Another form of spending time for children and teenagers in the United States is clubs and sports clubs, which are available in great variety not only in every school, but also in other places – churches, city and municipal governments, businesses and companies, adult sports clubs, shopping malls, etc. In principle, any trainer or activist can rent a room and with the appropriate license to run a club or, say, a sports section.
Sports are a huge part of the daily culture of Americans. On the one hand, this is indeed an obese and hypodynamic nation accustomed to fast-food snacks. But on the other hand, it is probably the most athletic nation in the world. For many here, sports are a powerful springboard into adulthood, and teenagers who show some athletic ability and achieve some success have a good chance of receiving numerous athletic grants to attend some of the country’s most prestigious and expensive universities and colleges.
Of course, children in the U.S. are involved in music, drawing, sculpting, dancing, including ballet, and technical creativity. In this respect, the market for children’s cravings and extracurricular activities is very large. But sports are at the top of the list. Second, perhaps, is church or synagogue, where children and their families go almost every weekend. In third place are all kinds of art, music, and intellectual pursuits.
It should be noted that American teenagers do not learn additional foreign languages as their peers do in other parts of the world. Not knowing at least one foreign language is not perceived in society as a lack of education. Unlike other countries, where children are reluctant to learn a foreign language, Americans live in a multicultural environment since childhood, almost daily confronted with the habits and lives of other peoples (of course, in their Americanized version), and it would seem that they should easily master other languages – but they do not. Yet American children grow up in a society where almost all of the world’s cultures, ethnic groups, and lifestyles are represented, especially in big cities, and many of them are bilingual by definition – for example, they speak Spanish because their parents speak it at home. Spanish is, in fact, the second language of the United States (as I said, there is not and never has been an official state language in the country).
But back to sports. High school and college sports in the USA are the most powerful in the world and are not only the basis of American professional sports, but also a big part of local youth culture. Sports are played everywhere – in school and outdoors, on playgrounds and summer camps, at home and away. For low-income American families, a child’s sports career is the luckiest lottery ticket they can draw in this lifetime. Low-income parents do everything they can to send their children to play sports – primarily those that are popular in the United States and therefore promising for future finances: American soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball, women’s soccer, figure skating, and tennis. And parents who dream of their child going to university, but are not sure they have enough money to pay for an education, stimulate in their children a love for less popular and spectacular, but very “college” sports in the United States – from swimming to athletics, from volleyball to archery, from skating to chess.
Thus, most U.S. children and teens participate seriously in sports, thinking, as a rule, not about their health and the role of physical education in its enhancement, but about their future. About the future think and their parents, who patiently take their child to training, waiting for hours under the windows of the gym, go on weekends to competitions and, sitting on the podium, in every way to support their child, jealously looking around at the other parents, pay a lot of money, since most sports for children and teens is commercial, buy the necessary equipment, which is also not cheap, pay for travel to competitions and gatherings. All this is in the hope that sports will help a child get into university, pay for his studies, build his reputation among his peers, and strengthen his self-esteem. As a rule, athletes are not “nerds” in the classroom and do not let school bullies get the better of them, which of course there are in America, as there are in any country in the world.
University coaches and admissions officers literally chase young people who excel in some relatively rare sports. However, university sports are a special topic; here I just want to point out that sports are an important issue for high school students in the United States. However, a high school P.E. teacher is a typical fat guy with a face red from high blood pressure, who looks ridiculous and very unathletic in his cool sports clothes and carrying a ball in his hands. However, these teachers earn much more than teachers of, say, mathematics or physics.
Americans take just as much pride in their children’s athletic accomplishments in school competitions as they do in, say, winning the Olympics. Winning a school or neighborhood competition becomes a family legend that is passed down through generations, and extended family members are just as proud as their parents. However, this usually applies not only to sports, but also to other competitions, including championships in spelling or debate, completely unknown to Russians.