Coaches often talk about the importance of chemistry within a team and how the way all the individual interact can produce more success than anyone might predict based on raw talent. You rarely hear a classroom teacher gush about how a freshman English class has performed far better than raw test scores predicted.
Academic classes don't assign "team grades." The emphasis is always on how the individual does and no matter how we try to develop a civilized "classroom culture," in the end it's each student for herself.
That incentive of not wanting to let your team down is powerful and we have simply removed it from the options for most classes.
Players who don't buy into the team concept tend to either quit athletics or find a sport that does not require a group for success. Or they are simply asked to leave.
Think of all the academic classes you have been in where you knew a fair percentage of your peers could not care less about the subject being studied, much less care about how those around them were doing, how much they were learning, and how they were connecting new learning with previous learning.
Football teams that don't work together, with individuals sacrificing and going beyond expectations, always end up losing in the long run. The players may have to suffer collectively for a while if the "every person for himself" ethos takes over, but lack of success is self-correcting in sports. Coaches and players want to win, or at least perform their best, and simply repeating routines and traditions that are not producing success can't continue. Changes must be made.
I was browsing some of my current college class gradebooks the other day and found a significant number of students either not participating or submitting assignments consistently late. Several students are in danger of not passing, but more are looking at a final grade that has almost no relationship to their writing ability. They are the "Bart Simpsons" of the academic world, mostly underachieving and then complaining of the world's unfairness.
In sports, there is enormous peer pressure to push oneself, to rise to standards and surpass them. If there is no blocking for the talented quarterback, and no one to catch the passes, all that individual talent is for naught. In my college classes, those students who are earning solid A's could not care less about their peers who are flailing (and failing). Why should they?
There are a very few "peer editing" assignments where one student's not participating could affect a partner's score, but for online courses my practice quickly became to NOT penalize the partner of a student who simply did not post a draft for the "peer edit." Yes, those students with the underachieving partner missed some feedback, but I wonder just how helpful that feedback would be in the end.
Imagine the unrest in my courses if I declared that each group or partnership would get the same score, even if someone didn't participate at all. Oh, the injustice!
But I recall many sports practices in my life where the entire team would be running wind sprints because one person on the team was late or repeatedly ran the wrong play or simply "dogged it" during a drill. It wasn't fair, perhaps, and we grumbled, but the peer pressure on that kid who was not working hard mostly meant that such indiscretions were not repeated.
Sports value and practice community in ways most academic courses just can't or won't.
I would often ask students on the yearbook staff about how many C-level photos and captions should appear in the final book. The answer was zero, of course, with the goal being that everything in the yearbook would be A-level (however we define that).
As with a football team that does not win all its games, sometimes content in the yearbook did not rise to a high level. We had to publish at some point, even if almost everything could be a little better, much as a football team needs to play the scheduled game even though players don't feel ready. But the team goal remained to "win."
Performance activities reward working together and sincere support for people. Most academic classrooms are all about how I did, not how we did.
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