Who decides whether an activity meets the criteria to be called a sport or if it’s fated to be designated as a hobby? ESPN devotes hours of afternoon programming almost every day to poker. Is poker really a sport? One of the most popularly debated “sports” is cheerleading. Dartmouth recognizes competitive cheerleading, but it continues to get a bad rap.
We came up with a list of sports criteria we thought would immediately rule out poker and cheerleading as legitimate sports, but realized the question of what constitutes a sport is not as black and white as we originally thought.
1. A sport requires physical ability.
Spectators admire the strength, endurance and tactical skills that athletes demonstrate while pushing their bodies to perform at the highest level. It is undeniable that flipping and throwing other humans into the air on the sidelines takes muscle. But don’t waste your energy trying to argue that holding five cards in your hand or tossing a poker chip into the pot is physically taxing.
2. A sport is competitive.
For us, competition implies gauging how one’s performance measures up to the performance of another. If there is no winner or loser, then the nature of athletic competition is lost and the activity is purely entertainment. Cheering on the sidelines at an athletic competition doesn’t make the cut. Anyone who’s seen “Bring It On” (2000), however, knows cheerleading rivalries can get pretty heated. Every game of poker ends with a winner pulling in all the chips, so this time, poker makes the cut.
3. A sport involves strategy.
Whether it’s designing a play, measuring your odds or adjusting in the moment to your competition, there is a lot of strategy involved in sports. To our understanding, once a cheer routine is set, it’s just a question of executing the plan, so this doesn’t count as strategy. Poker on the other hand, is a continuous test of mental acuity and strategic adjustments where one fault in strategy can ruin a hand.
4. A sport demands sweating.
At the end of the day, if your ponytail looks just as perfect as when you started or your eye black hasn’t run at all, congratulations — you have found a hobby! You burned just as many calories as someone playing chess or walking his or her dog. No shower necessary, not a sport. Maybe if it’s 80 degrees at a football game, cheerleaders will sweat, but even the most spectacular routine won’t leave you wiping sweat out of your eyes. You might sweat during a poker game because you are nervous about having an empty wallet when you leave the table, but not because of physical exertion.
So to tally things up, poker and cheerleading each rack up two check marks, while football or baseball would unquestionably earn all four.
No one debates why soccer, basketball or football are sports — the games speaks for themselves. Federal laws, including Title IX, do not recognize cheerleading or poker as sports. This lack of societal and governmental certainty on the classification of these activities for now rules them out as sports in our book.
We acknowledge that our criteria aren’t exhaustive and there are undoubtedly exceptions to every generalization we made. But the question of what constitutes a sport is overshadowed by the irony that activities that many don’t even consider to be sports get more air time on national sports networks than ones that nobody questions.
