Band, Performing Arts and Print Media Workshop all receive one credit plus an additional half. The reason for this extra half credit is because of the time com-mitment that the students put in outside of the actual school day. However, after the football season, after plays are over and after yearbook completion, one will rarely see any of the students staying after school. But if you were to look outside almost every sin-gle day, you would see students practicing for a big game or meet. Most students never take a break when it comes to sports. Now I’m not saying that the students enrolled in the aforementioned classes don’t deserve their half credit, but rather that athletes deserve some form of credit as well. Some people will complain that these classes get grades for their work that they do outside of school and that there would be no possible way to give a grade based on an athlete’s performance. Yet, these people are completely wrong. At Free-dom, a student must take a year of gym. This gym class gets grades based on participation, not perform-ance. So why is there no possible way to give a grade to an athlete because they, too, participated? Every day athletes are outside, practicing in the scorching hot sun or in a gym with no air condition-ing. Not because they have to, but because they want to. That is the exact same thing for the other classes. No student is forced to play in the band, write for the newspaper or act on stage. And no student is forced to play a sport. The number of kids that play sports at Freedom are continuing to decline because of work and the fact that they have outgrown it. However, if there was some sort of incentive, then the number of partici-pants in sports would also rise. Others may argue that there is absolutely no de-gree of difficulty to a sport and once you’ve played for so long you won’t learn anything. Yet, we have a class solely dedicated to playing football, basketball and dodgeball all for a credit. If gym is worth a credit and all of the arts classes are worth an extra half credit, then athletes should get some kind of credit. Each athlete should get a half credit for each Freedom Varsity sport they play. Because not only do they practice or compete every single day, but they don’t get breaks. Their weekends are even dedicated to practice. Therefore, one-third of their season totals up to be half of the school year. Months before school starts fall athletes have already been participating in their sports for months. The winter athletes also prac-tice at times during the summer but also months be-fore their season. The same goes for spring athletes. So if a student were to play three sports affiliated with Freedom, then they could total up to 1.5 credits. Athletes are students too, and it is about time for them to get some accredited recognition along with the band kids, actors and journalists.