Play ball, earlier!

Schools move toward seventh-grade athletics

Bowl games just aren’t what they used to be. Oh, we know. Any college is going to be pleased as punch to get an invitation to a bowl game, to cap a season with one more opportunity on the gridiron. But there are just so darn many of them with inane names driven by ever-changing corporate sponsorships, it’s hard to get excited. Nothing is quite so exhilarating as those 6-6 teams going up against 7-5 juggernauts.

But a lot of Americans love football and in true American style, that has to mean more of a good thing will make it a great thing, right?

That philosophy has its limits. Watching a movie starring the great Jerry Lewis from back in the day is sure to bring some laughs, but an all-night bingewatch of five or six might actually produce a reduction in brain cells.

But the more is better theory is driving a change in local schools, and that’s the addition of athletics for seventh graders. Bentonville Public Schools became the latest just a few days ago when the school board voted unanimously to implement seventh-grade athletics — football, basketball, volleyball, cross country, track, cheer and dance — starting next year.

Springdale is two years into its seventh-grade program. The Rogers and Fayetteville school districts are considering the same move.

“I think it’s one of the best things we’ve done,” said Wayne Stehlik, Springdale’s athletic director.

Strong arguments can be made for expanding athletic competition to seventh-graders. Educators say making sports available tends to keep students interested in going to school and has potential to increase their academic performance. Without question, athletics can create opportunities to promote teamwork, to show young people discipline in working toward goals and to learn how to respond to adversity.

Athletics in education is a good thing. Let’s make more. Just like bowl games in college football.

On balance, we suspect the pros outweigh the cons on the matter. But we also see circumstances across the nation in which families, for example, hold a player back in middle or junior high school for no other reason than to let the student’s body mature, with a goal of giving him or her an eventual advantage among peers. We’ve seen programs behaving less like high schools and putting on airs as though what they do is as serious as the business of the NFL or NBA. The treatment of players as commodities and the creation of at least as many false hopes as real ones aren’t unheard of, either.

We also worry that an expanding emphasis on sports in middle school might work to the detriment of other team-building extracurricular activities such as band, choir or other worthwhile pursuits.

So, if expanding athletics to seventh-grade just results in greater options for physical activity among students, that’s a grand idea. But if it’s treated as an expansion of a farm system for big-headed dreams and programs always looking for the bright new star, that would be a sad development.

Local educators care about their students. We see evidence of that all the time. So we’re going on a bit of faith here that seventh-grade athletics will be used to achieve all those good things listed as byproducts, including development of just the pure joy of fair sporting competition.

Let the delusions of grandeur wait.