Extra extra, read all about it! I’ve been reading about the comparisons to Steubenville for awhile. So it comes as no surprise that A) Anonymous has taken up the plight of two young girls in Maryville, Missouri and 2) the alleged rapists are football players. What is surprising, besides our government being open for business this morning, is that the Nodaway County Prosecutor who dismissed the case, has now asked the court for a special prosecutor to review the facts.http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/16/us/missouri-rape-case/
Nodaway County, nod.away, could the name get any more Shakespearian?
I won’t bore you with the facts as we know them so far. Except for the fact that the encounter was filmed, in a similar vein to Steubenville, but the video was erased that same evening and evidently cannot be retrieved. Maybe these football players are smarter than their Ohio counterparts…maybe the detectives at “Law and Order, SVU” should be called in? I’m not going to reiterate my previous opinions – that “NO” means “no” and “…a rape is a rape is a rape, no matter who you are or where you live.” https://mountainmornings.net/2013/01/04/a-rape-is-a-rape/
What I do want to focus on here is the Holy Grail of high school, football. Because it’s usually not the captain of the chess club who finds himself hauled into court over a sex crime is it. I was reading a fascinating article about our American obsession with sports on the bike the other day, I know, the irony. Still, Amanda Ripley of the Atlantic makes an excellent argument against school sports in her article “The Case Against High School Sports.” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education…When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
This is required reading for everybody since Ripley dares to expose the tax money we Americans spend on athletics, which includes coaches, buses to away games etc (instead of say, math) and the culture that goes along with an adoration of the body and not the mind. She shows us what happens when administrators in failing schools actually suspend sports – surprise, discipline reports go way down, while teachers’ salaries went up along with their students’ academic scores.
And here is my last lesson. As the budget talks are stalled on the Hill in a Hail Mary pass from a team of women Senators, and before we start slashing music and art budgets in public schools around the country, I think every single school board member from Albemarle to Marin County should find out exactly how much their district is spending on sports. Subs usually are hired for the days a teacher travels to a game, finding and maintaining playing fields can be costly. There are insurance costs and athletic supplies and trainers, a sports budget can also hide under other line items, you’ll have to dig deep.
Schools have been known to spend a quarter of a million dollars to install and maintain a running track around a football field. I know.
Because at the end of the day, if we want to compete on a global level and we want our daughters to feel valued, we may have to revisit a creeping patriarchy that began with private schools at the turn of the last century. The fear of new immigrants led Teddy Roosevelt to say about the American Boy – “Hit the line hard; don’t foul out; don’t shirk.” He should have added, don’t rape.
MountainMornings 
Just have to say that I personally don’t think football and rape go hand in hand. It is the morals of the kid. Neil played football for his high school. He had a good upbringing with good morals. The head coach always told them to stay out of trouble because the first thing that would happen is their picture as well as the school would be in the headlines. I have never seen a problem with Neil’s school or anyone at his school so I think all football players and sports in school get a bad rap. Now, I do believe this girl in Maryville was raped and also the one in Steubenville. No means no. It appears the girls had too much alcohol so no may have never been uttered, but it does not make it permissable for someone to rape someone incoherant.
Also, just a tib bit of info on supporting sports at school. Parents had to pay an annual fee (not cheap) along with mulitple fundraisers. I don’t know how much, if any, the school pays, but a lot of the stuff was self supporting. You will find this in many sports. Meals were donated by the parents and local restaurants to feed the team prior to the game since the kids were at school all day and then had to stay at the school before playing. Just someone who has not been in this area, may not realize everything that is going on.
Regardless, rape is rape. Just don’t label every sports person in that category. My husband and son love sports. Neil loves it so much, it is his career to be involved in sports.
Dianne I’m sure that not all football players are jerks, I was painting with a very broad brush. Indeed your son is a sweetheart!
I should hope you didn’t take this personally. But I know as a previous school board member, many discipline problems happened around away games or at after-school practice. The fact is, when football or any sport is idolized as it is in this country, our kids get the message….and when boosters raise thousands of dollars for lights on a field in order to play longer and later, that is time not spent studying.
Read the article and think about how we stand up to the rest of the developed world in math and science. I didn’t even touch on the many injuries, and head trauma, the risk of death in the sport. Repeat concussions can be seriously life-altering. Even in high performing high schools, if a boy doesn’t play sports- or party with drugs and alcohol – he is left behind. My own Superintendent warned me about this kind of student apathy. The article’s point is how the culture of the school changes, academic achievement rises…those who wanted to play switched schools or played with clubs.
We could add the value of fraternities to this. Thanks Chris for always tackling the tough stuff.
True Lisa! UVA just reopened a rape case in a fraternity from decades ago last year….I resent all the “teach your girls how to behave at a party” business and with boys it’s always been same old, anything goes!