feb9assignment x
Module 2 Discussion Prompt The author identifies a number of factors that make the future of the high school and college sports uncertain. Which two factors do you think will have the biggest impact on school sports in the United States? Factor 1: Factor 2:
Are Organized Programs Worth the Effort?
As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development … A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality.
—Lev Vygotsky, Psychologist (1980)
The perception is you train early and only do a single sport and do as much as you can until you’re better than everyone else. I think it’s pretty clear from the injury and performance-data side that that’s a terrible developmental model.
—Neeru Jayanthi, Medical Director, Primary Care Sports Medicine, Loyola University Health System (in Reddy, 2014).
Despite all the elite teams and high-powered youth leagues across the U.S., … statistics show that many children are dropping out of sports early—in droves—often because they can’t afford to play.
—Patti Neighmond, Reporter, National Public Radio (2015)
[Today’s youth sports] emphasize performance over participation well before kids’ bodies, minds, and interests mature. And we tend to value the child who can help win games or whose families can afford the rising fees. The risks for that child are overuse injuries, concussion, and burnout.
—Project Play Report (2015, p. 7;
http://youthreport.projectplay.us/the-problem
)
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Chapter Outline
Origin and Development of Organized Youth Sports
Major Trends in Youth Sports Today
Informal, Player-Controlled Sports: A Case of the Generation Gap
Youth Sports Today: Assessing Our Efforts
The Challenge of Improving Youth Sports
Recommendations for Improving Youth Sports
Summary: Are Organized Programs Worth the Effort?
Learning Objectives
·
Explain how social changes related to family and childhood have influenced the growth of organized youth sports in the United States since 1950.
· Identify the sponsors of organized youth sports today, and explain why children’s sport experiences may vary depending on who sponsors their sport programs.
· Explain how the trend toward privatization in youth sports affects youth sport experiences.
· Define what is meant by the performance ethic, and explain why it has become especially important in private and elite youth sport training programs.
· Explain why parents today take youth sports so seriously.
· Explain why alternative sports have become increasingly popular with many young people today.
· Distinguish the differences between organized sports and informal games, and explain why informal games are played less today than in the past.
· Use the grades that experts have given to organized youth sports in the United States to identify the major problems in those programs.
· Identify recommendations that will increase the positive experiences of children in youth sports.
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According to Census Bureau estimates, there were about 50 million six- to eighteen-year-olds living in the United States in 2016. Widely cited estimates of youth sport participation range from 15 million to 46 million six- to eighteen-year-olds, depending on who does the counting and what counts as sports. But best as I can tell, during a given year, about 23 million U.S. children and youth participate in organized sports, including high school teams.1
When, how, why, and to what end children play these sports are the questions that concern parents, community leaders, and child advocates worldwide.
When sociologists study youth sports, they focus on the experiences of participants and how those experiences vary depending on the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. Research by sociologists has influenced how some people think about and organize youth sports, and it continues to provide valuable information that parents, coaches, and program administrators can use when organizing and evaluating youth programs.
This chapter summarizes part of that research as we discuss five topics that are central to understanding youth sports today. These are
1.
The origin and development of organized youth sports
2.
Major trends in youth sports
3.
Variations in the organization of youth sports and in the sport experiences of young people
4.
Youth sports and issues related to access, psychosocial development, and family dynamics
5.
Recommendations for improving youth sports
An underlying question that guides our discussion of these topics is this: Are organized youth sports worth the massive amount of time, money, and effort that people put into them? I continue to ask and help people answer this question as I talk with parents and work with coaches and others who are committed to organizing sports for young people.
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ORGANIZED YOUTH
SPORTS
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, people in Europe and North America began to realize that child development was influenced by the social environment. This created a movement to organize children’s social worlds with the goal of building their character and turning them into hard-working, productive, and patriotic adults in rapidly expanding capitalist economies (Chudacoff, 2007).
It wasn’t long before organized sports for young boys were organized and sponsored by schools, communities, and church groups. The organizers hoped that sports, especially team sports, would teach boys from working-class families to obey rules and work together productively. They also hoped that sports would toughen middle- and upper-class boys and turn them into competitive men, despite the “feminized” values they learned from their stay-at-home mothers. At the same time, girls were provided activities that taught them to be good wives, mothers, and homemakers. The prevailing belief was that girls should learn domestic skills rather than sport skills when they went to schools and playgrounds. There were exceptions to these patterns, but after World War II, youth programs were organized this way in Western Europe and North America.
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The Postwar Baby Boom and the Growth of Youth Sports
The baby-boom generation was born between 1946 and 1964. Young married couples during these years were optimistic about the future and eager to become parents. As the first wave of baby boomers moved through childhood during the 1950s and 1960s, organized youth sports grew dramatically, especially in the United States. Programs were sponsored by public, private, and commercial organizations. Parents also entered the scene, believing that their sons’ characters would be built through organized competitive sports. Fathers became coaches, managers, and league administrators. Mothers did laundry and became chauffeurs and short-order cooks so their sons were ready for practices and games.
