Focus of high school athletics and activities should go beyond wins and losses

 
A resolution adopted recently by the Luverne School Board is leading student involvement in athletics and activities in a more positive direction.
Our young people will be better served by this change.
Instead of thinking athletic and activity events as after-school events, the board views student participation in events as part of educating youth.
At their May 28 board meeting, members watched the video “Why We Coach,” a requirement for continued membership in the Minnesota State High School League.
Board members could have simply watched the video and passed the resolution. Instead they took the video’s message to heart and encouraged athletic director Todd Oye’s plan to take the message to the community.
Oye, who saw the video last fall at a conference, is working with his own coaches and advisers in measuring and viewing their event’s success differently.
The “Why We Coach” video will be shown to parents at upcoming sport and activity eligibility meetings. The central message is to measure success by what students learn and personally achieve and not solely by the wins and losses in a season.
The Star Herald applauds these efforts and agrees that there shouldn’t be a “win at all costs” mentality in any of our high school programs.
Only 3 percent of today’s high school students go on to play sports professionally after graduation, so our focus should be on the 97 percent who participate to make their invested time enjoyable.
Equally as revealing is the other statistic that 70 percent of students drop out of an activity by age 13 due to pressures to win.
The “win at all costs” mentality is unhealthy for both our young people and our communities’ futures.
The diminished self-esteem, resentments and the losses of connectedness have led too many young people to make questionable life choices — including returning to their hometowns to live and raise their families.
A University of Kansas study found students who participate in athletics and activities do better academically than students who do not. The reason behind the success is the development of school connectedness.
We need to think of our young people as individual human beings and not as vessels for winning games and awards for a school and its community. We all need to see ourselves as mentors and support positive moral, ethical, social and emotional development to the future community members.
If these positive developments can be accomplished by approaching high school events differently, we should all support that change in thinking.