Are girls’ high school sports getting too serious?

Emma Sutherland | Writer

September 20, 2024

For most girls, trying out and successfully making a sports team at their high school is a monumental moment in their life. High School sports teams are meant to be fun, exciting, and build community and friendships among the girls on the team. Whether it’s volleyball, soccer, tennis, cross country, or softball, the idea and purpose behind a high school team is to have fun and improve your skills. However, most girls would agree these sports are becoming too serious and competitive. Long hours, strictness, competition, and discipline is a complaint among many.

Is the seriousness of “making the cut” taking the fun out of high school sports?

Even though there is typically a universal idea that if you make a sports team as a freshman, you will go on to continue and not be cut from the team in later years, this is not the case. With more and more students, competition rises just to make the team year after year. Girls spend weeks training extra hard, with their stress levels rising just to excel in tryouts. While this can help their work ethic and shows dedication, it can be utterly heartbreaking to find out you haven’t made the team. On the other side of this, it can be argued that there simply are not enough coaches for all these girls, or there isn’t enough room on the teams. With this, is it really worth it to be on a team if you don’t participate in games or meets?

Once they make the team, these athletes are put into intense training for the season coming. In an interview, Ashton Nelson, a varsity volleyball player at SCHS, describes she had to “run a mile in under 8:00 minutes” and “complete 50 double jumps” to even make the team. This only shows the harsh reality of just making the team. Once on the team, Ashton describes that they “practice for about an hour or two, then go straight to the weight room. It can be pretty exhausting.” In another interview with a cross country athlete, Annabelle Strutton, a sophomore at SCHS, she claims, “the hours can be grueling, we have practice 6-7 days a week and typically run 40+ miles a week.” While she was sure to make it known she loves her sport, she says it is “definitely a lot to take on mentally.” When asked if she’d consider quitting due to intense training, she replied, “I wouldn’t ever actually quit, but my teammates and I spend time making jokes about taking long breaks often.” 

Hours and hours of training are being put into these girls’ skills, but at what cost? All of this serious training and conditioning could lead to negative outcomes. Sadly, it can push girls to resent the sport and turn away from it. High school athletes are meant to be having fun while improving their skills, however, sometimes the intensity of training can take away some of the fun. The extremities of high school sports need to calm down before it burns out too many teammates.