Enthusiastic with Journalism Class, I am facing an opportunity I had never had in Portugal. Photo By: Beth Jackson
By Vasco Garcia
Portugal has no school sports or teams. If interested in practicing athletics, teenagers must join a club. Surprisingly, most adolescents do not practice sports at all.
From my experience at PHS, I have found that school sports have a major role in American high schools. Students enjoy joining teams, and competing against other schools by faithfully representing their school colors. Competitivity and rivalry between schools grow from week to week as the seasons go by, as well as the will to improve and triumph. It is fair to say, except for students that work, practicing a sport occupies much of an American teenager’s time. Without participating in sports, many would struggle with an excess amount of spare time and lack of activities to fulfill it. I recognize that the practice of a sport is good for one’s health, mental state and teaching important values such as teamwork, sacrifice and self-control.
This scenario may not, unfortunately, be found in my country. Portuguese public schools have no connection with athletic activities besides the weekly three PE hours. Young people, especially girls, are therefore not interested in playing anything at all and usually opt by going on diets and “hunger strikes” to stay fit. This separation between education and sports means also that the initiative of joining a team has to come from the student and his family only. Unfortunately, only few take a firm step towards a team, subjecting themselves to long displacements from their school site to the sport pavilion or field. Another obstacle they will have to overcome is the payment of the monthly fees, which are sometimes very high for those who do not have much money. Due to the economical crisis Portugal is going through many do not have enough budget to spend at least forty dollars in an extracurricular activity. Confronted with all these difficulties to simply practice a sport, many give up and choose to “hang out” in the streets for long endless afternoons without any purpose.
Although, there are difficulties many still manage to practice sports. Even then the conditions and atmosphere are very different from Indiana. First of all, the conditions are not at Plymouth High School level of quality. Locker rooms and fields are not as good, the grass is artificial in most cases and maintenance not as well-kept. For example, even being the National Rugby Champion, the club where I played for the last three seasons, uses two containers as locker rooms. It has no proper showers or toilets, and has holes in the wood floor. Despite being the best team, sponsors’ contributions are not enough to build a simple locker room, and the club is forced to have countless fundraisers every year.
The variety of sports practiced is also inferior to the one in America and varies from boys to girls. Boys especially play soccer, tennis and rugby while girls opt by volleyball, dance and gym. A sport season lasts a whole school year from September to June. This happens because of our climatic conditions that allow any sport, including surfing, to be practiced during all four seasons. As a result, players become specialists and focus on one single sport and do not learn how to play any other sport. If they want to play a new sport, they have to wait until the next September. Since they can play the same sport during the entire year, Portuguese teens only practice once or twice a week, three times maximum. This means that they do not play more than five hours of a sport per week while Americans practice about eight.
It seems as though Plymouth High School athletes end up practicing more in one sport during a single season than Portuguese athletes practice in all four seasons. This difference illustrates the contempt Portuguese have towards sports even knowing how important this is for the growth and definition of the human being. Once again, I believe Portugal should “run “after America in sportive promotion.