Most programs were for boys eight to fourteen-years-old, and they were organized with the belief that playing sports would prepare them to participate productively in a competitive economy. Until the 1970s, girls were largely ignored by these organizers and sat in the bleachers during their brothers’ games and, in the United States, given the hope of becoming high school cheerleaders. Then came the women’s movement, the fitness movement, and government legislation prohibiting sex discrimination in education, including school-sponsored sports. These changes stimulated the growth of sport programs for girls beginning in the mid-1970s. By the 1990s girls had nearly as many opportunities as boys.
Participation in organized youth sports is now a valued part of growing up in most wealthy nations. Parents and communities use their resources to sponsor, organize, and administer a variety of youth sports. However, some parents today question the benefits of programs in which winning is more important than overall child development; others seek out win-oriented programs, hoping their children will become the winners. A few parents encourage their children to engage in unstructured, noncompetitive physical activities—an alternative that many young people prefer over organized, adult-controlled sports.
For a century now, youth sport has been more proving ground than playground—an enterprise laced with purpose and emotion, even the hopes of a nation. —Tom Farrey, ESPN (in Game On, 2008, p. 99)
Social Change and the Growth of Organized Youth Sports
Since the 1950s, an increasing amount of children’s after-school time and physical activity has occurred in adult-controlled organized programs. This growth is partly related to changing ideas about family life and childhood in neoliberal societies, that is, societies where individualism and material success are highly valued and where publicly funded programs and services are being eliminated and selectively replaced by private programs. The following six changes are especially relevant to the growth and current status of organized youth sports.
First, the number of families with both parents working outside the home has increased dramatically. This has created a demand for organized and adult supervised after-school and summer programs. Organized sports have grown because many parents believe they offer their children opportunities to have fun, learn adult values, become physically fit, and acquire positive status among their peers.
Second, since the early 1980s, there’s been a major cultural shift in what it means to be a “good parent.” Good parents today are those who can account for the whereabouts and actions of their children 24/7—an expectation that leads many parents to seek organized, adult-supervised programs in which their children are monitored and controlled. Organized sports are also favored by parents because they provide predictable schedules, adult leadership for children, and measurable indicators of a child’s accomplishments. When children succeed, parents can claim that they are meeting cultural expectations. In fact, many Page 82mothers and fathers feel that their moral worth as parents is associated with the visible achievements of their children—a factor that further intensifies parental commitment to youth sports.
To meet cultural expectations for the “good parent,” mothers and fathers often are attracted to youth sport programs that use symbols of progressive achievement and skill development. Karate, with achievement levels signified by belt colors, is appealing to some because the visible and quantifiable achievements of their children can be used as proof of their parental moral worth. (Source: © Jay Coakley)
Third, many people today believe that informal, child-controlled activities inevitably lead to trouble—much like what occurs in the novel, Lord of the Flies. When young people are seen as threats to social order, organized sports are seen as ideal activities to keep them occupied, out of trouble, and under the control of adults.
Fourth, many parents, responding to fear-producing news stories about murders and child abductions now see the world outside the home as dangerous for their children. They regard organized sports as safe alternatives to informal activities that occur outside the home without adult supervision. Even when organized sports have high injury rates and uncertified coaches, parents still feel that organized programs are needed to protect their children.
Fifth, the visibility of high-performance and professional sports has increased awareness of organized competitive sports as a valued part of culture.As children watch sports on television, listen to parents and friends talk about sports, and hear about the wealth and fame of popular athletes, they often see organized youth sports, especially those modeled after professional sports, as attractive activities. And when children say they want to be gymnasts or basketball players, parents often try to nurture these dreams by seeking the best-organized programs in those sports. Therefore, organized youth sports have become popular partly because children see them as enjoyable and Page 83culturally valued activities that will enhance their status among peers and adults.
Sixth, the culture of childhood play has nearly disappeared in most segments of post-industrial society, especially in the United States. Children today have few opportunities to engage in spontaneous play—activities that involve creativity, expressiveness, joy, and “ownership” possessed by the participants themselves (Christakis and Christakis, 2010). Structured, achievement-oriented activities now begin early in children’s lives (Hyman, 2012). These activities, including organized sports for preschoolers, are controlled by adults and provide few opportunities for children to play, which often is seen as a “waste of time.” Instead, the focus is on improvement and measurable development that will pay off for a child in the future. Parents seek developmental activities that they hope will help their children experience academic and future occupational success.
Time for play has become a low priority in most families (Glenn et al., 2013; Singh and Gupta, 2012). Parents also restrict the spaces for play by keeping children in the house and yard, unless they live on a cul-de-sac where there is no traffic and where children know they are being watched by one neighbor or another (Hochschild, 2013). Even the language of play has nearly disappeared as children learn to describe and evaluate their experiences in instrumental terms rather than by using a vocabulary of emotions and expression—so they talk about activities in terms of what they have learned and accomplished rather than how they felt while they participated.
