On the other hand, "amateur" leagues for popular sports (football, basketball) being associated with colleges is extremely effective at amplifying the interest of these leagues. Consider how little interest there would be in the "Ann Arbor Wolverines" vs "Columbus Buckeyes" in the USFL without any association with schools and their alumni, or whether anyone outside a 20-mile radius would watch Durham vs Chapel Hill if they played in the NBA's G-league.

- male good enough at sport: can participate in sport

- good looking female: can participate in cheers/pompom girls

- male not good enough /female not in beauty standard: can’t participate, go to the free urban basketball field.

In the EU countries I know, sport is as mandatory as math until ~17year old, then universities sports clubs are open to anyone whatever how good you will perform. The budgets are low but you don’t need a ton of money to train/maintain your body in good condition.

Physical well being is as important as math (if not more) and I hope my knowledge of the US does not depict the reality.

At university level the "new gym" or "new stadium" is a common method of patronage, creating a snowball effect of a campus having really nice facilities and a large student population, so not only can they host athletics for the regular student body, they can also field an elite team by putting a little more into the scholarships and coaching budget.

But the way in which this differs from other places is that access is often impacted by US urban sprawl conditions. In Japan, for example, middle school and high school athletes will use all the major urban venues, just as is depicted in manga and anime, because it's reasonable to get there by transit. So sports are supported by better utilization of the facilities across the entire local population. In contrast the US tends to have talent clustering in specialized cities: for example, all the serious tennis players go to Florida at some point. And that means there's a very substantial jump in pressure and selectivity when you go into the biggest competitive sports, and just about everyone at NCAA Division I level is intending to - or their parents groomed them to - go pro, and had it in mind from long before they got the scholarship. They allocate their day around the sport, and can't have an ordinary life. But there are always options to participate in lower divisions, intramural or other leagues with lower stakes as well, and those usually have to scrape around for budget, but can sometimes draft in the wind of an elite program.

Mixing sports with education beyond basic PE is a recipe for disaster, as you can pretty clearly see by the underperformance of American high school education.

I grew up in deep football land in Texas, and my experience as a non-athlete was that football consumed nearly the entire budget for non-academics in the district. Everything else was subsisting on peanuts while the football program hired dozens of coaches and built a new $30m stadium. Probably 50% of my high school teachers were coaches who were just doing double duty as teachers for some extra cash.

Most universities in the US have recreation centers for students to exercise, play pick up basketball, and other forms of casual sports. College Athletics however is a whole different level - d3 and up are serious teams, though d1 teams is where the real athletic talent concentrates. Many d1 athletes seem to be at school for the sport, not the academics.

Division 3, intramural leagues, and physical education classes at colleges are a totally different thing. These are more in line with college/university sports in Europe.

Also not from US, but campi usually have a great physical structure for sport practice. So, even if not part of the team, you have easy access to play the sport with friends.

That was intentional, the only movie including girls team I remember is “Whipe It”. The main character is in college and she fight to make sport instead of beauty contests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnastics_all-around_champion...

First, while cliques are definitely a thing and kids can be mean to each other, there is nothing like a strict jock/geek breakdown where athletes are never smart and they hate and pick on each other. I'm here now, competed in academic olympics and spelling bees as a kid, got the top SAT scores at my high school, and also lettered in four sports. The honors classes were filled with preppies and jocks. I was tall and athletic and girls liked me, but most of my friends and my now wife were all goth kids and I never bullied anyone.

It's not even remotely true that you needed to be attractive to be in sports or a cheerleader, either. Neither men nor women need to be any good to play in high school. The teams are totally open to anyone, but competitions can only dress so many in a given game and you might never play. Something track or cross-country can usually find room for everyone willing to try. There are plenty of sports for girls and all the athletic or attractive girls are not necessarily cheerleaders.

Universities are an entirely different story. They usually have intramural sports, which means they are not part of any formal athletic association, don't have paid coaches, and anyone can join and play. The intercollegiate teams that represent the school, however, are mostly scholarship athletes. They have limited slots. People can try out and join the team if they qualify without being recruited or getting a scholarship, but you need to be good. "Good enough" is a pretty high standard at the university level except for obscure sports no one plays. I won two state championships at the high school level, not individual but I was on the varsity team, and I never even tried to compete in college outside of intramurals. My niece was a national champion in cheer in high school and didn't play any sport in college.

At no point is sports participation mandatory, but all school systems I'm aware require some kind of "physical education." There is a general class offered where a coach just teaches arbitrary sports and exercise and most students take that. I grew up thinking that competing in a real sport exempted you from this class, because it did at my school, but I guess that isn't universally the case because I found out my wife competed in sports but still had to take the PE class as well. So I guess that depends on the school system. It's different in every state, maybe even every district.

As for "free urban basketball field," we call that pickup ball. It's open to whoever gets there first and often teams are picked on the spot, but usually the same people who up pretty regularly and know each other well. I played a ton of pickup ball as a kid. My summers were often spent going to the park and playing basketball for 14 hours before I came home. There were some people you see there you don't see in school, but at least half the regulars also played for the school and they played pickup ball in addition, not instead of.

