Hang up your sneakers
From public speaking to dancing to debating to band to cricket, netball and chess club, students’ participation in at least one extracurricular activity is considered a necessity for enrichment and overall “roundness”. But only two of these things are important enough to have an entire school day devoted to them: the athletics and swimming carnivals.
I remember them from primary school as fun, rare “off” days with friends who lived too far away to see each other often outside of school. Somehow, we managed to sit in the sun for hours, eat copious amounts of junk food and participate in events for which we had never trained, all without throwing up. The thrill of it was the possibility of reaching the Zone carnival.
It’s different at high school. On sports carnival day, we show up as unprepared as ever, wearing our sports uniforms (tops substituted for t-shirts in the relevant house colour) and beaten up old joggers, with perhaps a few weeks training behind us if we felt like a shot at Zone.
Then a girl jogs onto the track in not just running spikes, but Skins athletics gear. For those who don’t know, Skins is a brand of tight fitting sports outfits that look like a cross between a wetsuit and the type of compression garments being tested for use on Mars missions. And they’re not even in house colours.
The carnival dissolves into a showcase of the school’s elite sportspeople. Casual competitors either trail hopelessly behind their body-suited peers or are shunted into “novelty” events and spend a day snacking without the old burning-off of calories around the track.
If the athletics carnival is unfair, the swimming carnival is borderline discrimination. Athletics carnivals are an event for sports that, barring disability, everyone can theoretically try, even if we’re humiliated by the sound of Skins-and-spikes girl lapping us for the second time. But a swimming carnival is an entire day dedicated to a single sport.
Why swimming? If you’re going to have a school event based around a skill not everyone can even do, why not a bike riding carnival? Or an ice skating carnival? Or a school riding gymkhana?
The distance, and whether different strokes equal different sports, doesn’t even matter. If I proposed the school have a horse riding carnival, and said it was multi-sport because showjumping is different to dressage, would anyone care?
Some schools have horse riding teams. I’m sure there are school cycling and skating groups too. But they realise it’s pointless to have a school day in which most people sit around watching the few kids who can do one specific sport.
People wonder why we have a childhood obesity problem? Because events like this portray sport as an activity for the elite, whose parents have the time and money (not to mention the lack of other, non-sporty offspring) to get up at four thirty every morning and drive them to training. These kids do not need school-based competition to motivate their participation in sport.
In fact, the only kids who participate in these carnivals are those who don’t need them — kids that already gain the benefits of sport outside school, and may in fact find it a hassle juggling both school-based and external competition streams.
Everyone else sits in the sun, bored, demoralised and increasingly convinced that sport is not for them.
Like other school subjects, sport should be based on maximising the participation and development of all students. Schools need to abolish individual sports carnivals, and use the resources to give all kids opportunity to discover physical recreation as a fun part of a healthy lifestyle.
