High schools are not encouraging their students to enroll in extracurricular activities enough. 

In order to get the attention of a large and different audience of teenagers, you should appeal to them and what gets their attention. Sending emails or advertising the club once on the announcements is not going to pique the interest of most high school students. 

Teachers and administrators at MHS lack the effort to figure out the problem of low engagement and involvement from students. Being able to get the attention of students should be emphasized more and it is a clear problem. 

When asked  whether or not a student would take opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities, the student responded saying, “Yes, I think that if I was more encouraged I’d participate in extracurricular activities due to the benefits I’d get from taking them.”

This shows that if encouraged by teachers and coaches, more students would participate in more sports and clubs.

As a student athlete myself, being able to be yourself and expressing your emotions on the field/court is what these students need. Extracurricular activities are an outlet for students to find themselves and a distraction from “reality”. High schools need to encourage students to join extracurriculars and sports in order to emulate success.

As a football player, I have not seen a gradual increase in players over the years. According to Coach Roberts, “we normally hover in a football program anywhere from 50 to 55 to 60 kids, I mean every year just depends on the year.” We can see a slow increase in numbers if coaches and teachers work harder to get the word out. 

If you really want to figure out when tryouts/practices are, you would have to know the players and or the coaches and ask them what the times were. When I was signing up for baseball, I only knew the date of the tryout, not the time nor the place or what to wear. 

Luckily, I had a friend who had played before and knew the coach, so he was able to tell me where the practice was and what we were doing. The coaches and adults who are in charge have trouble relaying the information to the kids they do not know and are not finding other ways to interact with them. 

I asked Coach Roberts about relaying information to new people and he stated, “I’m always trying to figure out how I can be better for our school. So it always starts with me as I’m trying to always work to feel how I can be better as a head coach.”

In order to appeal to these students and how they receive information the best, teachers and coaches need to take accountability and focus on advertising sports and clubs offered by the school in ways that will more effectively encourage students to join.

From what I can see, it is currently a work in progress when it comes to interactions with new players. This is most likely the same situation with other coaches and leaders of clubs.

This is a situation where the way to fix this must be mutual between students and coaches/teachers. An MHS student said they would learn the easiest about extracurricular activities by emails or announcements but holding a survey to find out how the majority of people would learn about these meetings.

There are a lot of variables and flaws when it comes to deciding how to roll out the news. The teachers and coaches need to be more informative and interactive whilst the students need to express how they would best retain this information.

Again, there should be more encouragement of extracurriculars and sports if teachers/coaches and students work together in order to find a common ground. Extracurriculars are so important because they help take your mind off school and create an opportunity for you to be yourself.

Let’s all work together and give each other an opportunity to express themselves and let these high school students gain the courage to explore different paths.