Basil Jarrett| High school sports: the numbers don’t lie

Well, the Premier League is back, and despite early worries about my beloved Liverpool, I think it is safe to say that sports fans across the world are in high spirits now that regular service has resumed following two years of COVID-19 enforced restrictions. Heck, even Manchester United fans are excited. Empty stadiums, virtual chanting and shortened leagues are now a thing of the past, and the games are back in all their wonderful glory, ready to gobble up your hard-earned cash in the form of tickets, merchandise and TV subscriptions.

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS: BY THE NUMBERS

To say that professional sports is big business would be the understatement of the year. Just look at the numbers. In the NFL, broadcasting rights alone generate over $4 billion annually. The English Premier League earns over $3.8 billion and the NBA at $3.1 billion comes a close third with revenue helping to offset the gargantuan salaries paid to professional athletes.

And these salaries are indeed gargantuan. What pro-athletes make nowadays is enough to make your eyes water, not to mention make any youngster start to harbour visions of grandeur right after winning his first lime and spoon race on Sports Day.

Indeed, there is so much money in professional sports today that I was a bit surprised when my good friend Dr Lascelve ‘Muggy’ Graham risked being lynched by an angry horde of sports enthusiasts, when he wrote a treatise recently, criticising high school sports recruitment.

SPORTING INEQUITY

Muggy believes that the practice “maintains and exacerbates the inequity in the education system, and fosters an environment where larger, richer schools plunder smaller, weaker ones, raiding them for their sporting talent”. He posits, too, that wholesale recruiting robs lesser schools of students who could “help to associate their names with excellence, help to eventually put them on the map and make them more attractive for future generations of teachers and students”.

I tend to agree with him in casting a suspicious eye on high school recruiting, but not from the perspective of the school, but rather from that of the student athlete.

I recently learned of a shocking statistic coming out of the richest sports nation on planet earth (that): 98 per cent of students in the US will not get a full sports scholarship to attend college!

Let that sink in for a moment. In the big, bad USA, home to five of the richest, most profitable professional sports leagues in the world, only two per cent of college students receive a full athletic scholarship, the first step towards a career in professional sports.

OUR NUMBERS DON’T LIE EITHER

The numbers were so shocking that I quickly did a mental check to see what the corresponding numbers here in Jamaica could be. Let’s say School A has a very strong sporting tradition with similarly strong financial support from past students. Let’s then say maybe 10 per cent of its students represent that school in sports, and of that number, let’s be generous and say that maybe one-third are good enough to receive a full scholarship to an overseas college. You may be tempted to say, well that’s about three per cent overall, still higher than the US average, right? Not so fast, Shaggy. You’d need first to ask yourself, how many schools A's are there in Jamaica? Sadly, not that many. It’s no accident that the top three schools at Champs each year are always the same and by a country mile from everyone else.

The reality is that the vast number of our high school students will not leave Jamaica on an athletic scholarship. This then raises the question of balance, in terms of what we spend on sports versus academics.

If 98 per cent of our students will most likely make a living utilising their brains as opposed to the two per cent that will do so using their fast twitch muscles, where is the logic of spending 98 per cent of scarce resources on that two per cent? This is obviously not a question pointed at the Ministry of Education where sports funding pales significantly when compared to the avalanche of dollars coming from past students and other benefactors. But it is an important question nonetheless, especially in light of another equally shocking statistic revealed recently: only 37 per cent of our students passed CSEC math and only 71 per cent passed English language. These, to me, are the more worrying numbers.

RECOGNISING ACADEMIC IMPORTANCE

It’s easy to see why these numbers and these performances do not motivate past students and other benefactors to get involved. Academics are simply not that exciting. The lofty achievements of our academic powerhouses simply do not get the same level of recognition as, say, your typical Champs or Manning Cup winners. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself when was the last time you saw a JUTC bus wrapped in the colours of the school which achieved 98 per cent passes in CSEC exams? Not going to happen. What’s even more ironic is that many of these same past students will spend lavishly on their high school’s sports teams, but end up sending their own children “elsewhere” to get a solid academic education.

My simple plea, therefore, to these benefactor groups is to spare a thought and a few dollars for those boys and girls who will not be going overseas any time soon to take up an athletic scholarship. Sports is not going to be the saviour of this country, and as much as we celebrate our world beaters, there are far too many unnamed and unheralded being ignored each year, simply because they don’t get us up out of our seats on game day.

Major Basil Jarrett is a communications strategist and CEO of Artemis Consulting, a communications consulting firm specialising in crisis communications and reputation management. Please send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com