Violence in Sport - Essay Example

Compare and Contrast Violence in sport has become one of the issues of concern in the sports sector. With the recent changing trends in sports, violence has not only been associated with professional athletes, but has also gotten its way up to the college and high school levels. This paper compares and contrasts Staffo, Donald’s Strategies for reducing criminal violence among athletes and John Pietrofesa and Al Rosen’s Interscholastic Sports Msdirected? Misguided? Misnomer? The paper gives the similarities and differences in the ideas expressed in these articles.

The first similarity in these articles is ha they both discuss abut the ills n athletics. In his article, Staffo presents an insightful discussion about interscholastic athletics. Although he acknowledges that interscholastic athletics is a good initiative that can positively contribute to the life of students, he says that it has not been used to instill educational values in learners as it ought to be. According to his research, the goals f scholastic athletics are no longer important to the school administration, teachers and students.

Today, scholastic athletics has become a tool for propagating violence, unhealthy competition and encouragement of the domination of teachers over the student body. Similar sentiments are echoed by Pietrofesa and Rosen who traces the development of violence and criminal activities in athletics amongst the professional athletes, high school and college students. The other similarity in the articles is that they both give recommendations on how violence and other criminal activities in athletics can be resolved.

To Staffo, the best thing to do is to stop perceiving scholastic athletics as a tool for competition. Being that students are encouraged to participate in athletics so as to defeat their opponent makes them grow up as bad citizens who can do anything at whatever cost to out do their opponents. Besides, both the scholars argue that it is upon the physical educators and coaches to ensure that they provide the necessary counseling skills on their athletes. Better still, team managers should offer periodical lectures on athletes so as to teach them on the benefits of refraining from violence and any other form of violence that can derail them from continuing with their athletics activities.

However, despite these similarities, the articles have lots of differences. First, while Interscholastic Sports Msdirected? Misguided? Misnomer? is mainly concerned about high school athletics, Strategies for reducing criminal violence among athletes dwells on professional athletics. In fact, unlike Staffo, Pietrofesa and Rosen combines high school, college and professional athletics in which he says that violence has become a common place. Besides, the articles differ in that they focus on different aspects of ills in athletics.

On his part, Staffo discusses about violence perpetrated by athletes while playing. However, Pietrofesa and Rosen concentrate on off-the pitch misconducts that does not only include violence, but encompass other criminal activities such as sexual abuse, physical assault and drug abuse. These, according to the article, have been identified to be affecting high school, college, new and veteran professional athletes. So, these are the similarities and differences between the articles.