Is Your Sport Easy?

I hate to tell you this, but your sport is easy. Or, rather, I’m sure you’ve heard from lots of people that your sport is easy. They don’t understand, right? They don’t play your sport. They don’t go to two-hour practices everyday like you do. They don’t work as hard as you do. They can’t. Right? Across the world, and even here at Broad Run, there’s a wide variety of people who play a wide variety of sports: there’s sports that you’d think would rely entirely on physicality, like cross country and swimming, but there’s also sports that take years to master the technique of, like baseball and tennis. Then there’s those sports you know next to nothing about, like water polo and hobbyhorsing. There’s no way people who hobbyhorse work harder than you do… right? So, the question is, how can we really determine what the hardest sport is? And… who really does work the hardest? 

To begin, we have to discuss the basics. Why are sports hard? First and foremost, high school sport practices across the country typically last 1.5-3 hours per day, effectively cutting into time reserved for homework, social get-togethers, and relaxation. Additionally, sports take a toll on student-athletes’ bodies, minds, and social lives. According to the National Library of Medicine, around 90% of student-athletes report playing through an injury in-season. This makes sense when sports like crew and track require racing until you reach full exertion, meaning your body is always working, while sports like wrestling and soccer put you at risk for physical contact, also increasing the chances of injury. So… is that how you determine what’s the hardest? Based on injury and physicality? But then what about those other, more technical sports, like figure skating? According to US Figure Skating, the average figure skater takes six years of dedicated, hard work to pass the gold skating skills test. And what about baseball? How does someone even throw a ball at 108.5 mph, like the fastest pitch ever recorded? 

This is a constant argument I’ve heard many times during my past year at Broad Run, but it’s a debate that’s been around long before that, a topic I’ve noticed has been very prominent recently with the rise in social media use. The difference in marketing strategies for different sports teams is a big reason why this lingering question exists. “Why does the football team get to run out last at our pep rally?” “Shouldn’t there be more people at the girls basketball games, when they’re just as good as the boys? So then why do the boys get more social media coverage?” “Are they… better than us?”  In hallways, classrooms, at lunch, and even on the bus I constantly hear it: the struggle of “my sport is harder because of this,” and “but my sport is harder because of this.” Based on the fact that I’ve only ever played three sports, I’ve decided that I am not qualified to tell you which sports require more work than others. So don’t get mad about the next things you’re reading: these are the voices of the student class at Broad Run High School, representing our collective opinion. 

When I first started the interviewing process, I kept getting a lot of answers saying that cross country is the hardest sport. Sarah McCarthy, a sophomore on the Broad Run cross country team, says that cross country is the hardest sport because “it’s more of a mental challenge than just physical.” She told me, “Anyone can run, but it’s the mental part behind it, and you have to have a strong mind to get you through your races.” I also asked Amber Scout, a sophomore who has never been a part of a long distance running team but who has experience in running from field hockey and soccer. She said that “[cross country] is… mental, and you also have to run a lot, which is pretty hard.” The answers were all pointing at running, and it seemed like everyone was saying this because it’s a very mentally hard sport. It’s hard on your mind to run a 5k, or 3.1 miles, at a race pace for anywhere ranging from sixteen to thirty minutes. But something about these answers didn’t seem quite right to me. 

Eventually, I figured it out. As someone who is on the Broad Run cross country team, it turned out that most of the people I was interviewing (or, my friends who are also on that team) were a bit biased. So, I took to trustworthy Snapchat to ask a larger group of people from our school what they think the hardest sport is right now, and my tally ended with gymnastics coming in with the most votes, taking the lead. Sophomore Aadya Pitani, who plays badminton outside of Broad Run, shares her opinion that gymnastics is the hardest sport because “it’s really hard to memorize all of your routines, and you have to have balance and flexibility and be really strong.” When asked about if she thinks gymnastics is more mental, physical, or technical she answered that it was a combination of all of them. She explains, “it’s really dangerous, but at the same time, it’s really hard to learn all of the moves… and you also have to remember everything and you have to have a perfect posture, your body has to be the perfect way.” Senior Ben Blackford chimes in on the idea of which aspect makes a sport hard, saying, “for me personally… I think that the mental aspect is probably the hardest one… all of the other aspects, the mental one just makes those ones even harder.” Delving deeper, he explains, “for any technical aspect you have in there, if you’ve got that mental battle of trying to resist the pain and everything your body is telling you not to do, you have to do that on top of all of the technical… and all of the physical aspects, you have to do that on top of the mental.” 

The only consensus we can agree on, it seems, is that sports are hard when they don’t just challenge you, but they make you challenge yourself. From Sarah and Amber talking about mental struggles during races, and Aadya mentioning the mentally hard aspects of gymnastics due to memorization, it looks like sports are more about the internal battle of proving yourself wrong than beating your opponents. “It depends on the sport, but overall, I’d say I think mental is the hardest part,” Ben concludes. 

If you think about it, every sport is a mental battle, everyday. No matter what team you’re a part of, or if you participate in an individual sport, you have to convince yourself that it’s worth it to put in the work everyday. You have to convince yourself of how much you want it, because if you don’t want it at all, why are you doing it? And I don’t think you chose to click on this article and read it because you really care all that much about what a random fifteen-year-old girl has to say about sports, I think you chose to read it because you’re tired of people saying your sport is easy without knowing the mental- or physical, if you’re an acrobat- hoops you jump through. I’m assuming you were hoping to see the sport you play in bold letters at the end of the article. Maybe you even skipped to this conclusion just to read my final answer. But if this article showed you anything, it should be that every single sport is hard in its own way, because every single sport requires focus, dedication, and a constant mental fight. So, no, I’m not going to give you a cut and dry answer of which sport is the most difficult, because it seems that that’s relative and different for every person. But I will tell you, no sport is easy. And maybe keep that in mind the next time you want to tell someone that their sport is.