Arrowhead Union High School is a public high school in Merton, Wisconsin (population: 8,269), a suburb 30 miles west of Milwaukee. The campus, which sits on 117 acres of land, is flanked to the west and north by pristine lakes that are popular for fishing and other forms of outdoor recreation. It’s located in Waukesha County, which has the second-highest per capita income in the state. The area’s suburban location and wealth enable Arrowhead to provide its 2,000 students sterling venues for academics and the arts. But the facilities that stand out the most at Arrowhead are the ones reserved for sports.
According to its website, Arrowhead offers 33 different sports activities for boys and girls. Among the jewels of the school’s sprawling, $72-million campus (much of which is viewable through a virtual online tour) are a 6,000-seat track and football stadium, replete with six luxury viewing boxes and a two-tier press box; four gymnasiums; an indoor ice hockey arena; a swimming pool; 12 tennis courts; an “adventure ropes and challenge” course; two rock-climbing walls; a fitness center; and multiple state-of-the-art fields for baseball, softball, soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse.
Few other public schools in the nation — regardless of their location — can match Arrowhead’s athletics offerings. But given the considerable physical, mental, social, emotional, educational, and professional benefits that youth participation in sports confers, it’s worth asking: Do suburban student-athletes have a leg up on their urban and rural counterparts? And do students, regardless of where they live, have a right of equitable access to sports?
Disparities in sports participation by region
As it turns out, when it comes to sports access and participation, it isn’t a slam dunk for the suburbs. According to a recent study commissioned by the Aspen Institute (Project Play, 2021), a higher percentage of rural high schools (73%) nationwide offer interscholastic sports compared to suburban (70%) or urban (63%) schools. And the percentage of suburban students (41%) who play on high school sports teams, while higher than urban students (33%), is slightly lower than rural students (42%).
But the same study also cites research showing that, compared to rural students, suburban student-athletes start playing their primary sport at a younger age, play for more years and hours per week, are more highly specialized, and are 2.6 times more likely to belong to a sports league outside school (Bell et al., 2018).
The availability of youth sports leagues outside school gives a clear advantage to suburban students. But not all of them. According to a study by Nirav Pandya (2021):
A shift from school-based sports participation to private, club sports has occurred within the USA. This is the background in which a “pay to play” model has developed excluding families who may not have the economic means to participate. [Disparities in sports participation have] been exacerbated by COVID-19 in which adolescent youth have been less physically active. . . . With a de-emphasis on school-based sports, the only options available to families are expensive and cost-prohibitive.
Case in point: The Aspen Institute (Solomon, 2017) reports that youth soccer in the U.S. has become “a pay-to-play venture . . . dominated by the suburban middle class” that costs families up to $5,000 for access to club teams and tournaments — a system that leaves many Latinx youth (who are the focus of the report) behind.
Many suburban communities make available more opportunities for youth to excel in sports, but availability does not equal access. Suburban students who don’t play sports are more likely than non-suburban students to claim that their school does not offer sports opportunities that “interest” them. According to Project Play (2021), the percentage of Latinx students who say this is twice as high in suburban schools (26%) than in urban or rural schools (13%). The same report notes that students in suburban public schools are up to three times more likely than urban students to identify cost as a reason they don’t participate in school sports. One wonders whether students’ lack of “interest” in a sport correlates with their inability to pay for it.
Many suburban communities make available more opportunities for youth to excel in sports, but availability does not equal access.
The popularity of private suburban sports leagues raises additional questions: Are these leagues replacing public school athletics? Or are they somehow driving up the cost of participating in public school sports? Do students who participate in private leagues at a young age have a significant advantage when the time comes to try out for interscholastic teams? Or is the problem simply that suburban public schools are not defraying enough of the costs for playing on their sports teams? These questions deserve research and policy responses — and perhaps legal ones.
Access to sports and the law
Courts have generally refused to recognize a legal right to participate in interscholastic sports activities. For example, in J.M., Jr. v. Montana High School Association (Montana Supreme Court, 1994) and L.P.M. and J.D.T. v. School Board of Seminole County (Florida District Appellate Court, 2000), individual students unsuccessfully sought to overcome disciplinary sanctions or other restrictions placed on their sports participation. And in Campbell County School District v. State (Wyoming Supreme Court, 2008), Wyoming’s highest court held that the law did not require that specific athletic programs or activities be provided to all students statewide.
