Part of sports becoming a real tool to get children out of subpar lives is the ability to keep them out of trouble and away from a life of crime.
According to Fair Play for Children sports play a massive role as a dynamic tool to prevent crime among youth. In Canada, over the last decade, youth participation in sports has dropped by nearly 10 percent, while crime rates have grown rapidly. This approach of trying to get at-risk youth involved in sports is not only local, but also global. The popular website crimepreventiontips. Many young athletes end up in sports because they see their favorite stars making millions of dollars.
As sports have increased in popularity, so too have the star athletes. Players are now viewed as celebrities and, much like movie stars, can barely be seen in public without being mobbed by hundreds of adoring fans.
This is a feeling many young people look up to and wish to attain. While this may seem like it would not have much pull on social or cultural change, it is quite the opposite. Many famous athletes grew up in a rough environment so many impoverished kids feel they can relate to it.
This leads them to want to get involved with sports and work on their skills so they can make it professionally and lives as comfortably as their idols did while they were playing.
Superstar athletes play such an important role in kids' lives that many times they will do anything to emulate them, from wearing their number while playing to even asking for their actual jersey as a gift. Children love to represent their favorite players, and more times than not that player is the best on their team and a league star. This can be accredited to team success and individual success that many kids want to strive for and daydream about.
Hoop Dreams is one the most revered sports documentaries of all time. Following the life of two young budding hoop stars, William Gates and Arthur Agee living in the housing projects of Chicago, their struggles out of poverty are recorded.
Sports provide a way out, yes, but not without a lot of struggle along the way. One idea that becomes relevant very quickly is the exploitation of star African-American athletes. But it also leads to better opportunities for them. For instance, in the film, the boys are recruited to play basketball at St. But when Agee does not develop as the coaches hoped, his scholarship is quickly dropped, thrusting him back into poor public high schools.
And on the dark side of sports as a way of getting out of the ghettos, when Agee loses his scholarship and receives little to no help, it causes him much emotional and psychological pain, making him vulnerable again to a life of crime Cipriano But even through all the hardships, sports helped lead both men to a much better life they could have only dreamt of living. Agee went on to star at Arkansas State University and eventually start his own clothing line, public speaking business and star in the movie Passing Glory.
Gates went on to receive a scholarship to Marquette University and eventually became a real-estate agent and pastor, giving back to the community he grew up in.
While neither man lived their ultimate dream to make it to the NBA, sports kept both men out of trouble in a rough area and helped them to lead successful lives as adults.
While sports do give many athletes a path out, it is not really evident for them until they are done with their education. This is why recently talks of paying college athletes has become such a popular topic. The disturbing part of the athletes not getting paid is the amount of revenue schools bring in because of these athletes.
However, paying them that much is not a viable option as the universities need to make money. Yet a new reform model has been proposed that would help the student-athletes and their families until they are able to graduate. This includes raising scholarship amounts to cover all expenses, and allowing players to do commercials and endorsements to make money. This provides them with greater opportunities even while in school and shows how big-time sports can really aid young adults in living a comfortable life.
Many may argue that sports have really not had much effect and rather society just became more adept to change and more willing to change. However, this could not be further from the truth.
But one thing that has always existed is poverty, and for millions of youth, sports seem to be their only way out of a rough life. And when the population is going through changes more often than not sports are right there with them with the same issues. The film Hoop Dreams provides substantial evidence that sports can be a path out of poverty for minorities.
Not only do sports keep many children out of trouble, it helps them lead happy, successful lives as adults. While the primary goal of playing professionally is only reached by two percent of high school graduates, the majority of impoverished students use sports to stay away from trouble, create better educational opportunities and eventually create better opportunities once their schooling is complete. Arthur Agee and William Gates are prime examples of how sports can change people's lives and lead them to a place they never could have dreamed of without them.
Anderson, Eric. Academic Search Premier. Carmichael, David. Youth Crime. Collett, Jessica. Eagleman, Andrea M. Gerlach, Larry. Gregory, Sean. Hiestand, Michael. Hoop Dreams. Steve James. They have a website.
Groups of them drive together to speak to community groups and the like. The movie is shown and, afterward, questions are answered by the Real Original Titans. Nobody, however, has been affected as much as Boone. A crusty man given to speech-making to even the smallest audience one listener will do , he was signed last fall by the American Program Bureau, a Boston-based agency that counts Mikhail Gorbachev and Johnnie Cochran among its more than speakers.
He's developed a following almost separate from his character in the film. Yoast accompanies Boone roughly four times a month, and the two men, close friends, work the audience together. Best of all--better than small fame or big money for any of these men--is the knowledge that the message of the movie is real. Coming together in had been every bit as difficult for them as the film conveys. At the end of the previous school year, administrators had brought together returning football players from all three of the schools that were being merged.
In real life T. Hammond High were joined, not two schools. The players sat on the tiered risers in the T. Williams band room in three distinct groups, segregated mostly by the colors of their skin and of their school shirts. Players fought even more than those in the movie. And the part about uniting a city?
Many say it's true. It's true. It really brought the city together. Boone coached T. Williams for seven years after ' His record in Alexandria was a solid , but he never won another state title, and the Titans went in , his last season. His replacement was Paul Doc Hines, one of his assistant coaches, who went in three years before Glenn Furman, another former Boone assistant, began a year run that included state championships in and ' In the middle of the season Furman's final team was and nationally ranked, but it fell apart in a five-game losing streak.
That began a slide that has continued until today, leaving little similarity between the movie team and the current squad. How did the Titans devolve from inspirational diversity and on-field excellence to resegregated ineptitude? They had help. Like many other U. The availability of affordable middle-class housing diminished until the majority of the city's residents were either very poor and often members of a minority or very well-to-do and often older, with grown children, or single and childless.
