Is Our Sports Culture Slowly Withering Away?

By Justin Ehiogu

From keeping fit and making friends to reducing our likelihood of participating in criminal activities, there are numerous advantages to sports amongst youths, but our sports culture is arguably at an all-time low, writes AFAS Pressman.

Sports and games are getting lesser and lesser attention in this school. AFAS Press is certainly interested in giving them more coverage; however, our sporting culture has dropped to an all-time low. When was the last time you played some sport? Perhaps we just consider them dispensable physical activities. Yet, there is more to sports than just the benefits of physical exercise.

Sports, particularly university sports, can increase a person’s confidence and self-esteem. Being watched and cheered for on a field can make one feel like a star, a focus of attention and attraction. We know how important or even crucial self-esteem and confidence can be.

Playing sports also help students relate with their peers in a fun, social and friendly manner. Sharing such an emotional space helps us understand each other, a lot more than we ordinarily would in the faculty. No matter how different two people are, or how big or small certain individuals can be, sports can bring us together in a unique way, such that our differences will be forgotten; and this makes it easier to interact better with each other, even outside the sports pitch. Sports breach the gap between levels and age. If the social director – and this is for the subsequent ones as well – is looking for a way to make AFASites more social, sports is a good area to start.

This sociability we can derive from sports is not just of use within the school environment, cultivating lasting friendships with people – whether our peers or otherwise – can help make us more sociable for our future career. We could create potentially profitable relationships with people on the field, relationships we would otherwise have been unable to create elsewhere.

Moving on to more scientific grounds, researches have shown that youths who participate in sports are less likely (than those who do not) to tilt towards crimes. How? It’s simple: sports bring about reduction of free time and prevention of boredom, making smoking, alcohol and drugs less attractive to an individual. In fact, during the period of tiredness that comes after a session of sports, an individual is less likely (than those who haven’t played any sport) to engage in violence, and would instead face a conflict situation with a more intellectual approach.

Furthermore, engaging in a sport trains the mind, increasing mental alertness in both males and females. This stems from the calculations and other efforts of mind that one engages in during a particular sporting activity, brought about by competitiveness – the desire to outperform, to do better and win.

For girls who play sports, they are able to learn the importance of goal getting, and improve their ability to plan and strategise. (For some reason, it doesn’t quite have the same effect for males.) Moreover, engaging themselves in sporting activities can make girls less hormonal; in other words, they will tend to think less romantically (than those who do not engage in sports) about the opposite gender, effecting a lesser urge to have a male companion or to engage in any sexual activity. A girl who plays sports is less likely to get pregnant at a young age.

Perhaps this is why; in virtually every school across the globe, sports is a necessary extracurricular activity. Some countries have even included it in the curriculum. In all the top universities across the world, from the US to the UK, the sports culture is superb; some undergraduate games are even televised on national television. It is saddening, then, that the atmosphere surrounding ours is so poor. We are, in fact, probably closer to scrapping sports in schools than we are to turning it into a means of scholarship acquisition, as it is in some top countries in the world.

Sports deserve to be an integral part of every student’s life. As we have seen, there are many benefits in store for those who get involved in playing games on the field.

So now that you know this, when was the last time you played some sport?