But extracurricular activities are widely considered one facet of a holistic, high-quality education. Using that logic, litigants have made the case for greater or more equitable extracurricular opportunity (including sports) within broader disputes involving desegregation, school funding, or discrimination (see Kim, 2021). Perhaps the most prominent legal avenue is Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs. Students have sued local and state agencies for failing to provide equitable athletic opportunities and resources on the basis of sex: See, for example, A.B. v. Hawaii State Department of Education (9th Cir., 2022), a Title IX class-action lawsuit alleging unequal treatment in girls’ athletics programs.
Non-Title IX cases challenging unequal access to sports are not as prolific, despite evidence suggesting gaping inequities in other dimensions. For example, a 2017 federal study reveals that students attending schools with predominantly wealthy or white student populations participate in sports at nearly twice the rate of students attending schools with predominantly poor or non-white student populations (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2017). This disparity sounds hauntingly consistent with the educational inequities often exposed in statewide school funding cases.
Prospects for legally challenging disparities in sports access
Any lawsuit taking on unequal athletic opportunity between suburban and non-suburban schools faces steep challenges, not the least of which is drawing the connection between vastly different types of school settings. To use Wisconsin as an example, it’s not as easy to build a football stadium in Milwaukee as it is in Merton.
On the other hand, regional cost differences apply to many types of educational resources and activities, and yet courts have held that states have an obligation to provide an equitable and adequate education to all students statewide. This principle was recently underscored in Hoke County Board of Education v. State (North Carolina Supreme Court, 2022), in which North Carolina’s highest court ordered the state to transfer additional funds to its education and health systems to ensure that “every child in every school in every district is provided with the opportunity to receive at least a sound basic education.” The court also cited other state courts — Kansas, New Jersey, and Washington, to name a few — that have acted in similar fashion.
Advocates may find it challenging to encompass enough schools within a single case to highlight stark regional differences. Litigating unequal access to sports between school districts could accomplish this, but that would require a statewide focus. Focusing within a single school district or region would seem to be more manageable.
Take New York City, for example. In 2018, Black and Latinx public high school students in New York City sued the city’s education department, alleging that it violated the city’s human rights ordinance by maintaining “discriminatory policies that deny Black and Latin[x] students equal access to the life-changing possibilities of sports” (see Alajbegović, 2019).
According to plaintiffs, Black and Latinx students throughout the city were more likely to attend high schools that offer fewer than 10 sports teams, with many attending schools with fewer than five teams. And more than 17,000 Black and Latinx students lacked access to a single public high school sports team — and were twice as likely as students of other races to experience this total deprivation. The case settled in March 2022; the city’s education department must now enact reforms that give Black and Latinx students more opportunities to play sports and a greater voice in shaping the athletic programs available to them.
The settlement promises to bring relief to students attending urban schools in New York City. But it does not bridge the wider urban-suburban sports gap, nor does it provide relief to suburban (or rural) students unable to take advantage of the many sports opportunities available to wealthier students within their communities. Further legal advocacy in this realm will require creativity and, perhaps, a wider lens.
And so it goes: Across America, some student-athletes are quite literally off to the races, while others are stuck at the starting line, waiting for the sound of the gun.
References
Alajbegović, A. (2019, Summer). Still separate, still unequal: Litigation as a tool to address New York City’s segregated public schools. City University of New York Law Review, 22 (2).
Bell, D.R., Post, E.G., Tigstead, S.M., Schaefer, D.A., McGuine, T.A., Watson, A.M., & Brooks, M.A. (2018). Sports specialization characteristics between rural and high school athletes. Orthopaedic Journal, 6 (1).
Kim, R. (2021). Do students have a right to ‘equal extracurricular opportunity?’ Phi Delta Kappan, 102 (8), 64-65.
Pandya, N.K. (2021). Disparities in youth sports and barriers to participation. Current Reviews in Musculoskeletal Medicine, 14 (6).
Project Play. (2021). Reimagining school sports: Small suburban public high schools. The Aspen Institute.
Solomon, J. (2017, September 1). Latinos in soccer: What’s the U.S. model so they’re not left behind? The Aspen Institute.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2017). K-12 education: High school sports access and participation (GAO-17-754R).
This article appears in the February 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 5, p. 60-62.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kim
Robert Kim is the executive director of the Education Law Center, based in Newark, NJ. His most recent book is Education and the Law, 6th ed.
