With March Madness over and the World Cup coming up this summer, students are concerned about how they will keep up with the game while in class. 

“The World Cup only happens once every four years. It’s being hosted in the USA as well, so I think that during that time students should be focused on the world cup because they are thinking about it anyway” Junior Jonah Lynch said. 

When the World Cup happens, students in classrooms across the school will be watching the games on their school laptops, often in plain sight, on websites the school’s content filter has not flagged.

Sports watching isn’t anything new, but the amount likely will be. When March Madness happened, games ran during the school day. Students who care about the tournament are going to watch it. So students wonder how the school plans to block it.

Some streaming happens on free, ad-heavy sites that aren’t officially licensed to broadcast the games.The fact that they are constantly multiplying is what makes them hard to catch. By the time one URL gets blocked, three mirror sites are already running the same stream. ESPN, CBS, and the NCAA’s official app require a cable login, so students skip them entirely. 

The Mercer Island High School content filtering system is designed to block major categories like explicit content, gambling and known malware, according to the Mercer Island School District website. Sports streaming sites sit outside those categories. They aren’t illegal for students to visit in the sense that triggers an automatic block, and they aren’t consistent enough in their URLs for the filter to keep up with. So in terms of watching sports at school, it’s for the teachers to decide.

The World Cup is going to bring more students to be on these sites. Games will run on weekday mornings and afternoons, stretched across weeks, and the global audience means even more streams will be available than during March Madness. If the school plans to treat the tournament any differently than it treated the last one, that would be news. Based on March, the best assumption is that the current approach holds: a filter that catches the obvious sites, a long list of workarounds that don’t make the list and enforcement that is mostly left to the teachers. 

Teachers assume that streaming equals distraction, and distraction equals lost instruction. However, many students argue that a student watching a muted game in a tab during a period they’d otherwise spend watching youtube or zoning out isn’t losing attention they were going to use; the attention was already gone. Streaming is just where it ended up, and it’s not particularly disruptful to the class. 

“I think that students should be allowed to watch sports, especially if its right before break or they have all their work done, often the work at hand is not very useful to our learning and it and if you have nothing else to do you can watch sports, however if you have lots of work to do or are behind you should be focused on the classwork at hand.” Junior Jonah Lynch says.

For students planning to watch, nothing about the school’s infrastructure suggests that’s going to change before June.