Musical Interludes Add a Sour Note to High School Athletics

Ahh, the joys of spring high school sports. The ping of the ball off an aluminum bat. The earthy smell of a freshly mowed field. Gleefully rolling up your sleeves on that first really warm afternoon. Sitting on the bleachers between innings with a couple hundred strangers listening to songs about principals sleeping with their students. Scoring a thick burger hot off the . . .

Wait a minute, what?

Songs about principals sleeping with their students? Well, that's the kind of questionable aural fare you might hear at some point this baseball season. More on that particular tune later. Spectators -- kids of all ages, parents, grandparents -- probably stand a better chance of being subjected to songs that glorify alcohol consumption. Just in time for prom season.

In recent years, Varsity Letter's ears have perked up time and again at the inappropriate music played at high school sporting events, which are supposed to be wholesome extensions of the classroom, and usually are.

But the time during warmups, between innings and at halftimes gives the would-be DJs handling the music plenty of time to play songs that are suitable for radio, an iPod or a home stereo, but unsuitable for a school-sanctioned event.

In those first three cases, you listen to music. At games, you're subjected to it.

Before we proceed, let's be clear about the difference: There's nothing wrong with kids listening to music that pushes boundaries in any number of directions. But there is a time and a place for it, and a school-sanctioned event is not it.

During basketball season, many of the selections are hard-core rap or hip-hop, some of which contain so many expletives (some edited, some not) and celebrated thuggery that they're more suited to R-rated movie dialogue than they are to a school event.

Even the edited songs are like profane Mad Libs: They might not say the words, but the blanks allow you to hone your profanity. And one doesn't need to be in the National Honor Society to fill in those blanks.

If a teacher stood in front of his class and repeated the lyrics or themes of some of these songs, outside of an educational context, he'd be canned. What makes a school-sanctioned event on school property any different from the classroom? Why do the administrators and coaches turn deaf ears to soundtracks that embarrass their schools, their athletic programs and their teams?

Let's draw a parallel: Watch "Scarface" at home with your buddies? Fine. Watch "Scarface" during study hall? Uh, no.

It's not just basketball that breaks out the racy or misogynistic stuff. A colleague reports that he was covering a Maryland county girls' soccer championship last fall when the public address system blasted a song with "pimp" references and a derogatory term for females.