Petrarchive – Team Sports

A big part of childhood is developing your motor skills through play, it’s what young people are meant to do at that stage of life instead of building endurance sitting at a desk. The muscle you build sets you up for the rest of adulthood and it helps regulate your nervous system during emotionally turbulent years. Everyone (nerds, gays, women) should play sports and school should offer a college sports bound league and a casual league so everyone can have the ability to incorporate exercise and team play into their school schedule.

A team sport just flew over my house and it made me turn into a chad. What do?

>>11591
I agree with the general idea here but a lot of teenagers really really really don't want to do sports and tbh I don't know what schools are supposed to do about this. Detention for those who try insufficiently hard at softball?

Males who are particularly disinterested in sports and other such motor skilled-based activities are probably abnormal in the first place, otherwise there would be no need to force them into team sports. You can't expect all human beings to fit the Procrustean bed.

Three sons in my family. All forced to play some combination of football / baseball / running sport. Each son dropped the team sport as soon as allowed. None of the other alleged benefits accrued: no lasting friendships, no sense of accomplishment, no special secret social skills. We're all socially fine and fine in teams but that's because we're grown ass adults.

Anyway, jocks are insecure and rely on teams for psychic weaknesses -- everything else is just a rationalization stemming from this. Sports was mostly just listening to fat has-beens in their 40s moan at us while we did exercises.

Team sports are a natural product of male socialization and predate many other developments of civilization including writing and agriculture. In this context, they are not just a positive thing but necessary. But much of the vociferous online posting regarding "putting your kid in team sports" to ward off various social and physical ills is the typical American putting the cart before the horse and trying to attack a problem (destruction of social bonds) from a specific corner. This is part of what I complained about in the other thread regarding taking up a hobby to "find a social life" instead of it arising as an organic product of socialization. The same can be said for the, again, vociferous chatter from mainly Americans about the loss of third spaces, and why the private sector has been "taking them away", and if companies just build more places to buy shit in then socialization will magically come back again.

In the US, the culture of youth sports seems to drain everyone involved to the point where it negates any positive effects it has on the kid. Buying equipment and paying fees to be part of the league, shuttling kids endlessly from one place to another, long suburban treks, often at the end of an already long and pointless school day, high parental expectations to make the most of that investment, both on child and on the staff. Playing footy with the neighborhood kids while mother fixes dinner it is not.

>Everyone (nerds, gays, women) should play sports

Everyone should have some sort of social participation in which physical *something* is involved, whether that be fitness or crafting. Those groups listed shy away from team sports not because of the physical or social aspect, but because they are naturally less competitive. Thinking [nerds|gays|women] are all going to get up tomorrow morning ready to kick the other team's ass is ludicrous. Again, this is what I am talking about with regards to Americans trying to solve a problem from the wrong side of the equation. You are not wrong that physical exercise and social bonding are necessary. But it will never come by forcing everyone into team sports.

>>11606
Nerds are extremely competitive in every other way but physical because they aren't able to dominate physically and it's why we are currently experiencing social and political upheaval from thiel et al. Tech and programming is probably the most competitive and backbiting male space besides politics. So many hours spent on who can use the best language, who can code the most elegantly with not that much thought to usefulness or solving broader problems.

Crafting really isn't physical enough to build confidence and fight neuroticism and female/gay crafting and art spaces are the substrate for cancel culture because nitpicking others work and policing the community around the hobby is how female nerds compete with each other. Especially now with how every hobby is monetized; groups are very concerned with arbitrating who can and can't use the community to launch themselves as a artisan/master crafter influencer.

It's simple advice for simpletons not meant to be dissected like this and I can't think of a way to miss the point more than to do that, but probably mostly true.

