Athletics

Athletics
Negative
By: Landon Frame

While sports seem primarily competitive they are not. In sports, yes, you have two teams competing with each other to win a game… but at the core of sports is truly cooperative. On these teams you have multiple players working together for the common goal of beating the other team. In order for this to happen each of the players have to work together. Imagine what would happen if a basketball had a bunch of players who would not work together. This would clearly be the worst team ever. It doesn’t matter who is on that team (you could have all the best players ever) a sports team without cooperation would fail.

I had an experience like that once. We used to play football for a local team. Are team was full of very talented players who know they were talented and wished to be treated that way. Needless to say the members of our team all competed to get the most playing time and other high honors. It was a bad year for me because our team lost every game we played. Heart broken and defeated I learned this important that surprisingly works well in today’s topic and that is that even in a competitive arena it works best to cooperate with all those on you “team” not matter how much you dislike them. In this “competitive” event I found that cooperation still was supreme (or still the better choice). Juan Antonio Samaranch (who was president of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to 2001) once said “Our philosophy precedes from the belief that sport is an inalienable part of the educational process and a factor for promoting peace, friendship, cooperation and understanding among peoples.” According to this quote cooperation is a main part of a sport. Note that competition was not one of the things that he said sport is meant to teach us and that cooperation was placed in there among promoting peace, friendship, and understanding among peoples. This quote is further supported by Susan Casey when she says "Sports remain a great metaphor for life's more difficult lessons. It was through athletics that many of us first came to understand that fear can be tamed; that on a team the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and that the ability to be heroic lies, to a surprising degree, within." Amber Massey a soccer player said "When you are out there on the soccer field playing, nothing else matters at the time. It's like the whole world has disappeared, and you and your teammates are all that matters." And a famous line from the movie gridiron gang “I’m with the team.” By the way if you’ve never seen to movie it’s about a team that was competing amongst themselves. They were failing miserably. But it clicked and because of there coach they became more cooperative. Because of this cooperation they started to win more games and playing better. All because a little cooperation was throne into the mix.