Together, these six social changes have boosted the popularity of organized youth sports in recent decades. Knowing about them helps to explain why parents invest so many family resources into the organized sports participation of their children. The amount of money that parents spend on participation fees, equipment, travel, personal coaches, high-performance training sessions, and other items defined as necessary in many programs has skyrocketed in recent years (Farrey, 2008; Hyman, 2012). For example, the parents of elite youth hockey players who travel to regional and national tournaments often spend more than $10,000 per year to support their sons’ hockey participation. They justify the costs by saying that being a hockey player benefits their sons in many ways. Other parents have gone even further—remortgaging houses and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to nurture the sport dreams of a child (Hyman, 2012; Weir, 2006).
Children’s play is so focused on lessons and leagues [that] kids aren’t getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, … the results are clear: Self-regulation improves —Alix Spiegel, PBS, Morning Edition (2008)
One of the troubling issues raised by these changes is that mothers and fathers in working-class and lower-income households are increasingly defined as irresponsible and “bad” parents because they lack the resources to fund sport participation for their children as wealthier parents do. Parents without resources may also be perceived as uninterested in nurturing the dreams of their children, even though this is far from true. In this way, organized sports for children become linked to political issues and debates about family values and the moral worth of parents in lower-income households.
MAJOR TRENDS IN YOUTH SPORTS TODAY
In addition to their growing popularity, youth sports are changing in five socially significant ways.
First, organized programs are becoming increasingly privatized. This means that more youth sports today are sponsored by private and commercial organizations, and fewer are sponsored by public, tax-supported organizations such as park and recreation departments.
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Second, organized programs increasingly emphasize the “performance ethic.” This means that participants in youth sports, even in recreational programs, are encouraged to evaluate experiences in terms of their progress in developing technical skills and moving to higher levels of competition.
Third, there’s an increase in private, elite sport-training facilities dedicated to producing highly skilled and specialized athletes who can compete at the highest levels of youth sports. This means that parents often spend significant amounts of money to buy sport training for their children, and they see youth sport expenditures as financial investments in their children’s future.
Fourth, parents are increasingly involved in and concerned about the participation and success of their children in organized youth sports. This means that youth sports are now serious activities for both adults and children, and adults are more likely to act in extreme ways as they advocate what they perceive to be the interests of their children.
Fifth, participation in alternative and action sports has increased. This means that many young people prefer unstructured, participant-controlled activities such as skateboarding, in-line skating, snowboarding, BMX biking, disc golf, Ultimate, slacklining, foot-bag (hacky sack), climbing, jumping rope, and other sports that have local or regional relevance.
These five trends have an impact on who plays and what happens in organized youth sports. This is discussed in the following sections and in the box “
Sponsorship Matters: Variations in the Purpose of Organized Youth Sports
.”
reflect on SPORTS |
Sponsorship Matters: Variations in the Purpose of Organized Youth Sports |
The purpose of organized youth sports often varies with the goals of those who sponsor them. Sources and forms of sponsorship differ from one program to another, but they generally fall into one of the following four categories:
1. Public, tax-supported community recreation organizations. This includes local park and recreation departments and community centers, which traditionally offer free or low-cost sport programs for children. The programs are usually inclusive and emphasize overall participation, health, general skill development, and enjoyment.
2. Public-interest, nonprofit community organizations. These include the YMCA,
Boys
and
Girls
Clubs, the Police Athletic League (PAL), and other community-based organizations, which traditionally have provided a limited range of free or low-fee sport programs for children. The goals of these programs are diverse, including everything from providing a “wholesome, Christian atmosphere” for playing sports to providing “at-risk children” with opportunities to play sports and keep them off the streets.
3. Private-interest, nonprofit sport organizations. These include organizations such as the nationwide Little League, Inc., Rush Soccer (
rushsoccer.com
), Pop Warner Football, and local organizations operating independently or through connections with larger sport organizations, such as national federations like USA Swimming. These organizations usually offer more exclusive opportunities to selective groups of children, generally those with special skills from families who can afford relatively costly participation fees.
4. Private commercial clubs. These include gymnastics, tennis, skating, soccer, and other sport clubs and training programs. These organizations have costly membership and participation fees, and some emphasize intense training, progressive and specialized skill development, and elite competition.
Because these sponsors each have different missions, the sports programs they fund are likely to offer different types of experiences for children and families. This makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about what happens in organized programs and how participation affects child development, public health, and family dynamics.
When public funds disappear due to tax cuts, one of the first things to be eliminated is youth sport programs—the type in category 1 (above). This has many effects. It limits opportunities for children from low-income families and funnels them into only one or two sports that may survive the cuts. Additionally, it creates a demand for youth sports in the remaining three sponsorship categories. But sponsors in categories 3 and 4 thrive only when they serve people with the money to pay for their programs.
Overall, this means that the opportunities and experiences available to young people are influenced by local, state, and national politics, especially those related to taxation and public spending. At present, youth sport opportunities and experiences are strongly influenced by voters and political representatives who make decisions about taxes and how they are used in local communities. Do you think that people in your community would vote to increase taxes to support youth sports? If not, what reasons would they give for voting against such a tax?