Thought provoking stuff as usual. It's very interesting to see many of these dynamics in the HEMA spaces and Larp world. These previously male only and insular hobbies are getting much more views, likely due to the creator-ification tied in with the monetary and social pressures have resulted in a very cheap feeling. I think the cultural adjustments that result from more women and MtFs being more present and perhaps emulating the nitpickiness alluded to by a previous poster. To be fair the gun space is already very female coded with the constant gear queer accusations.

Women are, of their nature, ill-suited to sports. Likewise homosexuals. For them, we have reserved dancing, ballet, etc. For nerdish men, as mentioned above, a young man's proclivity to engage in sports is genetically-encoded, and not something that can be forced from above; anyway, we would be much better off if we accepted that, though we are unequal, some may be talented in one domain and not others, and the mathematical genius should be given time to study and win plaudits (the maths world revolves around a small number of prizes and a lot of losers) rather than being forced by his dad (equally schlubby, but less intelligent, so more resentful) to be a "jock".

>>11614
> So many hours spent on who can use the best language, who can code the most elegantly with not that much thought to usefulness or solving broader problems.

Programming is a craft, not a sport. Mastering a craft is only "competitive" in the broadest sense of that word. I know we use the word "competition" for things like code golf or other crafts such as arts or gardening, but it's not the same kind of competition as facing an opposing team directly. Board games are cooperative for the most part, and the ones that are competitive abstract away the enemy team through tabletop mechanics. Only directly competitive games like multiplayer video games, card games, chess, and the like can be compared to sports in that sense. Competitive video gaming makes up a minority of total gaming, and the most popular of those are the ones where the team you face are hidden behind group objectives (MOBAs, team FPSes like Overwatch). The closest video game analogue to competitive sports, fighting games, are a painfully small niche with a barrier to entry, that being competitiveness. And you can make a very pithy but correct point in saying that *those* nerds who find themselves competing in Valorant should be in sports instead, and I will completely agree with that. But that's a far shot from the 60%+ wide swath of the population you insisted should join team based sports in your previous comment.

I equally disagree with >>11635's droll biological determinism. I think the current pool for sports-like activity in fact can be widened, but it depends on cultural factors and approachability of the sport. For example, following with the competitive theme I outlined in my previous reply, women are more drawn to sports if they do not have a *direct* competitive mechanism but are instead competitive by way of refinement - gymnastics, swimming, biathlons, and so on. Nerds may be drawn to LARPing and such activities with which they can engage their interest. But actually, I think we lose creative potential by starting with sports as the touchpoint for physical socialization. Imagine, for example, how much engagement from diverse groups we could bring if instead of ball sports, we encourage people to practice gardening, or neighborhood upkeep, or arts and crafts within ones' community. Would this not be more productive and holistic than a satirical fantasy of putting all the women and gays and nerds with the rest of the men in sports leagues?

>>11644
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7956464
>We hypothesized that girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who experience higher than normal levels of androgens prenatally, would show masculinization of behaviors that show sex differences. Therefore, we examined rough-and-tumble play and sex of preferred playmates in 3-8-year-old children with CAH and in unaffected 3-8-year-old male and female relatives. The hypothesized sex differences in rough-and-tumble play were seen, with unaffected boys showing more rough-and-tumble play than unaffected girls. However, CAH girls were similar to unaffected girls. Additionally, CAH boys showed reduced rough-and-tumble play. In contrast, sex of preferred playmates showed the hypothesized pattern of results. There were sex differences, with unaffected boys preferring boys and unaffected girls preferring girls. In addition, the preferences of girls with CAH were masculinized compared to those of unaffected girls. Results are discussed in terms of possible influences of social, hormonal, and illness factors.

>>11648
Okay, so?

I wish my dad would have pushed me into sports more. I don't know if it would have helped because I just wasn't that interested in it, but I don't think it would have hurt to have been forced to interact with other kids even if I would have hated it. I feel like it would have been good for my health. If the kid has interests besides video games and other frivolities like that it's probably fine to leave him to his own devices, but I think for 90% of kids it's probably a good idea until they are at least old enough to drive and start doing their own thing.