The Ignored Toxic Culture Surrounding Sports 

By Josie Mewes

Sports. Every American can name at least five off the top of their head. Most of us have played a sport, on a team, with a coach. And if not, you’ve at least played sports in PE. In America, we’re obsessed with sports. As soon as they can walk, kids are forced to play sports by their parents. We watch sports on major holidays as a tradition, school stadiums are packed during home football games, and we pay professional athletes probably way too much. But despite all this attention we give to sports, we tend to totally ignore the toxic culture we’ve created around them.

  Sports are full of aggressive coaches, parents, and players. Many coaches verbally abuse their players. They berate them, talk down to them, single them out, and judge their performance in front of their peers. And the problem with this is the players always listen. The dynamic between players and coaches is simple; players look up to and follow the coaches, even if they aren’t being good to the players. Sports stadiums are always full of parents and fans with seriously poor sportsmanship. There tends to be violence, fights, shouting, targeting referees, and fans having to be removed from stands.

Sports culture is built on the concept of fearing failure instead of striving for success. Sports culture teaches kids that it’s not ok to fail, that they must do whatever it takes to win, and this is not good. Kids should be taught how to fail because it’s a life skill they're going to need, but sports tend to not look at what players can gain from the mistakes and tend to target them for what they did wrong.  

A problem in sports is that we like to make athletes seem unbreakable. We see these really great players and we assume they can do anything. And  this is a very dangerous view to push on to kids in sports. This view forces them to hide emotions, to play injured, and to not seek help when they need it, because they want to be viewed just as these other athletes are, unbreakable. 

We need to start addressing this toxic culture we’ve created around sports because the toll it takes on players is not ok. Playing sports should be fun but a lot of players tend to dread it due to at least one of the reasons above and we should be doing something about it, not turning a blind eye to the problem. We need to teach kids that sports are a supportive environment where they can be themselves and learn to fail and that it’s ok for them to not always be at their best. We need to change our sports culture.