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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If they can field multiple sports teams every season, why can’t they have a small orchestra?

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It's one thing to throw a kid with no prior experience into a cross country race; quite another to hand a 15YO a violin or bassoon for the first time and expect them to play with more experienced kids in an orchestra. [/quote]

Freshman football is often the first time a kid plays. They learn.

We have beginner band and the opportunity for kids who are experienced with one instrument to pick up another one. By the time these beginners are juniors/seniors they can play in a small school orchestra. Like jrs/srs playing varsity, having started football as freshmen.

Some schools just don’t value the arts as much as sports. It’s the common American sports obsession and athlete worship. 
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The skill differential between even a talented beginner in strings at 9th grade (*) and a relatively average kid that started at 3rd is very large, and by 9th grade, most of the relatively average kids have dropped out for something else. This makes it much, much trickier to handle an orchestra in a small school which doesn't have that many players to begin with. It really does require two tracks -- probably even three -- and that's quite difficult to support.

(*) Without unlikely levels of practice. I am thinking of one kid I know who picked up an instrument and started practicing two hours a day, and holy cow, did he rapidly git gud.[/quote]

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