The Privatization of Organized Programs
Privatization is a prevalent trend in youth sports today. Although organized sports are widely popular in the United States, there has been a decline in publicly funded youth programs with free and inclusive participation policies. As governments face budget crises various social services, including youth sports, have been downsized or eliminated. Some publicly funded programs have survived by imposing participation fees, but most have been eliminated. In response, middle- and upper-middle-class parents have organized private, nonprofit sport clubs and leagues for their children. These organizations depend on fund-raising, membership dues, and corporate sponsorships. They offer opportunities to children from well-to-do families and neighborhoods, but they’re usually too expensive and inconveniently located for children from low-income families and neighborhoods.
If a family doesn’t think their huge investment in expensive sport is going to turn their child into an Olympian or professional athlete, they are often walking away from sport completely. —Barry Shepley, Hall of Fame Triathlon Coach, 2010 (in Richard, 2010)
Private, commercial programs also have become major providers of youth sports as public programs have been eliminated. But they are selective and exclusive, and they provide few opportunities for children from low-income households. The technical instruction in these programs often is good, and they provide closely regulated skills training for children from wealthier families. In addition, some parents hire private coaches for their children at rates of $50 to $200 per hour.
There are two negative consequences of privatizing youth sports. First, privatized programs reproduce the economic and ethnic inequalities that exist in the larger society. Unlike public programs, they depend on the resources of individual participants, rather than entire communities. Low-income and single-parent families often lack money to pay for dues, travel, equipment, and other fees. To the extent that income, family wealth, and support systems are less available to members of ethnic minorities, youth sports often create and accentuate ethnic segregation and social-class divisions in communities.
Second, as public park and recreation departments cease to offer programs, they often become Page 85brokers of park spaces and rent them to private sport programs. The rental fees are usually reasonable, which means that these private programs benefit from tax-supported facilities without being held accountable for running their programs to benefit the entire community. For example, private programs may not be committed to gender equity or other policies of inclusion that are a key part of public programs.
When privatization occurs, market forces shape who plays youth sports under what conditions. People with resources don’t see this as a problem Page 86because they have the money to pay for their children’s participation and choose the programs they want. But people with few resources face a double bind: They can’t pay for their children’s participation, and they often are accused of not caring for, controlling, or taking an interest in their children. In this way, privatized youth sport programs disproportionately affect poor people with little political power; therefore, these problems receive little attention from the media and most current politicians.
This point was noted by John Thomas, a director of coaching for United States Youth Soccer, who observed that in all his travels across the United States over the last decade, he’d never seen a travel team with mostly African American girls. In response to this observation, sociologist Paul Kooistra from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, suggested that private, fee-based youth sports in the United States are used by some upper-middle-class parents as a tool to “separate themselves and their children from lower social classes and minorities” (Wells, 2008).
Upper-middle-class parents may disagree with Kooistra’s statement, but they cannot deny that their children play sports primarily with other children from families that are white and well-off. Poor, working-class, and ethnic minority children are not formally excluded, but they are not on the playing fields. Of course, this has been true of private sport clubs in golf, tennis, swimming, and other sports for over a century, but the privatization of youth sports has re-created a twenty-first century form of ethnic and class segregation in among many populations of young people.
Emphasis on the Performance Ethic
The performance ethic is a set of ideas and beliefs emphasizing that the quality of the sport experience can be measured in terms of improved skills and competitive success. This ethic is widely emphasized in youth sport programs to the point that fun now means improving skills, becoming more competitive, winning, and being promoted into elite performance categories. “Travel teams” are now an important category in many sports because they separate certain young people from others on the basis of skills. Many parents like this because it enables them to judge their child’s progress and prove to themselves and others that they are “good parents” because they have “created talented children.”
Private and commercial programs emphasize the performance ethic to a greater degree than do public programs. Their directors and coaches market them as “centers of athletic excellence” to attract parents willing to pay high fees for membership, participation, and instruction. In some cases, the profiles and achievements of successful athletes and coaches who have trained or worked in the program are highlighted to justify costly memberships and dues.
Parents of physically skilled children sometimes define expensive membership fees, equipment, travel, and training expenses as investments in their children’s future (Hyman, 2012). They also use performance-oriented programs to develop social networks that can provide information about college sports, scholarships, coaches, and elite training programs. Overall, they want their children’s sport participation to bring developmental, educational, and eventual occupational payoffs.
Of course, the application of the performance ethic is not limited to organized sports; it influences a range of organized children’s activities, and it is changing childhood from a time of exploration and freedom to a time of preparation and controlled learning (Chudacoff, 2007; Elkind, 2007). In this sense, children’s sports are part of this larger trend.
Elite, Specialized Sport Programs
The emphasis on performance is also tied to a third trend in youth sports—the development of elite, specialized training programs and leagues. Many private and commercial programs encourage early specialization in a single sport because they have year-round operating expenses that can be paid only if people pay year-round membership fees. If young people played multiple sports and did not pay dues through the entire year, these programs could not to meet expenses or Page 87produce profits. Therefore, owners and staff develop clever rationales to convince parents and athletes that year-round participation in a single sport is necessary to stay on track for future success. As parents accept these rationales, “high-performance” teams and clubs grow in number and size.
