What’s More Important—Performance in Sports or Academics?

Will Fitzhugh, School Reform News, October 2004, p. 3


    Students who do good academic work in high school and who are also good athletes get much more recognition for their sports achievements than they do for their academic work, even though they may have put forward the same high level of effort for both. I have seen a number of examples of this in my role as editor of The Concord Review, which over the past 17 years has published 660 history research papers by high school students from 43 states and 33 other countries.

    Some years ago, I went to visit one of our authors, a high school senior in Connecticut whose essay on the Great Awakening won an Emerson Prize. She also was all-state soccer in Connecticut. Everyone in her school knew about her soccer accomplishments, but no one knew she had been published in The Concord Review. She went on to play on her college soccer team, at Dartmouth, but she also graduated summa cum laude in science and has since completed Harvard Medical School.

    Another of our authors, Sophia Parker Snyder, from Glendale, Wisconsin, who is a sophomore at Harvard College now, wrote me to say how “absolutely wonderful” it was to know there was someone who appreciated the academic achievements of high school students.

    “As a scholar-athlete, I am often shocked at the greater rewards I reap for my athletic achievements, regardless of the fact that these accomplishments are far less important than my intellectual ones,” she commented. “This approach to scholarship and athleticism seems to me completely backwards...”

    The purpose of The Concord Review over the years has been to find exemplary academic work by high school students of history and to distribute it as widely as possible to show teachers and other students what some of their peers are doing. Fine essays have come in, but the number of schools and teachers who have wanted to put good examples of history papers before students as an incentive has been quite small.

    In fact, some Teaching American History programs have decided that showing teachers fine academic work might just discourage them or their students.

    In sports and athletics, outstanding performance is celebrated to encourage participants to try harder to excel. A similar celebration of outstanding academic work would give our young people an incentive to put forth their very best efforts on their most important work—their school work.



Will Fitzhugh (fitzhugh@tcr.org) is editor of The Concord Review. Copies of prize-winning essays published by the Review are available online at http://www.tcr.org.

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