I remember years ago seeing a website that used a numeric system to help determine if an "activity" is a "sport". It had quite a number of criteria, and in each criteria the activity is judged from zero to a top number. (For most criteria, the top number was ten--but for some less-important criteria, the top number was five, and for other more-important criteria, the top number was fifteen or twenty.) When you got done, you totaled up the points for your activity--the higher the points, the more of a true "sport" it is. I don't remember all the criteria, but some (with examples of scoring for a few of them) were things like:
Teamwork--high score for things that involve constant teamwork like football, lower for partial teamwork like baseball (only one person at bat at a time, not the entire team) or auto racing (pit crews involved only during small portion of race), still less for things with even less teamwork involved like relay races, and zero for truly individual activities like archery or golf
Athletic agility
Athletic endurance
Athletic strength
Mental aptitude
Degree of physical contact with opponent
Criticality of assessing opponent on strategy: Activities where you assess an opponent's strengths and weaknesses and attempt to exploit those weaknesses (such as pitching inside to someone who can't hit inside pitches, or throwing to a receiver being covered by a player who just came into the game) get high scores, while activities which don't allow this (such as golf or archery) get low or zero scores
Role of officials: Activites where officials play little or no role in determining the outcome (such as bowling or archery) rate high, while activities where the officials are judges who choose victors subjectively (such as diving or figure skating) rate low
Entertainment value to non-participating observers
etc.
Made for a very interesting tool for assessing conversations like this--and also was a conversation piece in and of itself...