As publicly funded youth sports are downsized or eliminated, private clubs provide participation opportunities. Membership fees in club programs are too costly for most families, and children may not enjoy the emphasis on the performance ethic in these programs. This is especially true in gymnastics where costs and demands for excellence are extreme (Source: © Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images)
Commercial clubs for gymnastics, figure skating, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse, and other sports now advertise that they are dedicated to turning children into headline-grabbing, revenue-producing sport prodigies. Children in these programs even become marketing tools for program managers and symbols of the moral worth of parents, who pay the bills and brag to friends about their children’s accomplishments and how much they have done to “create” successful children. For example, eleven-year-old standout athletes may be used by clubs as marketing hooks to recruit dues-paying members. When this occurs, the adults who work at the club become financially dependent on the performances of eleven-year-olds who they train to succeed in high-profile competitive events, and this can become a recipe for abuse (Donnelly and Petherick, 2004; Hite, 2012; Zirin, 2013a).
Children in high-performance training programs work(out) at their sports for long hours week after week and year after year. They compete regularly, their images and accomplishments may be used to market commercial training programs, they sometimes appear on commercial television and attract Page 88paying spectators to events at which they perform, and a few even have product endorsement contracts. All this occurs without government regulation, which might protect the interests, bodies, health, and overall development of child athletes. When the livelihoods of coaches and other adults depend on the performances of child athletes, elite training can become a form of child labor (Donnelly and Petherick, 2004).
Child labor laws in some societies prevent adults from using children to make money, but there are no enforceable standards regulating what child athletes do or what happens to them. Governments in a few countries mandate certain forms of coaching education, but coaches in the United States need no such training to work with children. They can use fear, intimidation, and coercion to turn a few highly talented children into medal-winning athletes without being held accountable to anything but market forces. The results of this situation are sometimes frightening, but many parents and young athletes continue to believe that unless coaches are coercive, controlling, and abusive, they cannot effectively motivate and train successful elite athletes.
As elite programs become more popular, there is a need to have more public discussions about where the line should be drawn to separate abuse from the motivational and training strategies used by some coaches. The argument generally used to avoid this discussion is that the children themselves want to specialize, be pushed, and excel in sports. But these children have not reached the age when they can give legally “informed consent.” In addition, we don’t allow ten-year-olds to work as actors without regulations just because they like it and their parents approve; there are rules that regulate what child workers can do and how long they can work—even if they enjoy the work.
Increased Involvement and Concerns Among Parents
Youth sports have become serious business in many families. The expectation that parents must control the actions and nurture the dreams of their children 24/7 has made parenthood today more demanding than ever before. Many parents now feel compelled to find the best-organized youth sport programs for their children and then ensure that their children’s interests are being met in those programs.
Even though multiple factors influence child development, many people attribute the success or failure of children entirely to their parents. When children are successful in sports, their parents are perceived to be parenting the correct way. When a child succeeds, parents are congratulated, and people want to know what they did to “create” a prodigy; when a child fails, the moral worth of parents is questioned, and people want to know what parents did wrong.
Under these conditions, a child’s success in sports is especially important for parents. Youth sports are highly visible activities and become sites where mothers and fathers can prove their moral worth as parents. This greatly increases the stakes associated with youth sports and causes parents to take the success of their child athletes very seriously. These stakes increase even further when parents expect their children to receive college scholarships, professional contracts as athletes, or social acceptance and popularity in school and among peers. When parents think in these terms, the success of their children in youth sports is linked to anticipated social and financial payoffs, and the sponsorship of their children is often seen as an investment for which they expect certain rewards in return.
As the moral, financial, and social stakes associated with youth sport participation have increased, youth sports have become sites for extreme actions among some adults. Parents are increasingly assertive and disruptive as they advocate the interests of their children with coaches, referees, and program managers. A few have attacked and even killed others over sport-related disputes.
As the actions of parents have become more extreme, some sport programs now sponsor parent education seminars combined with new rules and enforcement procedures to control parents at practices and games. These strategies are useful, but Page 89their success depends on administering them with an understanding of the cultural expectations that exist for this generation of parents.
As long as parental moral worth is linked to the achievements of their children, and parents feel morally obliged to nurture the sport dreams of their children, parents will be deeply involved in and concerned about youth sports. Furthermore, when parents make major financial sacrifices and invest vast amounts of time in their children’s sports, their actions will be difficult to control. As long as the prevailing cultural ideology emphasizes that parents are solely responsible for their children, mothers and fathers will assertively advocate the interests of their children. If they don’t, who will? Under these cultural circumstances, many parents conclude that it is their moral obligation to get in the face of anyone standing in the way of their child’s success in sports.
Increased Interest in Alternative and Action Sports
As youth sports have become increasingly structured and controlled by adults, some young people seek alternatives allowing them to engage more freely in physical activities on their own terms. Because organized youth sports are the most visible and widely accepted settings for children’s sport participation, these unstructured and participant-controlled activities are referred to as alternative sports—alternatives, that is, to organized sports.
Alternative sports, or “action sports,” as many now refer to them, encompass a wide array of physical activities. Their popularity is based in part on children’s reactions against the highly structured character of adult-controlled, organized sports. For example, when legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk was asked why he chose to skateboard rather than do other sports, he said, “I liked having my own pace and my own rules … and making up my own challenges” (in Finger, 2004, p. 84). Similarly, when Sonja Catalano, the president of the California Amateur Skateboard League, was asked why skateboarding became popular, she explained, “We didn’t … have any parents. That’s what drew a lot of kids.… It was their thing” (Higgins, 2007).
