The best High School soccer players in PA are no longer allowed to play for their high school teams. They must pay $5,000 - $6,000 per year to play for the elite soccer club FC Delco.
http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/soccer/149173415.html
An unbelievably stupid, short-sighted decision by a sports governing body. Pennsylvania ought to do what Wisconsin does -- ban all club participation during that sport's high school season.
Phil, the other approach to this problem is to separate sports from high schools. While it isn't on the immediate horizon, given the extreme funding problems experienced by schools around the country, this strikes me as almost inevitable.
The upside? You can have as many teams as there are kids who want to play. As it is now, if you live in a district with a 3,000-pupil high school, your kid has a very slim chance of playing high school basketball -- or, for that matter, appearing in the school play. How are we helping our kids by giving them one varsity team, regardless of the size of the school?
Rick:
Well, the cynical answer to that is:
-- That's one way high schools prepare you for the rest of your life. Not everyone gets into Harvard, or even the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
-- Move or use transfer options if available (they are pretty widely available here in Wisconsin, particularly at the high school level, and lots of athletes utilize it).
But my less cynical side has sympathy for the kid in a 3,000-student high school who isn't big or fast or skilled enough to play football or basketball. Happened to me, in fact -- one reason I ran cross country and track in high school instead of trying to be a slow point guard. (And I do think schools -- particularly football/basketball-oriented phys ed. teachers -- need to encourage more kids to try more participatory sports like cross country, track & field, and swimming, where generally everyone competes in most meets. Our phys ed. departments generally focus too much on games played in high school instead of life-long activities like swimming and running -- or golf or tennis.)
But the broader question to me, particularly as it relates to public high schools, is the nature of extra-curricular activities --whether it be sports, musicals, choirs, clubs of all kinds -- and divorcing those from high schools. High school athletics, while not free (in terms of fees), are certainly much cheaper than anything comparable you can find at the club level. (My wife doesn't even let me look at the bills for how much it costs us to have two kids in club swimming.) So if you divorce athletics from high schools, you pretty much prevent anyone who is poor or even of modest means from taking part in athletics. Which, just strikes me as wrong. (I have yet to see any club, anywhere, provide the level of support for poor kids participating that high schools do.) And, in my community, and I suspect others as well, it's these extra-curriculars that maintain a bond between residents of the community and the schools themselves -- and as long as we keep financing schools with local property tax dollars, that bond to me is pretty essential to maintain and nurture. (Our high school recently ended its run of five sold-out shows at our school auditorium; I'd bet at least half of the people attending had no children in the district.)
Sorry for the long digression, but it's a topic I've actually spent a lot of time talking about with high school coaches, administrators and others about -- I worry we are at a tipping point in terms of the connection between schools and athletics that I worry we can't recover from.