Incentive of entering top colleges won't nurture top soccer players

A group of children pose for the camera during a training session organized by Sport8 in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

PEKING UNIVERSITY and Tsinghua University, the two top institutes of higher learning in Beijing, staged competitions over the weekend to recruit high-level teenage sports talents, including soccer players. Promoting soccer education is indeed praiseworthy, but it would be better done by nurturing more talented kids at a young age than simply using easier college entrance as an incentive, says China National Radio.

Of course, it makes sense to include soccer in the country's high school and college education, and students might feel more motivated to play soccer if they know it offers a route to enter the leading universities. A sufficient supply of talent may serve as a boost to Chinese soccer. However, is it necessary to make a seemingly far-fetched connection between talent recruitment and the national college entrance exam?

Not really. Such an exam-oriented marriage is likely to compel youngsters to participate in a university-favored sport such as soccer, even if they are not interested in it, which goes against the sporting spirit.

Besides, it is also difficult to precisely quantify a teenager's future performance in a sport.

Another example of such a policy, which failed, was the favorable policy for college applicants specializing in a certain sport, which could be transformed into bonus points for the national college entrance exam. This ended up being exploited by many high school students who did not even play sports, dealing a heavy blow to educational fairness.

For those student footballers who manage to enter their dream university, whether they are able to study for their academic courses while completing their intensive soccer training also remains to be seen.

If not, they will not be guaranteed a decent job after graduation either, because it is not rare for former champion athletes to struggle to make a living due to the lack of higher education. In this sense, nurturing children's interest in playing soccer and building more free public soccer facilities, would be a better solution to the country's poor footballing performance.