NFL Play 60

The National Football League's Play 60 campaign just recently unveiled a new initiative to increase physical activity among students. The Play 60 campaign is used to inform and motivate children to participate in at least 60 minutes of physical activity a day. With the rising rates of childhood obesity the NFL Network took it upon themselves to get kids healthy and active in their communities.

The NFL’s newest initiative is supporting physical education programs and provides publicity to the ever growing problem of budget cuts that are directly affecting physical education programs and teachers.

The NFL Network and Cox Entertainment have teamed up with the National Association for Sport & Physical Education, President's Challenge & Action for Healthy Kids to create the Keep Gym in School initiative. The mission of the NFL Network is to allow all students the opportunity to be physically active as well as, increase access to in-school physical activity and to teach skills needed to establish and sustain healthy lifestyles. Through the use of monetary grants, middle schools all over the country are eligible through application to receive grants to go towards the improvement of facilities, updating equipment and rejuvenate their physical education programs.

As beneficial as I think that having professional sports programs like the NFL become advocates for the importance of physical education and reveal the problems that PE programs are currently coping with, I cannot help but be disappointed in their use of gym to explain the subject. In the PSA's and some of the other campaigns that are being used, physical education is used to explain teachers, programs and the explanation of the initiative. Unfortunately though, gym is used in the title of campaign that is being seen in most of the NFL facilities, on television and included in all of their advertisements. For many including parents, the use of gym goes back to when they were in children in schools themselves and has stuck as the title of the class.

The public does not understand that the connotation of gym teacher gives the "roll out the ball" perception when we as physical education teachers know that our programs are much more advanced and comprehensive. The fight will continue to change the perception of physical education, but in the end any publicity and advocacy for physical education programs is needed and will hopefully, be very effective.