High School and Football Essay

The game of football has become an extremely popular sport over the years. It has two separate professional leagues, the CFL (Canadian) and the NFL (National Football League). While the NFL is the more popular league, the CFL is a very fast growing league in its own right. Football is played everywhere in Canada, especially in high schools. However, the Avon Maitland School Board has banned football as an extra-curricular sport, and stopped funding it, in its high schools. I feel that this is wrong. Football should be an extracurricular sport in every Avon Maitland high school because it has many physical and mental benefits, and it can bring an entire community together. How could the School Board say no to a sport that is full of benefits? Football is a sport that requires a lot of physical contact. This can cause some problems as injuries can occur. The most common and serious ones are concussions. To prevent this, schools can implement tough rules and penalties, which are similar to a professional league for the safety of the student-athletes. The NFL has disciplined many players recently for violent and unnecessary hits. They have created a rule stating that helmet-to-helmet hits are illegal. I feel that schools could implement his kind of a system to protect the student-athletes. Students who do not follow the strict rules that have been placed down will be punished. The severity of the punishment will range from a suspension to being kicked off the team permanently. With these, strict punishments being laid out I feel that students will follow the rules. The students that choose to play by these rules will gain many benefits from the sport of football, both physical and mental. Playing the game of football comes with many physical and mental benefits. It improves your strength, cardio, and speed. Also, due to the amount of physical activity it involves, it can lower the risk of diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. The mental aspect of the game will make you mentally stronger, and an increasingly better strategist. It makes you more responsible and a better listener. Playing football also increases the blood flow to your brain, which will keep you more alert in class. This could benefit your marks. Calvin is a student from another school district. He plays for the football team at his high school. Calvin talks about his typical school day. I awake at 6:30 am to get ready for my morning jog. I jogged from one end of the city to the other in 1 hour. I then consumed my breakfast and sprinted to school. The school is about 5 kilometers away from my house. I arrive at the school with some sweat dripping down my forehead. But I do not feel exhausted at all. I am on time for my class, as usual. The teacher gives us an insightful lecture. I grasped a lot of what he was talking about. After lunch, my friends and I play some football. I then head off to my last class of the day. I completely understand what the teacher is talking about. We then have a surprise quiz. I breeze through all of the questions and feel very confident about my mark. The bell rings for the end of the school day. I then get ready for football practice. Calvin is very physically fit and mentally strong due to the fact that he plays football on a daily basis. He plays for the school team, and with his friends. He is a prime example of the positive effects that football can have on teenagers. The word discipline is a word that gets thrown around a lot when talking about football. Discipline is key word to use when talking about football. You need discipline in order to play successfully and to listen to your coaches. It can be very beneficial. A typical football practice can be brutal. This is an average student’s account of a typical practice. The sun is out and it is 30 degrees outside. The coach makes everyone run suicides to warm up. Everyone is already dripping sweat. We then run wind-sprints for 20 minutes, in the sweltering heat of the sun. I, for one, am exhausted and ready to just leave and go home. The coach motivates me to keep going though. The grass is burnt to a crisp and every member of the team is drenched in sweat. We practice a couple of plays, running constantly throughout. The coach then tells us to run twenty suicides and then hit the showers. I am panting like a dog during each individual suicide, but I made it. That was a very grueling practice. A media example of discipline in football is the story of Camp Kilpatrick. It is a juvenile detention center for kids that are having problems with street gangs, drug dealing, etc. Statistics show that 75% of the residents eventually either go to jail or die. Sean Porter is a worker at Camp Kilpatrick and he gets sick of seeing this stat over and over. He decided to take action and comes up with the idea of creating a football team to teach the teenage inmates what it takes to be responsible, mature, and winners. At first, two of the kids from rival gangs constantly fought and didn’t work well as a team. This is a repeated event and one of the kids, Calvin Owens, gets shot by the rival gang and is hurt badly. Sean disciplines the kids and they eventually get along together and form a formidable football team of teenagers. After the season is over, the kids go on to have successful lives beyond the street gangs that they grew up in. If they had not played football and learned responsibility and become disciplined, who know what those kids could’ve gotten in to after they got released from the camp. 24 of the kids are now going to school, three of them are working full-time jobs, and only five went back to jail. That is increasingly better than the 75% rate, which is the amount of the kids at the juvenile detention center that go back to jail. This story shows how important the game of football can be, even to high school kids. It also shows how powerful football can be. Imagine what it could do to troubled teens in Avon Maitland high schools. It is so powerful that it can even bring an entire community together. Football can also bring a community together, which not many sports can do. Since football is an expensive game to play, it will require fundraising from the whole school . This in itself can bring an entire school together. The entire state of Texas is a huge example of football bringing communities together. They have thirteen different college football teams from every part of the state of Texas. Every game is sold out and many people from different communities come to cheer the team on. If college teams can bring out crowds like those, why can’t high school teams? The same effect can happen if a big Stratford team is created. Not only will a lot of the city come to see them play, but nearby cities will come too. Cities like St. Mary’s and Mitchell will come every week to see the local team play. Also, if the school chooses to charge money for tickets the school will generate a lot of revenue. Concession stands can be opened up as well, with many local eateries. The city will generate more tourism as well. For example, if every Friday night is a home game for the school team, it will become a weekly get together for the whole town, and other towns, to cheer the home-town team on. This can bring the community together, thus making them stand out from other cities/towns. In conclusion, the Avon Maitland School Board is making a huge mistake. I truly believe that football should not be banned as an extra-curricular sport by the board. Football should be an extra-curricular sport in every Avon Maitland high school because it has physical and mental benefits and it can also bring an entire community together. The benefits definitely outweigh the problems. So I ask this, how can the School Board ban a sport like football?