High School and the Sports Spirit Complex

By Karen Sternheimer

I currently live about a block away from a large public high school. Students walk by sporting their school merch, including hats, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. During track meets, in addition to starter pistols, you can hear a wave of cheering from an apparently large crowd. They seem to have “school spirit.”

This, along with Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens 1903-2024, got me thinking about the concept of “school spirit” and why schools work so hard to cultivate it among students and communities. It harkened back memories of our high school cheerleaders’ ubiquitous chant at football games:

Yes, yes, yes, we do; we’ve got spirit, how about you?

The crowd was supposed to respond in kind. But why?

In Messner’s study of his alma mater’s yearbooks from 1903-2024, he described a “sports spirit complex” that emerged in the early twentieth century. The sports spirit complex is “an amalgam of groups and activities that orbited around boys’ sports,” used as “a means of creating a sense of group identity and belonging” (p. 234, 47).

Listen to a conversation between Michael Messner and Karen Sternheimer about the "sports spirit complex here:

Download The High School part 2

We might take for granted that “school spirit” is part of the experience of high school and college. It’s really big business at the collegiate level, with an estimated $13.6 billion in revenue generated from college sports in 2022, according to one analysis. The sports spirit complex also serves as a way to raise money from community members and local businesses to support school activities when school budgets are cut. From ads on playing fields to yearbooks and direct sponsorship, sports can draw funding and demonstrate school support as a useful source of local advertising.

But before there was money, there was a need to create “community solidarity and identity” (p.53).

Many social changes took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, including urbanization, immigration, and compulsory education. This meant a general reshuffling of communities, identities, and work. Estimates suggest that between 1880 and 1920 the United States saw nearly 20 million immigrants, mostly from Europe, speaking different languages, with different cultural practices and traditions. This, coupled with migration from rural areas to urban centers, meant that people from a variety of backgrounds found themselves in one community. Schools were often community hubs linking diverse people together.

Compulsory education also meant that people were attending school for longer periods of time, particularly after the Great Depression in the 1930s. This might not have been a welcome change for all young people, who were used to more independence than school would have afforded. Being out of the labor force might have been a goal of reformers, but for young people it meant more time indoors, not earning money, and potentially feeling bored. (For more information, see historian David Nasaw’s classic Schooled to Order: A History of Public Schooling in America.)

“School spirit” is a way of creating community among diverse groups and creating non-academic bonds between students, communities, and local schools. Messner observed how within the 120-year period of the yearbooks he examined, sports were central to the imperative to support your school, to get “pumped up” and cheer on your school’s athletes during competitions with other schools.

Messner notes that a tension arose between school spirit creating a sense of citizenship through celebration of meritocracy, and the reproduction of inequalities, particularly gendered and racial inequalities (pp. 10-11). On its face, sports celebrate ability and achievement, but who has access to participation also shapes ability and achievement.

Using school yearbooks as data points enable those of us who attended American high schools—particularly public schools—to draw connections between his findings and our own experiences. As a one-time majorette and then marching band member, I attended and performed at nearly every one of our high school football team’s games. I was an ancillary part of the “school spirit complex” and recall how all being on the “same side” cheering our classmates on created a bond.

But I also remember some of the first experiences of racial and ethnic tensions, as my school was more diverse than some of the rural schools we played against. The “us” and “them” could take on a darker experience than just school rivalries, mirroring the larger society around us.

What are some of the ways the “sports spirit complex” reflected sociological lessons in your school?