High School Athletics: Good or Bad Imfluence? “ In America we have laws, laws against killing, laws against stealing, and its excepted that as a member of American society you will live by these laws. In West Canaan, Texas, there is another society, which has its own set of laws. Football is a way of life.” This excerpt taken from the beginning of Varsity Blues, which premiered in 1998, shows the way of life for high school football players. In this movie, Jon Moxon played by James Van Der Beek assumes the role of star quarterback after the starting quarterback suffers a career ending knee injury. This movie showed how athletics and athletes have become the center of everyone’s life and how athletes can sometimes become higher than the law. In society today, high school sports have a great influence on the future of students, whether they will or where they go to college. This influence may seem good at the time but later turns into a bad influence, which could end in the student dropping out of school. In recent years, the amount of violence in sports and involvement of parents has helped to put to much stress and pressure on the athletes. When children reach the age where t

Works Cited Krucoff, C. “Youth Sports Shouldn’t Be About Winning.” The Los Angeles Times (26 Oct 1998) 5 p. Online. ProQuest. 6 October 2000. McEwin, C. Kenneth, and Dickinson, Thomas S. “Placing Young Adolescents at Risk in Interscholastic Sports Programs.” A Matter of Fact. Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1996. 217-21. Nack, William., and Lester Munson. “Out of Control.” Sports Illustrated 24 Jul. 2000: 86-95. Robbins, Brian, dir. Varsity Blues. Perf. Jon Voight and James Van Der Beek. Paramount, 1998.

hey decide they want to get involved in sports it starts out pure. The child plays the game because of how much fun they have playing it. Children have no pressure to make the team or to win every game; they play to have fun not to win. However, as the child grows and continues to play sports, parents take the fun out of the game with their constant criticism of their child’s team and performance. The two main reasons a child plays sports are to have fun and spend time with their friends. Most kids would also rather participate on a losing team than sit on the bench of a losing one. Pressure from parents and siblings cause kids to overexert themselves and injure themselves because of their parents wanting to win more than their kids. Out of all sports injuries seen each year thirty-three percent of these injuries occur in children aged five to fourteen. Four million children seek emergency room treatment for sports injuries and eight million seek treatment from family physicians each year. As kids move from the pee wee leagues on into middle school they begin to learn about organized sports, and if they do not make one of the two teams set up by the school they have no other option or tea

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