By Edwin Sam, ’13, Sports Editor
Houston, Wii have a problem. A small school in Cincinnati, Ohio has decided to reward sports credits for playing the Wii, Nintendo’s motion sensor game console. According to an anonymous source in the Seven Hills administration, the school was looking for ways to be innovative in their sports program. “We have been pondering this decision for many years, but we thought participation would be an issue. However, it has not been a problem. We simply asked the boys that tried out for our cheerleading team if they wanted to try Wii Sports, and they gladly accepted.” Another source noted that Seven Hills’s boys were constantly mocked for not having a football team. Administrators began to notice that the boys’ self-esteem was lowering, so the school needed a way to boost their self-esteem. The source said, “We didn’t want our self-confidence hurt, so we wanted a sport that we could not lose.”
The source said there was another local school that used technology in innovative ways, so he wanted to catch up to this rival school. “At Cincinnati Country Day, students get their own laptops in the 5th grade, and they become proficient with computers at a very young age. Seven Hills students don’t get the same exposure to technology. One of the reasons we added Wii technology to the sports program at Seven Hills was so that our high school students could catch up to Country Day’s 5th grade students.”
The athletic boosters were at first skeptical of the idea of counting video games as sports, but thanks to student appeals they funded the plan. The boosters gave money to buy a state-of-the-art indoor artificial turf system to make the gaming experience more realistic. The small indoor stadium has a rack of Shake Weights for the students to practice. One source said, “We thought that the Shake Weight would be a great way for students to get the fitness it takes to play the Wii. For some reason boys tend to be better than girls at using the Shake Weight, but we don’t know if it will correlate to being better at video games.”
The athletic department of Seven Hills hopes that this idea will become more prominent in the future. “Our school is trying to set a monumental precedent for the rest of the nation. Hopefully, more schools will count video game playing as the true sport that it is,” the source said.
