what men’s sport is truly the hardest? pt. 1

As a person who enjoys almost if not all sports, there has been one debate throughout all of sports “Which sport is the hardest?” See the problem is, that is a difficult question to answer because there are so many factors to think about. If you’re talking about which sport is the hardest on your body then you could say football or hockey. If your talking about the sport that requires the most technique and precision you say baseball or golf. There’s not really a 100% effective way to determine the correct way to come to a conclusion but I bet we can get pretty close. Of course every sport will have “a million” reasons why theirs is the hardest, but we have to dive in and really, unbiasedly, get as close as we can. So, I am going to do a 3 part series talking about specific aspects that make sports difficult. I am going to be picking the hardest sport for the categories technique, strength, and strategy. Today I’m going to be talking about strategy. There are some sports that require strategy to win including basketball, football, and hockey. Out of all the sports I am going to narrow the competition regarding strategy to American Football, Basketball, Hockey, Soccer and Baseball. There are a couple standouts in this category but let’s look at all of them to get full reference on the topic. So when I say strategy I mean running plays and being able to outsmart your opposing team, not just overpowering them. In the case of football, the coaches get just as much credit as the players because of how much strategy comes into play. There are thousands of plays you can run in football and coaches have to strategize with each other to pick the right one every thirty seconds or they will lose. The players have to think on their heads and read the opposing team to try and stop them from scoring or to go and score themselves. I would say this is top 3 of all strategy sports so we will be back with this one. Next is basketball. Basketball is another sport where the coaches play a huge role in winning games. They come up with and teach a ton of different defensive situations and offensive plays that will lead them to victory. If all of their players just played like it was streetball, they would be smacked every game because of the opposing teams organized formation. In this sport you also have to read the defense and make quick decisions to score. I would also say this is a top 3 strategy sport so we will be back again. In hockey coaches have to teach their players how to move and rotate in and out to confuse the defense and score the puck. This sport is crazy physical so it will make it high on the strength list but it is not nearly as strategic as football or basketball. On to soccer. This sport is the most popular sport in the world so hopefully I don’t get hate for this take, but literally the only people reading this will be maybe my mom and Mr. Schwartz so shoutout to y’all. Anyways, soccer is a super hard sport but it honestly isn’t super strategic. You do have to make specific plays on the ball and know how to get past a defender so it is strategic in that aspect but overall there’s not a ton to go off of here. Finally we have baseball. Baseball is a very hard and technical sport with some strategy thrown in there as well. You have to learn and practice different scenarios and know what to do when that happens but it’s not like planning out exactly what’s gonna happen because that would be impossible in baseball. So to rank all of the sports in the strategic category I would say in last we have…. #5. Soccer. It’s not planned out and you really have to use a lot of pure skill and a few different plays to succeed. In 4th place we have a close one between hockey and baseball but because of how similar it is to soccer with the pure skill and fast paced motion, I’m putting hockey at #4. It might be controversial but I don’t care. So at #3 we have baseball, because of the pitching aspect where you have to pick exactly which pitch to throw based on the batter and their experience and other aspects of baseball. Here we go, this is the good stuff now. In the #1 place of all sports based on strategy, we have…. Football. Good ole American Football. It is the fastest and most difficult sport to coach and learn. People spend years on years trying to perfect exactly how they want to run their team. This of course puts basketball at #2, which is still amazing, but it just couldn’t beat football. It takes a crazy smart person to play all of these sports but this is how I rate them based on strategy.