Williams were white. The mandatory school desegregation portrayed in Remember the Titans has been reversed, in part because many middle-class white families have left the city. In more than 21, white couples owned homes in Alexandria; now around 14, do. By contrast, the number of low-income or publicly subsidized housing units in the city, many of them populated by minority families, has increased to 4, from 1, in the days of the original Titans.
As the city's demographics changed, so did support for school programs. Football, the sport with the need for the most funding, suffered worst.
Williams for 30 years. Another kind of trouble contributed to the decline. In the winter of , following Furman's second state title, all-state linebacker Tracy Fells was arrested and charged with possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. He was acquitted of that charge, but he was later convicted of the same offense, and in he was sentenced to a year term with a minimum of 17 years in prison. Later, another Titans player was arrested for cocaine and handgun possession.
Players from both the '84 and '87 teams told SI that drug use and drug dealing were rampant among the Titans throughout the middle of the decade. Bill Dawes, who played on the '87 and '88 teams and is an actor living in New York City, says, "On both of my teams there was drug trafficking and drug use. You would hear conversations in the locker room. Nobody was hiding anything. I used to give some of my teammates rides home to the projects, and they talked openly about the drug trafficking on the team, and it was by no means limited to Tracy Fells.
Almost in concert with the rise and fall of Furman's teams in the '80s, the Alexandria school board stiffened the academic standards for T. Williams students participating in interscholastic sports. Alexandria had always used the state requirement that an athlete simply pass four courses, but in the early '80s it raised the minimum grade point average to 1. Before the football season the minimum GPA was raised again, to 2.
The issue was--and remains--controversial, because under Virginia High School League rules athletes can play with a 1. Alexandria is one of the few school districts in the state to have raised requirements on its own. Many people in the city believed that the toughened standards were aimed at the football program and its troubles. Furman argued against the rule.
Boone, who was retired from coaching but still teaching driver's education in the district, argued against it. Yoast, who was still working with the football team, argued against it. Paul Masem, the Alexandria superintendent from to '94, brought the 2. Williams is a big school with broad-based programs.
Students doing remedial work could qualify for sports. It isn't that difficult. Miller, the retired Alexandria attorney, who is black and who was a member of the school board when it passed the 2. Yet the C rule remains a lightning rod at T. Williams; it's one of the first factors mentioned in any discussion of the football program's struggles. As significant to the football program was the deterioration of facilities.
When Ellison took over last spring, he found his only practice field was a mess of weeds and dirt. The blocking sleds were decades old, rusted and nearly useless. Locker room showers and toilets were filthy and so clogged that they couldn't be used. Because football requires more equipment and more funding than most sports, it was hardest hit by such neglect.
The weight room, according to Ellison, was a wreck. Often T. Williams's junior varsity and freshman football teams are pushed off practice fields by youth soccer teams. White participation, meanwhile, had waned. Neither of Furman's state title teams had more than five white players who made significant contributions.
The '84 squad had a certain amount of black-white unity, of the sort depicted in the hilarious scene in Remember the Titans in which black players initiate Gerry Bertier into the world of Yo Mama put-downs, in effect making him one of their own.
Mike Porterfield, a white starting offensive lineman on the '84 team who would go on to row crew for the U. I loved it and I miss it. The Yo Mama scene in the movie cut right to my heart, because that was my experience. Three years later, however, Dawes, a starting wide receiver in '88, had a different impression of the team.
Today it is rare to find a white player contributing to the football program. Williams's starting center before a knee injury ended his season in early September.
Some of them are going to be white. Says Marvin Watkins, a senior wide receiver on this year's team, "Most of the good teams we play have big white guys and quick black athletes. We don't. Visitors to T. Williams are greeted by the lobby's Hall of Nations, a display of flags representing the more than 80 birth countries of the school's vastly diverse population.
Diversity, however, does not breed interaction. Inside T. Williams that dynamic produces something dangerously close to separate-but-equal facilities. But people stick with their own social class. I saw lots of black kids every day, but I hung out with my white friends, took my AP [advanced placement] classes and rowed crew. Alexandria city manager Phil Sunderland, who sent three children through T. Williams, says, "T.
We have to do a better job of removing that. Williams has lost many white athletes to private schools. Billy Schweitzer, a redshirt freshman quarterback on scholarship at Virginia, was raised in Alexandria but attended St.
Agnes School there. Williams kids," says Schweitzer, "but when it comes to high school, you don't benefit athletically or academically from going there. If your parents have the means to send you to private school, you go. Nothing, though, illustrates the struggle of the Titans football program more than its comparison with crew. Thanks to aggressive fund-raising outside the school budget by well-heeled Alexandria parents, T. On a scale of one to 10, crew is a 10, and the football program is about a two.
On a warm September afternoon the T. Williams boys' crew coach, Mike Penn, stands on the floor of the cavernous Alexandria Schools Rowing Facility, which was built by the city for the school district in There are 25 four- and eight-oared shells in large racks, along with several double shells.
On the second floor of the boathouse is a sprawling weight room that, by comparison, humbles the football team's musty basement facility. Dozens of T. There is little crossover between crew and football, despite the former's preponderance of tall, strong athletes and the latter's need for the same. Says Clayton Wynne, a 5'10", pound senior rower, "The football team isn't very good, and that's part of the reason the white kids don't want to do it.
Black kids don't row, either. Penn says that of the 87 boys and 93 girls in the program, 12 are black. It's difficult breaking down stereotypes. Plus, I've had several African-American kids come to me who couldn't pass the swimming test.
When Penn attended a preseason football meeting, black football assistants McClain and John Morehead say they got into a heated debate with him over the lack of cross-pollination between the sports.
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