I much much prefer the European football model of professional sports clubs that run programs reaching all the way down to 5-year-olds. These clubs use profits

I much much prefer the European football model of professional sports clubs that run programs reaching all the way down to 5-year-olds. These clubs use profits from their pro teams to build their programs and are in no way associated with schools. Mixing sports with education beyond basic PE is a recipe for disaster, as you can pretty clearly see by the underperformance of American high school education. I grew up in deep football land in Texas, and my experience as a non-athlete was that football consumed nearly the entire budget for non-academics in the district. Everything else was subsisting on peanuts while the football program hired dozens of coaches and built a new $30m stadium. Probably 50% of my high school teachers were coaches who were just doing double duty as teachers for some extra cash.