Chances are you’ve been involved with a sports team here at Liberty, and with that involvement often comes competitive instincts and an instant perception of your sport versus others.

Those who work hard at their particular sport often have a strong bias towards that sport and don’t understand that there are others who put in equal energy into what they do for their sports.

However, you can’t judge a sport that you don’t play without knowing the actual dedication and training those athletes go through to train for their specific events or roles. For example, between the distance runners and sprinters on the track team, there’s a lot of argument over who works harder because of the major difference in the difficulty between stamina and speed. Sprinters put in a different type of effort than those who run long distance, which creates a divide of understanding. But the fact of the matter is that without experience in one track event, you have no right to claim how hard it is.

Moreover, tennis often gets the reputation of being a “joke” sport because several of the tennis players treat it as a joke and stop showing up to practice by the end of the season. As a result, those tennis players who put tremendous effort into their sport end up being seen as playing an easy sport simply because their teammates don’t take it seriously. As this shows, you can’t judge how difficult a sport is by being an observer without being a player.

Yes, friendly competition between sports engenders camaraderie and appreciation for athletics at our school. But people need to recognize that it’s pretty much pointless to argue about which the sport is hardest because each is difficult in its own unique way.