Friday Night Lights written by H.
G. Bissinger is about a relatively small town and its great fascination with
high school football. The book raises questions about the role of sports within
education. Bissinger uses several examples within the book to show negative and
positive role sports have had within the academic community. The positive impact
sports have had will be seen in Brian Chavez example. The negative impact of
sports will focus on the financing for education versus athletics, and actions
involving apathetic athletes and the administration.
The prologue of the book introduces
you to several of the people that Bissinger will focus on during his
examination of a town and its big sport. One of the players is Brian Chavez.
Brian Chavez was one example of how football was a positive impact within the
community. It is interesting to note that Brian Chavez is immersed with
football, but he never takes his focus off of schoolwork. The reason he played
the sport was not to be part of the identity, but to play “for those hits, for
those acts of physical violence that made him tingle and feel wonderful”. [1]
Brian Chavez felt that Permian football was “just a game to me, a high school
game.”[2] One
could make a simple argument that the game of football to him was a means to
get an emotional thrill. His focus on the game was the same determination he
had in his schoolwork, for he was number one in his class. High school football
cultivated his determination. He had high aspirations to go to Harvard, and
football developed his determination to reach his goal.
The way football had negatively
impacted education is the way districts budget their money. The budgets for
athletics versus education in Odessa were staggeringly in favor of the football
teams. LaRue Moore, an English teacher, pointed out that just the medical
budget for Permian football was slightly larger than the entire budget for the
English Department: “The cost for teaching materials for the English department
was $5,040” as opposed to the cost for the boys’ medical supplies which were
$6750.[3]
Another $6040 was used to print the film of the game. In 1988 season alone,
about $70,000 was spent for chartered jets.[4]
Such a budgeting difference would negatively impact education.
Obviously Permian football was its
focus, but at what cost? During the 1988 – 1989 school year at Permian, the
senior class scored an average 878, while only twenty years earlier, the senior
class scored an average 963.[5]
“In the seventies it had been normal for Permian to have seven seniors to
qualify as Nation Merit semi-finalists”, but in the 1988 – 1989 school year,
only one had qualified.[6]
There was an obvious downward trend among the educational focus in the city,
which lead to the less quality of education.
Many football players could do
anything he wanted. If you were a star athlete on the football team, you could
walk around the school and break any rule with the administration and teachers
watching without getting into any trouble. Grades were the same way. For
football players, you did not have to do the work, and you could participate in
football. This was the extreme low point in high school education for some of
these football towns that the winning of football games were so important that
the academic success of those football players were shelved. Academic achievement
was the only element pushing certain athletes in their schooling, while others
were apathetic, and sat back and failed.
To combat the lowering of the
standards for athletes, many of the school boards across the state elected to
pass a regulation stating that an athlete had to pass their classes within a 6
week period. If they did not pass with a 70, they could not play.[7]
Even with the regulation, administrations found a way around in order to play
their star athletes. At this point athlete’s class participation grade would
count enough toward the 70 grade average for each class. Therefore even when
the school boards tried to curb the blatant failing of its student athletes,
the administration continued to look other way in order to keep their star
athletes in the game.
For the relatively small town of
Odessa, Texas, the negative impact of sports outweighed the good it did for the
community. High school is for academic instruction. Sports should be an
elective or extracurricular activity. Odessa and other similar counties within
Texas took sports too far. Sports, in this case did not have any checks,
therefore it negatively impacted the community by hindering academic
instruction and achievement.
[1] Bissinger, H.
G. Friday Night LIghts: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. 5th ed. (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley Company, Inc, 1990.) 13
[2] Ibid. 13
[3] Bissinger, H.
G. Friday Night LIghts: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. 5th ed. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley Company, Inc, 1990.) 146
[4] Ibid. 146
[5] Ibid. 131
[6] Ibid. 131
[7] Bissinger, H. G. Friday Night LIghts: A
Town, a Team, and a Dream. 5th ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Company,
Inc, 1990.) 292
