By Asher Berkner
Photo by Gabe Pizzolatto
Here at the Willow School, we have a wide range of sports to pick from–football, basketball, track, baseball, volleyball, swimming, and many others. But what about the sports we don’t have? Do we need more sports? There are so many sports in the world. We couldn’t possibly play them all at Willow, but if we could add just a few more sports, what would we add?
I asked several Willow students for their opinions on what we should add. Some suggestions made it onto my list of final picks, but others were quite odd, like 8th grader Jaden Dumas-Mwendo’s suggestion that we have a four square team. Others didn’t even tell me about real sports. Creative writing teacher Ms. Hemming said, “I think we should add competitive hot dog eating,” or 8th grader Jordan Ruiz who told me, “I think we should do epic rap battling.”
While those might be interesting, these are the top picks suggested by students:
WRESTLING
First up is the sport that I think would be the most likely to be added. Wrestling is a very physical sport played between two people whose main objective is to pin each other onto the ground for about a second to beat their opponent. A great reason for adding this sport would be that this is an incredibly popular sport among other high schools, so it would be easy to find other schools to play against. Interest in the sport is pretty high, according to my polls. Wrestling also doesn’t require a lot of money to start up and keep running, unlike other sports, because all that is needed is a uniform, head gear, and a mat to wrestle on. There’s also traveling expenses to and from competitions, but that’s true of any sport. The gym we have here at Willow would work just fine for wrestling. This is the number one sport I would want to add to our school’s roster.
GYMNASTICS
Gymnastics can be described as the performance of physical exercises that require extreme balance, strength, flexibility, and coordination that are beautiful to watch because of all the technique involved. But there are many apparati that would need to be bought if we were to add a competitive gymnastics team. A competitive gymnastics balance beam alone would cost more than $5,000 on American Gymnast’s website, and an elite floor exercise mat system ranges from $25,000 to more than $50,000. And those are just half of the apparati for women alone. Add the other two, and the five separate ones for men, and you’re talking very big bucks to add a properly funded gymnastics team. That said, it is a popular sport that is unusually thrilling to watch for its sheer athleticism and technique. It would be nice to have a gymnastics team, but who would fund it?
PING-PONG
Table Tennis is a game in which players hit a very small ball back and forth across a table divided by a net, using small rackets. It might be more difficult to find teams at other schools to play against, but the team could be relatively easy to start up in terms of expense and people. We’d only need about 4 or 5 players to make up a team, a ping-pong table, paddles, and a ball to make this team happen..And since ping-pong is somewhat similar to tennis, a team we do have, the members of the tennis team could play when the tennis season is over to improve their skills in the off season.
RUGBY
Many people in the USA don’t know how to play rugby, so this is the least likely to become a team here, but I’m still putting it here since it’s one of my favorite sports. Rugby is a team sport with two 15-person teams playing against each other. The object of the game is to move the ball into the opponent’s area and to score across something called a try line. It’s played both with the ball in hand and kicking the ball. Rugby is the “grandfather of American football.” Without rugby, the NFL and American football in general wouldn’t exist. Since it’s quite similar to American football, the football players here at Willow could play it during the off season so that they could at least get some kind of practice in.
BOYS’ VOLLEYBALL
Last but not least on this list is boys’ volleyball. Several students thought it was weird that we had a girl’s volleyball team but not a boys’ volleyball team. This may be due to the fact that there are more women playing volleyball than there are men in general. According to a study by Zipia, 78.1% of volleyball players are women. There are sports that have traditionally been dominated by boys, like football, and those dominated by girls, like volleyball and gymnastics. If there was enough interest among boys, it would be very inexpensive and easy to add, as we already have a girls’ team and equipment is relatively inexpensive.
An alternative to adding the above as official sports teams would be to have them as clubs. If you’re interested in one of these sports coming to Willow, consider bringing it to the attention of your SGA representatives.