When I observe children in action sports, I’m regularly amazed by the physical skills that they develop without adult coaches and scheduled practices and contests. Although I’m concerned about injuries and the informal exclusion of females that often are part of these sports, I’m impressed by the discipline and dedication of young action sport participants who seek challenges apart from adult-controlled sport settings. The norms in these participant-controlled activities vary from one location to another, but most young people use them as guides as they share the spaces used in their sports (Bradley, 2010; Seifert and Henderson, 2010).
Mark Shaw, winner of the first International Mountain Board Championships, explained that action sports often are attractive to young people because the older and more skilled participants teach tricks and give helpful advice to those with less experience. He said, “I look forward to helping young skaters … at the park each weekend almost as much as I look forward to skating and my own progression on the board” (2002, p. 3). Many young people find this orientation and the sense of community it creates to be more welcoming than what occurs in organized youth sports.
Participation in alternative and action sports has become so widespread that media companies and corporations wishing to recruit young people as consumers have sponsored competitive forms of these sports and hype them as “extreme” activities. These sponsored events, such as the X Games, the Dew Action Sports Tour, and others sponsored by Oakley, Red Bull, and Lucas Oil, provide exposure and support for athletes, but they alter the activities by making them more structured and controlled. At this point, we need research on the ways that this occurs and its implications for the participation experiences of young people. For example, as coaches and organized competitive programs become more common, these sports cease to be alternatives, and many young people may seek other activities that allow them to be free and creative.
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Many young people seek alternatives to adult-controlled youth sports. Skateboarding and BMX biking are popular alternative sports that young people use to express themselves as they learn skills on their own terms. The experience of creating your own sports and playing them on your terms is very different from the experience of playing organized youth sports under the supervision of parents, coaches, referees, and league administrators.
INFORMAL, PLAYER-CONTROLLED SPORTS: A CASE OF THE GENERATION GAP
The structure and culture of childhood have changed dramatically over the past two generations. When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I spent at least fifteen hours playing in “pickup games” and informal, player-controlled sports for every one hour I played or practiced an organized sport. Few of my sport experiences were ever seen or evaluated by parents, coaches, or referees. They were my experiences, and it was up to me to give them meaning because neither parents nor coaches were there to provide their interpretations, praise, or criticisms. I decided if I had fun, played well, succeeded, or failed. My judgments were influenced by peers with whom I played and by my general experiences, but there were no “outside spectators” shaping my perspectives. Further, there were no official statistics, scores, records, game films, or coaches’ ratings to influence how I defined, evaluated, and then integrated these experiences into my life.
I played on high school teams in five different sports (over four years) and played other sports during summers. Only in college did I specialize because I had a full, four-year basketball scholarship, and there was a team rule prohibiting involvement in sports that might cause injuries or distract attention from basketball training. However, I golfed, swam, and played in softball, handball, and basketball leagues during summers. Although I played over 1
30
basketball and baseball games as a college athlete, my parents saw none of them, nor did I expect them to do so.
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Two generations later, Maddie, my seventeen-year-old granddaughter has played for eight years on a club travel team organized by a local nonprofit soccer organization. Her team plays two seasons, one in fall and another in spring. About half the games are out of town, and each involves two to seven hours of round-trip driving. Maddie’s team also plays in an indoor league between seasons and in three to four major tournaments that require significant travel during the year. Additionally, it is highly recommended that all travel team members play in one or more summer soccer camps.
When I was nine to seventeen years old, and when Maddie’s mom was nine to seventeen years old, we were never asked to be so exclusively committed to a single sport. To meet the expectations of her coaches, Maddie has given up opportunities to play basketball, volleyball, karate, and swimming—all of which are sports that she enjoys. My parents could not and would not have supported such intense, specialized sport participation, and I would not have allowed Maddie’s mother to specialize this way when she was that age in the 1980s.
Although Maddie has played organized soccer since she was four years old, she’s played very few informal sports and pickup games. She lacks time to do so, and her parents, like most parents today, have never felt comfortable allowing her to roam the neighborhood to find other children and create informal games in places that cannot be predicted ahead of time. Even if she did have permission, she would not find peers with whom she could create informal games. This is because parents today fear that their unsupervised children could be exploited by strangers or create trouble of their own doing. Therefore, for every one hour that Maddie has played informal games, she has spent at least twenty hours practicing or playing games on organized teams under the watchful eyes of coaches, referees, and parents. Only a handful of times during thirteen years of playing organized sports has she played an official game without family members in attendance.
Maddie and I typify our respective generations when it comes to youth sports. My experiences were enjoyable, and I think I benefited from them; Maddie, at seventeen years old, says the same thing, even though her experiences have been very different from mine. This raises the sociological question of whether we can make sense of the differences between them. Fortunately, there is research to help us think critically about the changes over the past two generations and the implications that they have for young people and the place of sports in their lives.
