do american schools actually give that much of a shit about sports or is it a tv/movie thing?
My old high school spent over $1,000,000 on a new weight lifting room only for the football team to use. We desperately needed new desks, textbooks, and the language department needed stable teachers who didn’t quit after 3 months. but fuck that right? Football.
OMDHDNEHDH WHAT THE FUCK
yeah unfortunately tv and movies get it right, football is god in US high schools
Yup.
It is truly fucked.
Not to dis athletes in any way, they are pretty nifty.
But they are not more important than other people. And treating them like gods creates all kinds of problems for EVERYONE.
It should really be said that “American schools” is not a uniform category here, not even a little bit.
In the suburban NY school system where I grew up, school sports were…y’know, a thing, kind of. Approximately like what they are in Japan, or at least in the weird stylized version of Japan you get from Japanese popular media. The participants gave a shit, and a few community boosters did too, but not really anyone else. Athletes weren’t socially dominant in any kind of meaningful way. The administrators did spend far too much money on athletic facilities, but that was less about a special interest in sports than it was about being a visible prestige signal – they also spent far too much money on useless “leadership programs,” on a visually-impressive-but-not-really-functional auditorium, etc. It was probably even true that sports were seen as slightly declasse; this was the sort of suburb where Getting Into the Best College was the local religion, and the kids who were at the top of that game were likelier to spend their extracurricular time doing music or volunteer work or even theater than playing ball. (For that matter, no one team was particularly exalted over any of the others.)
On the other hand, you get the rural Texas towns where high school football is the community’s main sacred ritual, and where the players are basically semidivine boy-kings.
It’s a big, diverse country we got here.