This article really brought back some memories.

When I lived in Ak, the kids in my village LOVED basketball. Everything was about basketball. Some nights we'd hear kids playing basketball in full winter gear outside of our trailer at 1am.

They were HUGE pulls for money for the school too. Because my village was only 300 people, and everyone has a brother, sister, cousin in the school, the events would be packed! People from a nearby village (~10 miles) would ride their snow machines over trails just to come see teenagers play some ball. The games were broadcast on VHF across the village for those who were disabled or too elderly to come out.

So it's understandable that the school would leverage this to gain some extra funds. It's pretty much good for everyone.

But the problem is that when the kids had science fairs where they were doing LEGITIMATE research, no one would show up except the sparsest of families. There was a huge pull to get these kids into the events, to get the funds to travel and compete with their research. They worked hard and nobody came.

Now I understand that it's not the most exciting thing in the world. But man, I couldn't help but to think that part of the reason so many kids find academics so painful and focus so much on basketball is because nobody cheers for you for carefully labelling plants and inferring what those plants mean to the greater ecosystem and everyone cheers when you are able to drop a basket in a hoop.

I really don't want to dismiss either set of kids either. Of course the basketball players deserve all the praise, like I said they practice until their hands fall off. But if everyone wants to play basketball, people are going to sit on the bench.

Go Eagles.