Your example of team sports promoting teamwork, discipline and 'keeping up one's grades to be eligible' is admirable, but doesn't carry water.
Plain and simply, bullshit! You obviously never played a sport or maybe you were the one who carried the water. Sports very definitely improve discipline and structure for many students.
Let me ask you this and if your answer is no, then you are either being sarcastic or simply out of touch. Do you believe in the band program? How about the theater program? I don't know of too many GC kids who have gone on to professional music careers. I haven't seen anyone on Fox Theater stage who went to GCHS.
So if you want to reduce schools back to my day where it was the 3 R's in a one room school house with a wood stove.
Come on dee, you have to know better. Athletics may not be important to you but you may have come from wealth. I know poor kids in the district who got scholarships that might not have been able to go to a four year school without them.