Fantasy Sports: Are They Hurting or Helping the Sporting World?

by Emily Price | More from this Blogger

I once heard a radio host say that fantasy sports were ruining sports fans. He had the argument that by building fantasy teams filled with players from all sorts of different teams, you were rooting not for a favorite team, but for individual players. Fantasy sports manage to turn a blatant team sport into an individual one.

I can remember hearing that, but it never really made any sense to me until this past weekend when I was traveling from North Carolina to Vermont in a car with my friend Joe. Joe has never been into sports. As long as I've known him the closest he has ever been to a sports fan is playing basketball with friends on a Saturday morning.

On this car trip we had to listen to a variety of different football games, simultaneously on the car radio. At times when there was not a football game being played we would listen to sports commentators talking about the game we just listened to, or previewing the game we were about to listen to. It was insane.

Fantasy Sports are becoming more and more a huge part of the lives of people in our society, particularly men in my opinion. If you aren't familiar with fantasy sports, the way you play is that you create a sports team, with all the typically positions, but using players from all of the teams in the league. You then are scored based on how your players do when they play.

To me it seems confusing, and based on Joe's description of the activity it confuses him as well, even though he plays. Fantasy sports have really changes the way sports are looked at by taking the games to cyberspace.

Do any of you play fantasy sports? What do you think about Fantasy Sports, are they great for the sporting community or are they hurting it?

Learn more about Emily Price

Emily is a freelance writer and video editor in Raleigh NC.

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