I COULDN'T agree more with John Dunlop (Letters, November 13) regarding the need for more sports participation among our youth and less with the Very Rev Kelvin Holdsworth's astonishing view that sport is inherently bad (“Church leader: Ban sport in schools”, The Herald, November 12).
Provost Holdsworth’s view that sport should not be taught in schools also is remarkable in that one wonders, first and foremost, what planet he inhabits; sport in state schools in any recognisable sense - certainly as it was when I was a youngster - is virtually dead and gone already.
When I attended school, team and individual sports were plentiful. The benefits are obvious in terms of health, but also various.
Sport, particularly team sport, teaches self-discipline, the benefits of working together for a common purpose, the need to rely upon each other, the realisation that the whole can be so much more than the individual components. It also leads to a sense of comradeship and develops friendships which last a lifetime.
One might have thought a reverend would have recognised parallels with some of the values he presumably preaches.
We live at a time when our children are becoming overweight. We live at a time when the National Health Service is warning of increasing demands being placed upon it due to increasing obesity and lack of exercise.
That trend can be effectively reversed by the reintroduction of sport at state schools. The teachers' strike of the mid-1980s effectively led to the disappearance of team sport played on Saturday mornings. I have no grouse with the action the teachers took at that time, but it is not beyond the wit of mankind to provide a solution to additional hours worked. The benefits would be enormous as outlined above.
As Mr Dunlop says, there has been no legacy from either the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games. We have become obsessed with funding the elite in sport to the detriment of sport at grass roots and school level.
Roger Graham,
23 Cullen Crescent,
Inverkip.
SPORT in schools is an integral component of the health of the nation and anyone who believes otherwise is at best misguided. It also engenders skills such as working together for a common purpose yet in a non-academic environment. Sport also teaches one that in life there is both winning and losing and how to cope with them.
Governing bodies of sport and their financial instrument Sportscotland do not see this truth. Their model is to fund only those who are likely to win medals at an elite level expecting these athletes to miraculously appear without meaningful investment in grassroots sport. Despite their very large cheque book Sportscotland will not help fund any form of maintenance of facilities but only "improvements" therefore ignoring those at the base of the playing pyramid.
In my youth I played rugby, along with many other sports, for Rutherglen Academy and though we often had difficulty scraping together a team and were regularly thrashed by opponents we never failed to play a fixture. Countless players came before me and many played after me until today when the current iteration of the school, Cathkin High, has produced its first Scotland international in Duncan Weir. Unbelievably, the school admitted last year that it could not afford new rugby jerseys for the school team. I am certain I am not alone in being proud of Dunc and immensely frustrated at the lack of support for the school.
Post-2014 Commonwealth Games there appears to a Field of Dreams mentality by those in charge of sport as they think that to "build it and they will come" will guarantee a long queue of participants desperate to utilise the facilities irrespective of the fact that without being exposed to sport at school the vast majority will completely ignore these cathedrals to elite sport. If we do not have the solid foundations of school sport then we fail our younger generations and our society can only descend into greater levels of obesity, diabetes and all the other consequences of an unfit population.
David Stubley,
22 Templeton Crescent, Prestwick.
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