To the Editor:

Re “Poor Schools Can’t Compete With Suburban Rivals. Should They?” (front page, Sept. 23):

I can appreciate the dejection felt by the members of the Hoover High School football team in Des Moines as they lose to better-endowed schools from their district. Fifty years ago, I played high school football at my lower-middle-class school in Los Angeles. We were mediocre at best, competing with wealthier schools whose facilities were better and whose players weren’t concerned about the daily anxieties of family economics. The disappointment is certainly real.

At the same time, it is hard for me to muster much passion to take on inequality in sports when high school students in some schools don’t have enough to eat, when the academic facilities in schools are woefully inadequate, when security in neighborhoods is precarious, when many of the families of students still lack health insurance. Let’s solve those problems, and then concern ourselves with athletic inequities.

Steven Livesey

Norman, Okla.

To the Editor:

What a depressing article. If this were a Hollywood movie, the poor but scrappy football players from Hoover High would overcome the superior equipment and technology of the richer suburban schools and triumph through sheer innate talent, an inspiring coach and a greater desire to win.

Alas, the real world of 2019 is much crueler than that. This football story is just one more signifier of the devastating and wide-ranging effects of poverty and gaping inequality. We should be ashamed.