Essay About Competitive Sports

Whether competitive sports are beneficial or helpful to middle school students is a hotly debated topic. People believe that the amount of injuries, and pressure that is put on adolescents can severely harm a teenager mentally and physically. However, that is completely false. The activities that take place in sports are not completely risk free, but they are much less dangerous than other forms of exercise, and the health benefits drastically outway any dangers. The pressures and competition benefits adolescents by helping them stay healthy, gain life skills, and provides college opportunities, all from participating in a sport activity.

One reason that competitive sports are helpful to middle school age students is because participation

The ability to respond to a loss will be crucial in the competitively driven society that we live in. Sports will prepare a child for the real world. Participating in sports, there will be times when they “fail” or have success. Sports will situate its players in ways similar to how they will experience them when they grow up. However, in the real world, you won’t have an the leeway to make mistakes. In sports, you can learn by experience, and learn how to react when they finally face these situations. According to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, “youth sports can help stop negative behavior, like joining a gang. This happens because competitive sports provide an outlet for expression, friendship, and controlling anger. Teens who have positive influences and more friends feel less of need to try out risky and possibly harmful things.” (Davis

For example, Grace Chen an avid education researcher and writer, states how participates in sports are more successful students. Chen states, “By participating in sports and other extracurricular clubs and organizations, an applicant demonstrates the ability to manage academics with additional responsibilities, an important quality of a successful student” (Chen 3). Furthermore, Chen is saying that if students can maintain success in school while participating in other activities, such as competitive sports, colleges will see that they will be able to balance all the work that comes with college. Also a quote from an article by Galin Education helps prove this claim. They state that, “Colleges have moved away from the idea that students must dabble in a little bit of everything, but they still want to see evidence of student involvement in extracurricular activities. What a student does with his/her free time to tributes to the understanding that admission officers have of who he/she is overall” (Galin Education 1). What a student does in their free time shows what kind of student they are out of school which may have a college choose one student over another. Since more college opportunities are available, competitive sports are