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 to develop and improve her soccer skills, and it showed when she made the school team. However, when she got an F on her report card, the coach told her she was no longer eligible to play unless her grades were ameliorated. The school that Svenka attends, like many others around the country, has a rule that if you don’t pass a class, you don’t get to play. Svenka believes that this is unfair because she does not think this one bad grade should affect her place on the team.
Some people argue that middle and high school students should have to maintain certain grade point averages in order to play sports. This is not an unusual requirement. Many schools use grades as a prerequisite for partaking in numerous after-school activities. These schools enact this policy because 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 diligently on their academic work to ensure that they can.
Not only does this rule induce student athletes to keep up with their schoolwork, it also compels coaches to teach players how to balance their time. Coaches don’t want their star athletes to neglect or fall behind in their schoolwork, because that will mean they will be dropped from the team.
On the other hand, other people disagree and 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 addition, requiring good grades has led to unanticipated consequences. 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 arduous 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.