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Ross Pederson is an LGBTQ+ innovation project manager with a background in supply chain and customer service who lives in Down East Maine.
Last month, a state representative threw an underage student to the wolves to make some kind of point about trans student participation in sports. The president then used it to ambush our governor at the White House and threatened to pull funding from our state.
After weeks of back and forth on this page debating the representative’s ethics and existing Maine law, the question I have is: Why are sports in our schools anyway? Youth sports in most countries are played through private sports clubs, associations and loosely thrown together pickup games during free time. Why does the U.S. insist on investing so much on sports in schools? The answer is likely varied and complicated but that doesn’t mean we can’t start thinking differently, now.
The president likes to say the U.S. is “ranked 40 out of 40” in education. Like most things he claims, it’s not certain where those numbers come from. In reality, the United States consistently ranks in the middle of most studies. For a country that likes to believe in American Exceptionalism, is being the globe’s C-student good enough? I hope that’s not the bar we’ve set for ourselves, but it’s been the level of our achievement for many years.
Organized sports in schools don’t seem to be driving improvement, so I believe it’s time for us to refocus that attention and those resources to growing and celebrating academic achievement — that’s right, posters and banners in the halls for students who submitted work to The Maine Constitution Essay Contest and a pep rally to send off the team attending The U.S. Academic Decathlon.
In a world of underfunding, school budgets may dedicate 10 percent or more to athletics; an activity only about half of students participate in. Far less than 1 percent of high school athletes will ever make a living as a professional, so does it make sense that 10 percent of our educational funding goes to sports? Our investment appears to be over indexed without even considering the additional costs families have to carry, like equipment, travel, and medical costs related to injuries. (According to healthcare provider AdventHealth, over 2 million high school student athletes suffer an injury every year.)
From the University of Maine’s own website, here’s the capital spending budget for fiscal year 2025, as of January:
Research, Academic, and Innovation Projects: 16 projects totaling approximately $186.65 million.
Auxiliary Projects: 4 projects totaling approximately $10.68 million.
Infrastructure and Space Projects: 13 projects totaling approximately $177.81 million.
Athletics Projects: 8 projects totaling approximately $186 million.
Nearly the exact amount of capital spending is allocated to athletics projects as is research, academic, and innovation projects combined. Does that seem like we’re striving for greatness when it comes to the graduates we’ll rely upon to discover the next great innovation, cure our worst diseases, or incubate the industries to drive our future? I wonder what the academic departments would do with the money if their capital budget were doubled. Don’t you?
Academics can encourage teamwork, camaraderie among peers, and teach resolve as well as any sport and that experience of working together to solve a problem is much more valuable in the real world. Academics are also all-inclusive and not just available to those with the athletic aptitude. Straight, gay, trans, Indigenous, Black, Latino, white, Asian, abled and disabled persons can all work together towards academic achievement while cultivating the same skills and much-sought-after American Excellence, and do so without the distraction of catcalls from the political peanut gallery claiming one student or another doesn’t deserve to play.
Now is the time to reconsider how we’re spending our educational dollars and make sure they are truly being spent for education. I encourage any student who enjoys sports to do so, but after they’ve figured out the day’s algebra equation and their work group has completed their preparations for academic decathlon.