I'm still working on my first kid (actually have an IVF appt in two hours), but as far as I understood youth sport these days, the more competitive level has unfortunately become a lot less accessible than it used to be. There are national travel leagues now that get sponsored by rich parents and participation can often be quite expensive between the travel and the equipment, so rich kids can have quite an advantage. Obviously, you need access to ice to play hockey, access to water to swim, things like that. Basketball courts, soccer fields (football, but Americans call it soccer), and baseball fields tend to be available everywhere, but playing as part of a real team will probably cost money except in basketball, where the lower-level amateur leagues will still scout and sponsor kids from pickup courts because the pro stakes are so much higher that pro teams don't just want rich kids to play, they want the actual best athletes. Baseball still has pretty good free little leagues for kids, but you need your own bat and glove at least. If you're into running, you can at least do that anywhere.

> "With regard to Title IX’s participation requirements, a school can meet the standard via three independent tests. The first test is a mathematical safe harbor. If the school offers athletic participation opportunities (number of individual athlete participation slots, not numbers of teams) proportional to the numbers of males and females in the general student body, the school meets the participation standard. If the school does not meet this mathematical test, it may be deemed in compliance if it can (1) demonstrate consistent expansion of opportunities for the underrepresented gender over time or (2) show that the athletic program fully met the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender. The courts have ruled that “boys are more interested in sports than girls” is not an acceptable defense to lack of equitable participation opportunities."

> "Under Title IX there are no sport exclusions or exceptions, so football is included under the law. Individual participation opportunities (numbers of athletes participating rather than number of sports) in all men’s sports and all women’s sports are counted in determining whether a school meets the Title IX participation standard. The basic philosophical underpinning of Title IX is that there cannot be an economic justification for discrimination. The school cannot maintain that there are revenue production or other considerations that mandate that male athletes receive better treatment or participation opportunities than female athletes. A good analogy would be that a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide wheelchair access for students with physical disabilities as required under the Americans With Disabilities Act because the football team needs the money in order to maintain its current level of revenue production. Similarly, a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide participation opportunities for an underrepresented gender."

https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/advocacy/what-is-titl...

And yet, outside of the USA, these sports do manage to exist, leagues and all, outside universities.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/lnir2v/oc_the_high...

Football coach but the same principles apply: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/12/jimbo-fisher-buyout/

All that to say there is some academic good that comes out of all this.

Trust me, this qualifier is completely unnecessary. See: Cal football's inexplicable perennial popularity.

People just like having a team to cheer for, regardless of that team's success.

Unlike European football, in the US town-based football seems not to have taken off quite so much. The college scene, possibly because of affinity to elites, became the one that got the self-reinforcing money spiral that led to it becoming really big. This leads to weird distortions where the most highly paid public employee in many states is a sports coach.

Men's football and basketball are entirely different stories. Of the North American big four, hockey and baseball have always had robust minor leagues and kids are drafted into them straight out of high school. Football and basketball, on the other hand, have pro leagues that have historically relied upon university competition to develop athletes ready for the big leagues. The NBA (American pro basketball) started up a developmental league something like maybe a decade back or so it now calls the G League, but historical inertia being what it is, there is a much larger following for universities and the best players will still tend to do at least a year there, which I think is still the minimum required. The NFL (American pro football) won't draft you until you're at least three years past high school graduation, so the players there have no choice and need to go to college.

There's a lot driving it. Alumni pride, even regional and civic pride in places without pro teams in the same sport. Often the best school in each state is the flagship land grant public school and maybe a large private school, and these are usually not located in major metro areas that also have pro teams. There are a few exceptions like University of Washington, which played in the national championship game two days ago, is in Seattle. USC has one of the historically dominant teams and is in Los Angeles. But looking at the other top schools from this year, you're looking at Athens, GA, Ann Arbor, MI, Tuscaloosa, AL, Austin, TX, all places that do not have pro teams.

Something people miss is the university athletic department is often, even usually, its own separate non-profit corporation from the school. So, contrary to a lot of takes, it actually has its own revenue stream and its own expenses separate from the larger university. Having a very good football and/or basketball team can draw in enough revenue that the athletic department at the very best schools is typically self-funding. They may as well just be pro franchises, except they don't pay taxes and the athletes nominally have to attend enough classes to not flunk out, though they also don't need to graduate.

It's a farce of a system at the very top, but most athletes at most schools are actually amateurs just looking to do something healthy and competitive while they learn and get some of their school paid for, and the US law requires an equal number of scholarships awarded to men and women, so thanks to there often being men's sports that generate a lot of revenue, and there not being such a thing right now as women's football, the presence of a very successful football program can fund a ton of scholarship for obscure women's sports that give girls a chance to get a free education if they're willing to learn and practice them. Everything from fencing to bowling.

I'd guess the opposite. IMO, too much attention gets put on the top tier of athletes in the most popular sports.

I'd guess that well over 50% see education as the primary benefit. Most of these students realize that they don't have a professional playing career ahead of them.