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

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While proposing any tax increase may seem foolhardy and a nonstarter in the United States, as a country we can actually save money by promoting and achieving better public health through increased access to and participation in sports. This means paying it forward and focusing on prevention, with benefits more on the back end, but it is critical for everyone to have skin in the game, including the government. A tax subsidy could be something the public gets behind, if it can reduce overall health-care costs and save money in the long run. Combining this with entrepreneurial spirit, public and private partnerships, and good old American ingenuity and creativity, we can enable and sustain the funding and infrastructure for newer, more accessible models of sports development and delivery.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SPORTS

Sports have been a part of society for most of the history of human civilization. People all over the world have been engaging in physical exercise for millennia, mostly through work but also through games and athletic events. In the Western tradition, organized competitive sports date back to 776 BCE, when the first Olympic Games were held in Olympia, Greece. Some twenty-five hundred years later, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, games that had been largely unsupervised and unregulated were recognized as being beneficial for members of the working class (Gerdy 2002, xiii–xiv). From their origins in unstructured play and loosely organized events based in communities and schools, increasingly organized sports competitions were gradually established via host organizations, schools, or rudimentary sports clubs in a variety of countries. Throughout this period and into the early twentieth century, several sports spread across the globe, often introduced by young participants who had learned of the games in other countries (especially England) or who made up rules on their own. In general, this type of recreation was viewed as a healthy outlet for students, while being a needed respite from the rigors of academics. It was also a healthy physical and recreational outlet for workers, one that could potentially enable higher productivity in the rigorous and demanding factory jobs that dominated this time period (Gerdy 2002; Coakley 2014; Frei 2015).