Learning from Play: Informal Games and Organized Sports
Informal games exist when young people come together and agree to organize themselves for the sake of having fun. My research indicates that informal games involve fun to the extent that they provide action, exciting challenges, and opportunities for personal expression and the maintenance of friendships (Coakley, 1983b). On an individual level, fun requires personal involvement in the action of a game and facing game-based challenges that test and extend personal skills. When the players are mixed ages, a seven-year-old playing with older children may have fun without a high level of personal involvement in the action, whereas the older and more skilled players require continuous personal involvement to have fun and they often alter rules to create exciting challenges.
Nearly all informal games are organized to maximize action. When there’s plenty of space to play and few available players, the game rules are interpreted and adjusted to keep everyone involved, so that players don’t quit and destroy the game. When space is limited and many young people want to play, game rules are enforced more strictly, and those who aren’t selected to play are relegated to the sidelines; furthermore, the team winning a game may claim the right to play against a challenger that replaces the losing team. But in all cases, the emphasis is on action and exciting challenges. Action keeps alive a “spirit of play,” and challenges require players to focus on testing and extending their skills.
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Research shows that informal games help children learn to cooperate and express themselves physically through a wider range of movements than they would try if coaches were evaluating them (Ginsburg, 2007; Henricks, 2006). For example, when Tom Farrey, an Emmy Award-winning journalist at ESPN, investigated why France produces great soccer talent, he was told by André Mérelle, the director of youth soccer development in France, that they emphasize the importance of unstructured play and informal games for French children. Mérelle told Farrey this:
Everyone wants to win games. That’s good. But how do you win? If you’re too focused on winning games, you don’t learn to play well. You get too nervous, because you’re always afraid to make errors (in Farrey, 2008, p. 75).
As Farrey talked with Zinedine Zidane, three-time World Player of the Year, Thierry Henry, also rated a top player in the world, and other soccer standouts in France, he concluded that the French developmental approach succeeds because it emphasizes informal play—no uniforms, positions, lined fields, game clocks, league standings, or adults yelling instructions from the sidelines. Without the constraining structures and adult expectations that characterize organized youth sports, young people learn to improvise, feel the joy of intrinsic satisfaction, and develop a playing style and personality that make them unique. This allows them to be creative and claim ownership of soccer, rather than feeling that soccer owns them. As French coaches explained, informal games are the places where children develop a personal “feel” for the game and a vision for what occurs and is possible on the field of play—things that are not learned as readily in organized, adult-controlled games in which the structure and rhythm of play are dictated by rules, coaches, and referees.
Farrey also reports that sport development experts worldwide say that children under eight years old should not play highly organized sports or on (soccer) teams with more than five players. From eight to fourteen years old, games can be increasingly organized, but positional play should not be emphasized. There should be no travel teams and no more than one game per week or thirty to thirty-five games per year. Most important, say the experts, is that all coaches must complete a coaching education course and be regularly recertified through continuing coach education. When coaches learn about child development, they can facilitate participation opportunities through which young people are likely to develop a passion for the sport and the awareness that the sport enables them to be creative and expressive.
Research on Play and Development
Developmental research supports the approach used in French soccer (Balyi et al., 2013; Bloom, 1985; Côté, 2011; Côté and Fraser-Thomas, 2007). When Benjamin Bloom, a noted educational psychologist from the University of Chicago, studied 120 individuals who were recognized world-class talents in classical piano, sculpting, mathematics, Olympic swimming, professional tennis, and neurological research, he concluded that talent development occurred over a long period of time under special conditions. In all cases, the talent development process began with exploration, play, and expressive fun. It did not begin with structured activities organized by other people, early specialization, or childhood commitments to long-term goals. Nor did it begin with pep talks about hard work, sacrifice, dedication, and the need to constantly practice. It began with opportunities to freely and playfully explore an activity and discover that it required creativity and effort. Talent development ultimately depended on whether the young people emotionally bonded with the activity, claimed it as their own, and identified the skills they wanted to master. When this occurred, the young people came to be driven by the feelings of exhilaration that occurred as they met and mastered new challenges.
Bloom found that this process took at least ten years to occur, but when it did, the young people, usually in their mid-to late-teens, were ready to Page 93specialize and make the commitments required to excel. At this point, fun merged with the hard work of mastering skills, and this merger fueled the passion and drive that enabled them to achieve excellence.
Bloom’s findings have been widely supported by other scholars who study the development of excellence in sports (Côté and Fraser-Thomas, 2007; Ericsson, 2012; Ericsson et al., 2007). For example, reports on the experiences of U.S. Olympians and top collegiate athletes indicate that they attribute their success to being introduced to sports through unstructured play and informal games and having opportunities to play multiple sports through junior high school (SPARC, 2013).
We know that the existence of informal games and sports require and foster creativity, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving abilities among the players (Côté and Fraser-Thomas, 2007; Elkind, 2007, 2008). Creating games requires knowledge of game models, but maintaining them in the face of multiple unanticipated challenges requires keen conflict resolution skills and an ability to develop on-the-spot solutions to problems. Players must understand the basic requirements of an organized activity so they can create games to fit here-and-now circumstances; additionally, they must form teams, cooperate with peers, develop rules, and take responsibility for following and enforcing the rules. These are important lessons, and we need research to explain when and how children learn them in different types of sport experiences and whether the learning that occurs in sports is used by children in their relationships and activities apart from the playing field.
