'March Madness', Singapore version?
We get lost in discussions about our national teams every SEA Games. We moan about the anaemia of our local football league, while ardently following the European professional leagues.
Year after year, car rear window after rear window, the colours and the banners are of Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich. Dollar after dollar goes to merchandise and paid-programming to follow this hyper-commercialised football action.
Yet we do not have a similar event in local schools sports that takes our community and society to nervous excitement, like that which exist in other countries. Nothing in school sports ever takes the top of the news locally. We don’t care, it would seem.
March Madness
Have you heard of March Madness, the annual sporting event in US college (university) basketball? Even at the high school level, the Americans take their sports seriously. High school championship football leagues, especially in powerhouse states like Pennsylvania and Texas, are followed with almost-religious fervour.
FULL HOUSE: A packed crowd at the match between Mentor Cardinals vs Euclid Panthers, September 2014
Closer to home, the Japanese have their own March Madness. Known as Koshien, after the stadium in which the championship game is held, this bi-annual national high school baseball championship tournament is a nationally obsessed event for the Japanese.
PACKED TO THE GILLS: Support for high school baseball is evident in the turnout at matches. This is the championship game in the summer Koshien tournament, 2011.
I think it is fair to say that if we don’t care about our school sports, then nobody else will. And the question is why not?
Not a closed, old-boys' club
Of course, we have the old legacies of the independent elite schools who excel at sports, such as Anglo-Chinese School, Raffles Institution, St Andrew's School and St Joseph's Institution, among others. These schools are to be credited for nurturing sports excellence, but it does not have to be a closed club.
Each and every school can excel at sports, and be supported by their student and family communities, as well as their local neighborhood residents. Is that not an easy way to foster loyalty, support, rivalries and to push for excellence?
Even international schools in Singapore take sports (more) seriously and play in their own leagues. Why is this culture of sporting excellence missing in the vast majority of our local schools?
Perhaps it is time to examine the landscape of our society and how it has been tinkered with, and ask why we do not have local and community teams that engage our interest and arouse our passions.
Is it money? 'Friday Night Lights', a book about a championship-winning, working class, regional high school football team in East Texas, has spawned a movie, a television series and much more.
Sunderland vs Athletic Bilbao. It doesn't make sense that we care so much about them, thousands of miles away, and yet have no clue what happens to the school football team across the road from us.
Why can’t we take steady yet simple steps to develop our own engagement with our own people playing sports?
These are all inconvenient, but vital, questions to ask.
YOU SHALL NOT PASS: Singapore's Muhammadd Alfien Mohd Amir (centre in red) vies for the ball with Chile's Juan Pablo Purcell during the Singapore Youth Olympics
Future of local sports?
Toa Payoh vs Clementi.
Pioneer Secondary vs Bedok Secondary.
Perhaps this should be the future of our national schools championships. Do we shoot for an attendance of 5,000? 25,000? The seating capacity at the Singapore Sports Hub is 55,000 but well, we are heading to 6.9 million, so let’s aim for 69,000.
Can our local news spend some time on own sports events, and create personalities locally, instead of jabbering about Lionel Messi, Didier Drogba and Wayne Rooney every week?
The news has the responsibility to determine what makes the news. If they want European mega leagues to be the news, it will be so. If they make our own schools sports the news, it will be so.
There is the aphorism that Arthur Wellesley, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo, was trained to win it on the playing fields of Eton. Effort, concentration, the resilience to rebound and the will to win – these are all good lessons that a decade's worth of past year PSLE papers will not teach.
Sports, at the community and schools level, can be as effective a cause as any other to rally the nation and create a sense of nationhood.
Why haven't we done it?
Photos: Erik Drost, alexxis, Singapore 2010 Youth Olympics
