Читать книгу Alternative Models of Sports Development in America. Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health онлайн

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When that day comes, you will hear doomsday scenarios about the end of sports as we know it, and maybe the loss of American values. Sports participation is too easily conflated with participation trophies, which no one outside the trophy industry is really all that big a fan of but have become a great tool anyway to grouse about millennials and liberals. It’s ironic, given that the original vision of school sports in America, by its founders more than a century ago, was of mass participation, of sport as a tool of public health and educational achievement.

The way you can support renewal of this vision is to be open to new ideas. Do not buy the theory that if change is made, our games will go away. The sports entertainment industry will be just fine; the market demands that Alabama play Auburn on one Saturday each fall. Nor is anyone going to start tearing down the gyms and fields attached to schools; the physical infrastructure of sports in our country remains. What is in play is the software side of sports—how the operating system works, who gets to use it, how its assets can best be deployed and services scaled.