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This is likely the result of the dominance of club sports and the less competitive relationship between the educational and sports club systems found in Europe. As Pot and van Hilvoorde note, in their comparison of school sports in the Netherlands with those in the United States, “one of the main goals of interscholastic school sports in the Netherlands is to increase sports participation rates among children, excluding children by means of selection and competition is not a desired effect. In addition, competitiveness in Dutch interscholastic school sports is not stimulated, as performances in school sports have little or no influence on the status of either the school or the students involved. Therefore, rituals and symbols that provoke (and are provoked by) competitiveness are absent in most schools” (ibid., 1168).

Interscholastic sports in America, by comparison, seem to be clearly more important to the athletes, coaches, and local community. In local newspapers (city or town), school sports can take up pages. Local stations and regional networks report results of what has become a dominant weekend activity not just for local people attending games, but, through the media, for anyone (Miracle and Rees 1994; Stokvis 2009). Schools use this media exposure to distinguish themselves and use the achievements of their student-athletes to promote their institutions. From a marketing perspective, prestige can be gained from interscholastic school sports in the United States. In Europe, schools by and large do not use their interscholastic school sports results in their marketing strategies, because the prevailing wisdom is that people do not associate the school’s athletic performance with the educational value of the school. While interscholastic sports achievements typically do not gain any media coverage, that void is filled by the local sports club or clubs, all the more so due to the different levels of participation in terms of age, gender, and skill. Meanwhile, in the United States, school-based athletes have a higher status and are often viewed as more prominent than other students.¹² This higher status influences the connection that student-athletes feel to the school, since their status depends on their relationship to the school community (Fredricks and Eccles 2006; Hintsanen et al. 2010; Marsh and Kleitman 2002). The status of the sports club athlete may not be as pronounced as that of the school athlete in the United States because of the lack of affiliation with an institution, but successes are known and celebrated by members of the club and local residents.