Are School Sports Getting Too Vicious?

Needville High School’s Megan Crosby knocked softball opponents Demi Janak and Kylie George (not pictured) off their feet on Saturday with elbow jabs in a Texas state championship game that still has fans outraged. (Photo: YouTube)

A high school girls’ softball game has been getting lots of attention this week, and it’s not because Texas’s Needville High School and Huffman Hargrave High School were vying for a state championship title. It’s because on Saturday, Needville catcher Megan Crosby elbowed two opponents with such force as they approached home plate — while the play was unfolding elsewhere on the field — that both 18-year-old Demi Janak and 15-year-old Kylie George fell to the ground, eliciting gasps of shock from the fans, one of whom caught the separate incidents on video.

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“Out of nowhere I’m running full speed and I just get an elbow to the chest, so it was pretty surprising to me,” George told Inside Edition. Janak adds: “When she hit me, I flew over the plate and never had the chance to actually touch home plate."

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Outrage ensued on Facebook. “That’s a shame she wasn’t ejected, she should still be suspended from playing. That’s poor sportsmanship and straight up bullying,” vented one commenter in a typical remark.

“We were mad and upset,” Huffman Hargrave athletic director Mike McEachern tells Yahoo Parenting of the scuffle. “It definitely shows that kids want to win at all costs.”

There’s no question that the intensity of teen sports, of all types, is a real issue. And playing hard means getting hard knocks, it seems. High school athletes undergo 2 million injuries, 200,000 doctor visits, and 30,000 hospitalizations every year, according to the Youth Sports Safety Alliance (which, it should be noted, does not separate data regarding injuries due to overuse from medical problems incurred during play). ER visits for sports-related concussions have gone up 60 percent in the past decade, reports the Physicians News Digest.

On Tuesday, the American Medical Association (AMA) acknowledged the alarming increase in students’ concussions during sports, calling for athletes and educators to address the issue. Noting that “concussions account for nearly 10 percent of all high school athletic injuries,” according to AMA board member Edward Langston, M.D., in a statement, the group is advising that athletes with suspected head injuries be taken out of play immediately and not permitted to return until they show written approval from a doctor.

But injuries aren’t the only indication that high school sports can get ugly. A 2007 survey of more than 5,000 high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that more than a quarter of student athletes believe that playing dirty is no big deal: 30 percent of all boys and 20 percent of girl softball players “think it’s okay for a softball pitcher to deliberately throw at a batter who homered the last time up,” the organization reveals in its report, “What Are Your Children Learning? The Impact of High School Sports on the Values and Ethics of High School Athletes.” Also noteworthy in regard to poor sportsmanship: 54 percent of male football players, 49 percent of male basketball players, and 18 percent of females in all sports approve of trash-talking.

Not all sports reflect the same lack of respect, though. “Boys engaged in baseball, football and basketball are considerably more likely to cheat on the field and in school and to engage in conduct involving deliberate injury, intimidation and conscious rule-breaking than boys involved in other sports,” according to the findings. “Generally, boys participating in swimming, track, cross country, gymnastics and tennis were markedly less likely to cheat or to engage in bad sportsmanship than their male counterparts in other sports. Girls involved in basketball and softball were more likely to engage in illegal or unsportsmanlike conduct than girls involved in other sports.”

Yet McEachern says these issues are nothing new. “I don’t know that sports are getting more vicious,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “I think our society has become ‘Win, win, win! Be the best!’”

After coaching for 23 years, McEachern says that kids haven’t really changed that much in their attitudes when it comes to athletics. “It’s our social media that has changed a lot of things,” he says. “There were always a lot of negative things happening, but they weren’t videotaped before. Now that they are, it just brings them to light. People see what is out there and what does happen. It brings incidents to the forefront.”

Just like elbow-gate, for instance — from which his team emerged triumphant and captured the state title, by the way. “Things do seem to be getting more competitive, and that’s getting more exposure with videos being posted,” he reiterates. “But at the end of the day, the rules haven’t changed. Kids wanted to win just as bad 20 years ago — and they competed just as hard.”

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