President Barack Obama has made all types of legislation since taking over the oval office. The latest initiative he's contemplating, a longer school year, could change the face of sports forever if passed.
Now you're asking yourself, how can a school year effect sports? Here's a taste of how America's three major sports football, basketball and baseball could be altered.
For Major League Baseball the school year ending is paramount to each team's summer gate, but the end of the school year is imperative to the teams that are bad. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that has been out of contention for two solid decades, banks on drawing kids (and the accompanying parents) to the ballpark. Young children don't really care who's on the field, or who won or lost, they just want to go to the game. If the home team wins great, if not they enjoyed their nachos and cotton candy anyway.
Adults in major league cities absorb the cost of taking their kids to the games, regardless of where the team is in the standings, just so they have the memory. Teams that are effectively out of the pennant race in June don't have much of a competitive product, so the bump in sales at the end of the school year provides is necessary to the bottom line. If school is in session longer and the start of the school year earlier, MLB owners will have a severe problem on their hands. Especially the bottom feeders.
In basketball, practically all of the NBA Playoffs are broadcast in the latter part of primetime. Young kids generally can't make it to halftime before bedtime in the early rounds, much less the conclusion of a game. However the NBA Finals takes place in early to mid-June. That's late enough on the calendar for the youngsters to catch an entire game in most states. Watching Kobe, or LeBron, or whomever celebrate a title may not be feasible in the future for the fifth-grader who has a test in the morning.
The NFL really doesn't have a dog in this fight because it's games are primarily played on the weekends in the middle of the school year now. But football may be effected in a different fashion.
A shortened summer means high school football games will start earlier in the season, meaning more practices in the heat. With class in session earlier in the summer, and this country's love for football, you know there will be a push to get the kids to start playing earlier. The status quo is high school football season starts when school starts.
A school of thought like that would lead to exposing kids to even more of summer's unforgiving heat. Imagine kids practicing in June and July in the Texas heat. That means more possibilities of heatstroke and severe dehydration. Sound like a good idea? I know what you're saying to yourself. That would never happen. My response, of course it would.
Whether the school year is elongated for today's kids does not effect me directly. I'm out of school, degree in hand. How a longer school year would effect sports on a larger level is something that needs to be thought about now, waaaaayyyyyy before something like this goes into effect. Food for thought from the sports grill.
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