The movie "Friday Night Lights" shows just how important a tradition high school football has become. "Hoosiers" does the same for basketball. Varsity sports in high school provide a valuable opportunity for the top athletes to hone and showcase their skills. They feed the college football programs nationwide. They create a group entertainment possibility for the entire student body creating excitement and identity.

In some extremely isolated but highly publicized cases parents, coaches and students have gone too far. A few fights and some steroid use got the most attention. But is more subtle, more pervasive damage being done?

America is struggling with obesity and sedentary lifestyles. Type II (adult onset) diabetes is rampant. What causes this problem and what can we do to confront it?

Students outside the gifted and talented athletes that "make" the varsity teams are failing to get the type of physical education that they need. Just as math skills are important to an engineer, physical education is vital to anyone who owns and operates a human body.

Right now physical education ends at puberty for the 90% of students who don't participate in varsity sports. That's just about the time when most teens stop engaging in active childhood play thus ending their only regular exercise. It's also the time when lifelong habits are being formed.

Basic anatomy, proper diet, exercise and use of the health care system are skills and habits that are primarily taught at home. These skills need to be reinforced in our schools.  Sex education is part of the problem as educators have had difficulty creating a meaningful curriculum. Drug use education presents similar problems. Good grief, 35% of Americans can't even swim.

Non varsity sports are relegated to the bottom of the heap. Intermural sports if they exist at all are not funded, coached, nor is time allocated to make them attractive. Sports clubs don't really exist at most schools. PE class is a joke. Taught by the coaches whose jobs depend on varsity performance, coaches are not interested in these students because they can't help create a winning record.

Noam Chomsky at MIT seems shares same wavelength for a slightly different reason. "..and I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves society in general: it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions."