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. She made the school team. But then she got an F on her report card. The coach told her she was not eligible to play. Her grades needed to get better. Svenka’s school has a rule: If you don’t pass a class, you don’t get to play. Other schools have this rule too. Svenka thinks it’s not fair. One bad grade should affect her place on the team.
Some people say middle and high school students should maintain certain grade point averages to play sports. Many schools use grades as a prerequisite for joining after-school activities. They say 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.
Some people say that this rule gets student-athletes to keep up with their schoolwork. It also gives coaches a good reason to teach players how to balance their time. Coaches don’t want their star athletes to fall behind in school. They don’t want athletes to be dropped from the team.
Other people do not think grade requirements are a good idea. They think that forcing students to get a certain grade keeps 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 worked to keep up their grades in hard 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.