Playing the Game: Sports as a Force for Promoting Improved Academic Performance for Urban Youth

Summary of

"Playing The Game: Sports As A Force For Promoting Improved Academic Performance For

Urban Youth"

By Eric DeMeulenaere, PhD

In "Playing The Game: Sports As A Force For Promoting Improved Academic Performance For Urban Youth" Eric DeMelenaere, PhD examines the relationship between involving in sports and academic performances for urban youth by observation and interviews. To begin with, the author reviews relevant literatures written by six authors such as Ogbu, Davis, Foley, Fordham, Rosaldo, and Wenger. He introduces Ogbu's idea that status of one's racial group depends on one's academic performance. Eric further explains that Fordham discovered exceptions against Ogbu's idea and Davis and Foley extended two previous author's work. He reviews Rosaldo's analysis approached culturally and the limitation of Wenger's analysis to examine how people harmonize with others in conflicting communities. Finally, Eric points out inadequacy of these studies and introduces how can he proves that sports involvement leads to successful academic performance.

The author continues to explain the methods he used. It is conducted by eight youth from urban public school in northern California. Then, he goes on to introduce four student's different backgrounds: Mattew, Jalisha, Jamal and James.

In the next section, Eric analyzes six different ways that participation in sports contributes to improve student's academic career. First of all, by after-school sports activities, they can organize their daily schedule efficiently. Second, involvement in athletics put them into studying hard environment because if they want to continue to play sports, they should maintain appropriate levels of academic performance. Third, outstanding performance in sports makes them feel proud themselves as well as the surrounding communities. Fourth, participating in sports affects the development friendship in positive ways. Fifth, students can learn how to deal with adults by interaction with coaches and acquire considerable motivation from them. Finally, youth involving in sports can build desire to enter college in order to keep sports career.

In the conclusion, Eric summarizes briefly the results from this experiment and suggests how schools and practitioners implicate sports programming in their system such as establishing athletic eligibility requirements for students and increasing opportunities to participate in sports.