Not only do they put you in better condition to study and enjoy your work in school, but they also teach you many valuable lessons as well.

Our favorite national game, base-ball, for instance, not only develops the muscles of your arms and shoulders in throwing the ball and in striking and catching it, and your lungs and heart in rushing to catch a fly or in running the bases, but also develops quickness of sight and hearing,--requires, as we say, "a good eye" for distance,--makes you learn to calculate something of the speed at which a ball is coming toward you or flying up into the air, requires you to judge correctly how far it is to the next base and how few seconds it will take to get there and whether you or the baseman can get there first.
More important yet, like all team games, it teaches you to work with others, to obey orders promptly, to give up your own way and do, not what you like best, but what will help the team most; to keep your temper, to bend every energy to win, but to play fair.

It also teaches you that you must begin at the beginning, take the lowest place, and gradually work yourself up; and that only by hard work and patience and determination can you make yourself worth anything to the team, to say nothing of becoming a "star" player.
If you will just go at your studies the way you do at base-ball, you will make a success of them.

Make up your mind to gain a little at a time, to learn something new every day, and you will be astonished how your knowledge will mount up at the end of the year.

When you first start in a new study, it looks, as you say, "like Greek" to you.