Everyone has heard the line, if not said it themselves, that (insert sport here) is the hardest sport of them all. By saying this, it not only straight up dogs other sports, but it causes endless arguments. This statement is a huge pet peeve of mine, because once you get to a certain level, every sport brings its own challenges to the table. Maybe a sport like baseball doesn’t take as much endurance as soccer, but it takes speed, strength and accuracy. And yes, volleyball can be called “a more intense game of don’t-let-the-balloon-touch-the-floor”, but the game takes mad reflexes, not to mention strength and timing.

Take football as an example. Many times, it’s been said that football has only 11 minutes of actual playing time, that the rest is just standing around. This aspect of the game has taken lots of criticism from non-football players, and maybe there are only 11 real minutes of playing time, though throughout the game, players are body-slammed over and over again. The literal goal of the game is to stop the ball from getting into your own endzone at all costs, and that means full-out body slamming.

So yes, maybe football can be called the hardest-hitting sport, though this does not mean that it takes more skill than other sports.

This is the problem. People take the greatest, most-challenging aspect of the sport and amplify it, making it sound like some challenge unlike any other. This can be done with any and every sport, so therefore they are all equal, they are all equally challenging. No one is the hardest of them all.

By telling someone that their sport is easy and unchallenging, one is basically saying that all of the work that person has put in is worthless. It’s saying that any man or woman could come in, not practice at all, and succeed at whatever the sport may be. To that, I say, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. Sure, there are those natural athletes out there that can dominate other sports, so they can just be thrown out of the equation. But, for the regular old Joes that like to dog other sports, give them a run for their money.