[Reporter’s Notebook] Sleeping Classrooms, Shaken Amateur Baseball

Behind the dazzling fireworks of the KBO League era, which now draws 12 million fans a season, lies a cold shadow we have long chosen to ignore. Each time Korea comes home from an international tournament with disappointing results, we briefly wring our hands over the state of amateur sports. Yet when it comes to tending to the deeper wounds, we are consistently stingy. That is why, even after reaching the quarterfinals at the 2026 World Baseball Classic (WBC) for the first time in 12 years, few dare to claim that the glory days of the past are truly on their way back.
A tree with weak roots can never stay green for long. The roots of Korean baseball are, quite simply, amateur baseball. The most painful problem is the absolute lack of training time. This is the defining difference between past generations and the current one. Even in the greater Seoul area, where half of all schools are concentrated, there are only a handful of fields with both night lighting and grass, and practice is allowed only after regular classes. Young players who have lost both training hours and access to proper fields end up shouldering costs in the tens of millions of won, forced to turn to private academies instead.
The "minimum academic achievement system," introduced in the name of guaranteeing students’ right to learn, is tightening the noose around student athletes in a very different way on the ground. On weekdays, they scramble to juggle classes and training. On weekends, they pour everything they have into games in the weekend league system. Under the banner of the right to learn, the "right to rest"—which growing children need most—has simply disappeared.
College baseball offers another bitter picture: bound by mandatory school days, teams now struggle even to gather everyone together once a week. We must ask ourselves whether forcing exhausted kids into their seats and turning the classroom into a de facto nap room is really the kind of education we wanted. Just as we would never tell ordinary students, "Your physical fitness test score is too low, so you are not eligible to sit for the college entrance exam," it is cruel to impose a rigid, one-size-fits-all academic standard only on children who dream of a career in sports.
We live in an age of ultra-specialists, where professional gamers can serve as de facto diplomats. The notion that "it is a disaster if an athlete is bad at studying" is hopelessly outdated. If these young athletes truly need education, we should not force-feed them generic classes, but instead work with them to design sports-focused curricula that match their career paths. In a uniform system that insists everyone walk the same road, there can be no solid promise of the future. The popularity of baseball is at its peak right now, and that is our window of opportunity. It is time to grant student athletes more autonomy and to reform the education system so that the sweat they shed on the field can fully bear fruit.
jsi@fnnews.com Reporter