Any thinking sports fan knows that there’s more to sports than just fun and games. As pleasant as it is to just sit and marvel at athletic skill on display and root-root-root for the home team, even greater rewards come from knowing sports history, gaining a context for today’s competition.

The deeper you dive into sports history, the more likely you also will learn a thing or two about the rest of our nation’s history. Sports fanhood also can be a gateway to considerations of politics, economics, and cultural trends. And, believe it or not, a good sports argument relies on research and rhetorical skills.

Thus, Saint Thomas Academy offers Tom Madden’s class on Minnesota Sports History, a middle school Social Studies elective, focused primarily on the four major North American men’s professional leagues. The class does include fun and games, such as ventures outdoors to run football plays from before the invention of the forward pass or playing “Alexander Cartwright Rules” baseball, where a ball fielded on the first bounce counts as an out.

In the classroom, the fun of a sports theme continues and mixes with more traditional academic pursuits. Students split into teams, earning points on the basis of correct answers to trivia questions in competition for sports-themed prizes, and as part of academic rigor Madden builds in social-emotional learning by docking points from teams for lapses in discipline or decorum, which leads students to encourage their teammates’ best behavior.

Madden grades students on their historical analytical abilities. For example, they study the political and economic ramifications involved when the Vikings considered leaving Minnesota after their lease at the Metrodome expired.

He incorporates African-American history into lessons on the breaking of racial barriers in sports. He ties U.S. geography lessons into team re-locations (extra points if you knew the Los Angeles Lakers moved from Minneapolis and the Minnesota Twins were once the Washington Senators).

Students write and deliver speeches about meaningful sports memorabilia, such as “catching a home run ball or getting something signed by their favorite player,” Madden said. The class also involves a great deal of internet research, building students’ skills in that area, as well as software and public speaking skills needed to create slide show presentations about their favorite teams or historical ports dynasties. Texts studied include Sid Hartman’s Greatest Minnesota Sports Moments, the newspaper columns of Dan Barreiro, and Dan Whenesota’s History of Heartbreak: 100 Events That Tortured Minnesota Sports Fans.

Then, there are the roundtable discussions, whose quality and intelligence put to shame 99 percent of whatever you hear on sports talk radio. “We talk about whether the Vikings are the best team to never win a Super Bowl,” Madden said. "Also, we debate whether the Vikings are cursed. We consider the students’ proposals for how to make baseball more interesting. One student suggests more home runs, and then we get into a discussion of why home runs are cool. Some of the proposals are very creative, such as banning curveballs or creating more opportunities for player contact on the basepaths instead of less.”

What Madden calls “culminating debates” at the end of course sections are meant to develop critical thinking and rhetorical skills, so that students “get their vegetables along with their dessert.”

The famed sports commentator Howard Cosell is credited with saying, “Sports is the toy department of human life,” but in Tom Madden’s hands, sport is a very educational toy.