Just like our society, sportsmanship has really changed in the last 20 years. Today’s high school athletes have many different factors that affect how they treat opponents, officials, and team members. These new variables have led athletes down a dangerous path towards negativity and lack of construction. This not only develops a sense of pessimism towards athletics, but also general bad feelings towards today’s younger athletes.

Advanced technology helped shape the way athletes treat each other. The Internet has played an important role in the way students communicate. Now, chat rooms and websites offer high school students the opportunity to interact with each other. When used appropriately, these can be very productive in helping students develop relationships. Often this is not a popular approach in using up-to-date technology. Instead, many high school athletes tend to visit websites that allow site members to post negative information. These sites generally do not require members to use their real names. Therefore, athletes have free rein to joke back and forth with absolutely no responsibility for their words. This practice has often resulted in verbal or physical altercations on and off the field of play.

Parents’ attitudes and actions have helped instigate more misbehavior from high school athletes. Being a poor role model is one way that parents have aided in the influx of negative sportsmanship. For example, during a 2004 high school basketball game in Pennsylvania, where a parent body criticized a referee for ejecting his wife from the game for using obscenities. These types of incidents have helped high school athletes see violence as an acceptable reaction to unfavorable results. Behavior like this has been highly publicized in the media, causing many organizations to become advocates for better parental behavior. In fact, the International Sports Institute has been promoting a National Sportsmanship Day for 16 years. Many famous athletes have jumped on board like Lance Armstrong, Chris Spielman and Jennie Finch.

Practicing a team concept is another element of sportsmanship that has deteriorated in high school athletics. Players today seem to have a very selfish perspective on athletic participation. This kind of attitude has trickled down from professional players to the college ranks. Now, today’s best players are often found on the worst teams because their attitude is not conducive to creating a winning environment. This trend provides evidence that players often put their individual desires before the vital needs of the team. In earlier athletic environments this type of attitude was not accepted in sport.

In conclusion, today’s athletes must battle many distractions to practice proper sportsmanship. Athletes may even face pressure from their teammates not to be a good sport during and after competition. To help remedy this growing problem, coaches need to provide proper instruction on the importance of good sportsmanship. Additionally, they must send a clear message that poor sportsmanship will not be tolerated within their sporting problem. By using this discovery, coaches can protect themselves from embarrassing behavior by athletes in practice and game situations.