Should there be a grade requirement to participate in sports?
Overview
Should grades always come before sports?
Should there be a grade requirement to participate in sports?
Svenka worked hard on her soccer skills and made the school team. When she got an F on her report card, the coach told her she was not eligible to play unless her grades improved. The school that Svenka attends, like many others around the country, has a rule: If you don’t pass a class, you don’t get to play. Svenka thinks that this is unfair. She does not think this one bad grade should affect her place on the team.
Some people think that middle and high school students should maintain certain grade point averages to play sports. Many schools use grades as a prerequisite for participation in after-school activities. They feel that the students should work as hard in the classroom as on the field. If students really want to play, they should work extra hard in school to make sure that they can.
Not only does this rule encourage student-athletes to keep up with their schoolwork, it also motivates coaches to teach players how to balance their time. Coaches don’t want their star athletes to fall behind in school and be dropped from the team.
On the other hand, there are people who do not think grade requirements are a good idea. They think that forcing students to get a certain grade will keep too many from participating. In previous years, some students took easier classes just so they could play sports. This was unfair to the athletes who had to work harder to keep up their grades in challenging classes.
What do you think about this? Does the “no pass, no play” rule seem fair to you? Should middle and high school students have to meet a grade requirement to participate in sports?
Credits:
Text credit: Word Generation by SERP and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Image credit: By Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.