pluralistic underpinnings of a liberal arts education—and understandably, something else to game; more than once a student has let me know that a certain lower grade would threaten a college athletic scholarship. One classroom teacher recently remarked that he feels like a “shift worker” rather than an influential adult—influence having been claimed by the student-athletes’ athletic universe. In fact, though we still promote the notion that student-athletes can also be artists and actors here at Milton, very few can afford the time. And I get why an athlete might not want to try out for the dance concert, if he has already invested a lifetime of hours in another identity.

Our students have been raised in this model, so they don’t know life otherwise. But they do feel its costs. One student-athlete just wrote an article in my class acknowledging the anxiety of returning from an athletic injury, left to question whether recruitment was now off the table. Another student interviewed a peer about the years she felt she wasted playing hockey only to never receive a college offer: “I lost my childhood,” she decried. Yet another, like for many, knew that an athletic scholarship to any school made college affordable, a reality and a pressure that ruled out any option to shift course. Again and again, I hear stories of over and single use injuries and burnout. Even the many athletes who continue to love the sport they started over a decade ago can pause to wonder how high school might have looked different had they been able to design their own time.

At best, we adults have watched all of this happen, stepping out of the way of a cultural trend’s momentum; at worst, we have driven this change even when we suspect that it benefits adults, institutions, and systems of power more than it benefits our children and their education. I don’t think we can turn back the clock, but I do see value in naming how we got here. We owe it to our students’ development as self-aware critical thinkers to openly and boldly examine this moment; their agency depends on it.

Our school’s agency does, too. Ironically, in a moment when schools want to claim distinction from each other to attract prospective students, they have embraced homogeneity at its most basic level, following the irresistible appeal and safer-bet of everyone else is doing it. One colleague here at Milton recently suggested that we partner with a club team to host practices here on campus, cutting down on athletes’ travel and the subsequent erosion of our community—an effort to wrest back some control.

Perhaps with more intentional counter-messaging and limit-setting, we can work to claw back some of the beauty of amateur play, where athletes can compete with lower stakes, can mess up and try again without cost; where they can choose to diversify or redirect their play based on personal motivation; where they can play to commit to present joy rather than future prospects. Norway, the country of only 5.3 million that, yet again, topped the medal count in these Olympics, prioritizes the “Joy of Sport for All” throughout the development of its young athletes, a philosophy outlined in its Children’s Rights in Sports platform.

In fact, until the 1990’s when the rules shifted, the Olympics were designed to honor amateur athletes competing for the sheer love of the sport rather than compensation; the 1980 US hockey team to last win Olympic Gold was a team of amateurs—a far cry, of course, from the highly managed professionals who now compete. Still, basking in victory with a boyish joy, Jack Hughes summoned the Olympic spirit in his comments to a reporter: “I love the US...So, I’m happy to represent here with these guys, and it was very special.”

Most poignantly, athletics teach us to serve the success of the whole rather than the achievement of the individual, a mindset sorely needed now. Schools, invested in fighting for better versions of our collectives, should work to recenter the best lessons of an athletic education.