Goal Oriented: Students Score in School and Sports

By Demetri Blaisdell

Sports Editor

In baseball, it’s the perfect game. In golf, it’s the hole-in-one. In school, it’s a 4.0 GPA. Student-athletes at Albany don’t just have to worry about winning the game, but also about acing the next morning’s quiz. Teachers expect student athletes to complete their homework and study for tests, while coaches will not accept their players showing up late for practice or missing games.

Administration draws a line in the sand of grade point average between these two, often competing, forces. Still, student athletes at Albany are rising to the challenge. Overall, AHS athletes’ average GPA is 3.186, above the entire student body’s mark of 3.04. This success is a wonderful testament to the drive, time management, and perseverance of those who compete for the red and white.

What is it about a sport that motivates students to excel in the classroom? Albany High School Principal Ron Rosenbaum had this to say: “Students that get involved in school get involved at more than one level. Being involved in sports or music or art also helps to sharpen their ability to do well in the classroom.”

“When you’re on a real tight schedule like that [of an athlete], you’re more productive,” added Assistant Athletic Director Jake Shaughnessy.

Unfortunately, this success is not uniform for all student athletes. Grade point averages are as diverse as the athletes themselves. The JV Football team brings up the rear with a GPA of 2.50, while Varsity Girls Cross-Country boasts scholastic prowess to the tune of 3.66.

However, irregularities abound in the data. How can sports with similar time commitments have students performing so differently in school? The answers are far from simple, and the findings certainly aren’t limited to athletes. Race, language, socioeconomic position, and parental involvement cause gross inequalities in education at every level. In fact, studying sports brings to light problems that plague the student body as a whole, and beyond that, society at large.

A general trend in the data shows female athletes outperforming their male counterparts almost across the board. Five of the six teams with GPAs under 3.0 are boys teams. Among athletes, boys average nearly a fifth of a grade point lower than girls. This, by itself, is not cause for concern: scholastically, females have the edge during high school. The average GPA of female students at Albany is 3.12, compared to the male population at 2.96.

But if sex is the only reason for grade discrepancies, how can we account for a Varsity Girls Soccer team GPA of 3.57 and a Varsity Girls Basketball GPA of 2.74? Clearly, the other factors are coming in to play.

One important piece of the puzzle might lie in when these students came to AHS. Many of the girls on the basketball team are new to Albany, while most on the soccer team are homegrown. In fact, of a hoops team of nine, only two girls attended Albany Middle School and more than half of the team started school at Albany in the last two years. By contrast, of 21 girls on the soccer team, only two did not attend Albany Middle School.

In a recent interview, Mr. Rosenbaum speculated that JV teams didn’t do as well in school as Varsity teams because of age and maturity. The data, however, doesn’t support this. Average GPAs of JV and Varsity sports vary only .04, a twenty-fifth of a grade point, a statistically insignificant number.

But what do any of these numbers mean? Certainly GPA is not a perfect measure of academic performance. For many student athletes, simply showing up to class means a great success. Wrestling and football coaches make a deliberate effort to seek out kids clearly in need of structure and discipline. For these kids, overall improvement would be a much better measure of academic performance. But even within the limited scope of GPA, trends in the data are meaningful and should be noticed by administrators, teachers, and coaches alike.

The life of a student athlete is far from easy. Students must answer to parents, teachers, coaches, teammates, and classmates. Often, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to complete everything demanded. But, by at least one yardstick, athletes at Albany are doing amazing things with the ball and the books. It is a testament to the teachers, parents, coaches and students of Albany that athletes at AHS have found a way to balance it all.

Coach Shaughnessy summed up Albany’s unique relationship between the helmet and the thinking cap like this: “Albany has a tradition that athletes excel [in the classroom]. I think everybody probably would like to see a bit more success in the athletic realm to match our academic success. However, I don’t think anyone, myself included, would want to improve our athletic success at a cost to our academics.”

With devoted coaches as interested in report cards as they are in the scoreboard, the future of Albany sports and academics looks promising.

Albany High School

The Cougar

Monday, April 4, 2005