Is Scrabble a Sport? When it comes to determining what is classified as a sport, there are three areas that must be addressed. These three criteria are as follows, the action in question must have physical activity. It must have a competitive atmosphere around the event. Finally, it must have an official governing body. The event that I have chosen to research in order to judge its worthiness of sport-hood is Scrabble. The rules of Scrabble are players have 100 tiles consisting of different letters with different values for those letters. You need to make words and whatever word you make gives you a score. There are areas on the board where you can have double/triple word and letter bonuses depending where you play the length of your word. You are then rewarded a score and your opponent has to spell a word connected to your word in some form and through that connection you add up your scores as you go along.
Physical activity is defined as rigorous exertion and complex physical skills. Regarding Scrabble, proponents of calling the game a sport such as Dave Brannan, CEO of Mind Sports International, in a BBC Sportshour video says that “Mental agility is a sport, if you were playing golf why would one hit a good shot or not? It’s the pressure, it’s the stress. It’s what is going on mentally, it’s not necessarily their swing or anything else physically. Everything in sport, even if you are a footballer…is being able to think under pressure”. (Brannan 2014) He argues that mental agility takes the role of physicality when under the scrutiny of this first criteria. After watching many championship level Scrabble matches during the 2015 Scrabble World Championship it is obvious to the viewer that the game does take complex skills, such as a knowledge of thousands upon thousands of obscure words and being able to form them from randomly supplied letters while under the pressure of competition and the stress of a running play clock. However, these skills are classified as mental, not physical. Since there is no physical activity outside of placing the pieces on the board, no rigorous exertion is taking place.
To achieve the goal of a competitive atmosphere, the main goal of the game has to be defeating the opponent in order to win. Whenever there are people willing to take a hobby past the recreation of family and friends in order to advance their skill, as is the case with Scrabble and many other activities that are widely considered sports i.e. football and baseball, it inherently gains a competitive nature to the event. At high competitive levels you see deep and thoughtful strategies arise in order to defeat your opponent, such is the case with Scrabble. Tactics such as board management where maximizing the double/triple letter and word scores is just one example. Additionally, one does not want to set up his or her opponent with an easy word on a section of the board where their points will be multiplied. “Its true competition, it gets my adrenaline going” said Lindsey Dimmick in a Lexington Herold Reader Article written by Linda Blackford. The one versus one nature of the game in a tournament setting sets up direct competition with another person.
The governing body has goals of its own that it needs to accomplish in order to become the official organization of the players. The agency must have institutionalized the activity giving it standardized rules, an official regulatory agency to enforce those rules as well as both internal and external rewards for participating and winning the event. The in game rules of Scrabble have been standardized by the creators of the game, Hasbro. Furthermore, the competitive rules have also been laid out by the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), going over things such as board etiquette, scoring issues, holding & challenging and timers, each player has 25 minutes for the whole game but are allowed use as much time as they wish on each turn. To enforce these rules the NASPA has an Advisory Board who acts as an appellate body for the rulings of Working Committees, and as disciplinary body for members. As well as an Executive Committee to manage NASPA operations and to supervise other committees. Both local tournaments and international tournaments are held all over the world. These competitions generally feature a significant prize in the form of money. The 2013 Scrabble World Championship was sponsored by Mattel and offered a total prize pool of $25,000 and $10,000 going to the winner as recorded by Event.poslfit.com. In order to completely pass this category, there must also be internal rewards for the players. For many, providing a challenge to one’s mind or body is fulfilling as it tests their limits, this holds true for Jacob in the Lexington Herold Reader Article; “It’s a challenging game, and I like the adrenaline of words and math” (Blackford 2015). In all respects Scrabble passes this test.
In the end, Scrabble fulfills two of the three needed merits to qualify it as a sport. When it comes to the competitive and the institutional sides of the argument, Scrabble passes exceptionally well with high stress competition and also with the many associations and leagues that attract new talent and govern members. It provides both internal and external rewards for the competitors in self-fulfillment and monetary awards respectively. In some eyes the use of the brain in pressure situations is enough to pass the physical portion of the criteria but it does not hold up to the scrutiny of rigorous physical exertion. I believe that while a legitimate competitive activity with many talented individuals, Scrabble falls just short on being classified as a sport. There are repercussions for the determination that Scrabble should not be recognized as an official sport. Members of the many associations will feel slighted in the eyes of the public as a result. Not being recognized as a sport could cost the associations in exposure for growth and the legitimacy that they desire. This will cause them to build up more solid arguments in order to achieve the final criteria that it is missing. http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/counties/fayette-county/article45955330.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02cjvyc http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/Committees http://event.poslfit.com/2013/sct-me/build/tsh/prizes.html