Hacking Milton Sports
By KENDELLE GRUBS ‘20
I would not consider myself a sporty gal. I would be one of those cliche high school romance movie characters who sits on the sidelines and cheers on her boyfriend while he plays some white male dominated sport. Sure, I get really invested into the Super Bowl, but I think that’s more because of a hidden competitiveness rather than a love for football. In theory, I think sports are great, but in reality, running around and sweating for one and a half hours isn’t really my cup of tea. That’s why I stick to JV sports instead of varsity; less pressure + less work = more fun!
Even though I’m not the biggest sports fan, I still have a strong opinion on Milton’s sports credit policy. At Milton, underclassmen must be playing a sport or some alternative each season while upperclassmen only have to do two seasons. For underclassmen, Milton offers Project Adventure and Fitness Concepts, which does fulfill a sports credit for one season. However, during the other two seasons, you have to figure something else out. You can avoid doing strenuous activity by joining an intramural sport such as hack soccer or tennis. If you’d prefer a relaxing, yet core intensive sport, try to hop into yoga before the senior girls take up all the spots. Or, maybe you’d like to avoid physical activity altogether and try to snag a spot as a manager of some team. Sure, you’ll still have to go to practices and games, but at least you’re not sweating. If all your options are exhausted, you’ll end up in P.E with the theater kids who already used their season off.
While students have plenty of opportunities to fulfill their sports credits, the question comes up as to why sports credits exist. After looking through the course catalog, I found that Milton wants to encourage a groundwork in physical education and daily physical activities. The benefits of mandatory sports are clear. Students get physical activity that they normally wouldn’t and are able to venture into new experiences that they wouldn’t do otherwise. When I came to Milton, I had no clue what I was going to do my freshman fall. I had no sport until Ms. Otenti convinced me to join the field hockey team. I figured, why not? I joined thirds field hockey, and quickly copped the goalie position because there was no way I was running more than the mandatory warm up laps. Overall, I had a great experience with playing field hockey and I wouldn’t have known how much I liked it if not for Milton’s sports requirement.
As beneficial as physical activity and the new sports experiences are, sports credit tend to hurt some Milton students more than others. If you’re a theatre kid, the sport requirement is a major pain. Not only does play practice take up the amount of time a sport does, but you have to fill three of your free period with P.E. When tech week comes around and you’re practicing until almost ten at night, those free periods make the difference between completing homework and not. Milton’s theatre productions take a lot of time whether you’re on stage or backstage and not letting productions count as a credit seems unfair. Even letting just one production a year count as a credit would do wonders to relieve stress for the theatre kids on campus and allow for new people to join in on productions knowing that they don’t need to add P.E on top of it. The mandatory sports credit tends to take away a student's ability to try out new ventures in our theatre program while funneling them into the sports department.
The sports credit is a mixed bag of hits and misses. If you’re a sporty kid, great! If you’re not, yikes. I don’t believe that Milton’s sports credit should be abolished completely but I do think that there needs to be a change to the rule. If I’ve found so many ways to hack Milton sports, doesn’t that say something about the worthiness of it?