YOUTH SPORTS TODAY: ASSESSING OUR EFFORTS
A few years ago the Citizenship Through Sport Alliance (CTSA) brought together a panel of experts to assess the current state of organized youth sports in the United States. Using their collective knowledge, the panelists created a Youth Sports National Report Card.2 They also issued grades for twenty-five important elements of existing organized sport programs. The elements were divided into five sets, with each set related to a major topic. The topics and the overall grade for each are
1.
Child-Centered Philosophy: D
2.
Coaching: C
3.
Health and Safety: C+
4.
Officiating: B−
5.
Parental Behavior/Involvement: D
The panel that assigned the grades consisted of researchers, youth sports leaders, attorneys, youth coaches, and parents. Their goal was to identify where youth sports were succeeding or failing and to alert people to the need for improving the sport experiences of children. The panelists also identified specific problem areas that needed attention. The problem statements emphasized that, in general, youth sports
·
Have lost a child-centered focus, meaning that there is too little emphasis on the child’s experience and too much emphasis on winning
·
Are distorted by overinvested sports parents, who have unrealistic expectations and often undermine for their own child and others the benefits of playing sports
·
Fail to adequately train and evaluate youth sport coaches
·
Overemphasize early sports specialization that often leads to burnout, overuse injuries, and a hypercompetitive culture focused on travel teams
·
Ignore the age-based interests and developmental abilities of children who view sports as a source of fun, friends, physical action, and skill development
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The panel also created a Youth Sports Community Report Card for Parents to enable mothers and fathers to evaluate programs serving young people ages six to fourteen in their communities. A third report card was designed for youth sports leaders to evaluate their programs and identify needed improvements for teams and leagues. These tools were intended to facilitate discussions about the organization of youth sports and how it might be improved to benefit all young people.
Unsurprisingly, the report cards were not widely used and had no significant impact. But this is mostly due to how youth sports are organized in the United States. Most other countries have a central sports authority or governing body, such as a federal ministry of sport, that can exert influence on sport programs nationwide, especially publicly funded youth programs. This makes communication to those programs effective, and it makes policies related to safety, health, and overall development of young people easier to implement and promote.
Youth sports in the United States are a fragmented, disjointed, and uncoordinated array of programs. They are based on diverse adult interests, including profit-making, sustaining jobs for adults, generating local tourism through annual tournaments, identifying sport talent, nurturing the best age-group athletes, introducing children to sports, developing basic sport skills, providing neighborhood-based recreational experiences, training athletes for local high school programs, winning regional and national tournaments, building character and leadership skills, controlling young people identified as “at-risk,” keeping kids off the streets, fostering community integration, helping immigrant children learn U.S. culture, creating tough young men, boosting the self-esteem of young women, building new sports like lacrosse or rowing, and achieving many other goals that adults think are worthy.
Of course, all youth programs should not be the same, but because physical inactivity, obesity, and other fitness-related health problems are at crisis levels today, it would be helpful if they followed general principles related to health, well-being, and positive youth development.
To move in this direction, Tom Farrey, an Emmy-winning journalist at ESPN, developed Project Play through the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program. Project Play is a bold attempt to re-imagine and re-form youth sports in the United States so that programs are based on good research about child development and the positive consequences of lifelong physical activity. Farrey and his working board of advisors brought together key stakeholders from business, health, sports, education, research, and government to brainstorm how youth sports can better serve the common good—the quality of life in the nation as a whole.
The stakeholders agreed that youth sports should be a context for developing physical literacy— that is, the ability, competence, and desire to be physically active for life (Project Play, 2015, p. 8). This is done through age-appropriate play, early positive movement experiences, universal access to safe participation opportunities, quality coach education, and support from both public and private sectors.
The stakeholders also agreed that there is a need for a national sports agenda or general policy recommendations that provide guidance to those who organize youth sports. The long-term goal is to link youth sport programs with a nationwide emphasis on physical literacy and lifelong participation in health-producing physical activities.
Canada and other nations have such policies (for example, see
http://www.canadiansportforlife.ca/
) and are taking them seriously in the face of their own health-related crises, none of which are as extreme as the crisis in the United States, where inactivity and obesity have hit record levels. Although people in other nations sometimes look to the United States when it comes to developing elite athletes in certain sports, they are unlikely to see a model for producing public health. However, there are some Page 95recent encouraging moves in that direction, including First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program. And in the realm of traditional sport, USA Hockey has created the American Development Model (
http://www.admkids.com
), which does an excellent job of outlining for youth hockey coaches an age-appropriate method of teaching hockey and organizing youth programs. The model is based on youth development research, which also was used to create the national Canadian Sport for Life program (CS4L).
A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality. —Lev Vygotsky (1978)
Although there are models for organizing youth sports to serve both the common good and the interests of children, it is difficult to convince people to consider those models and implement them in connection with their programs. But the people working with Project Play are focused on doing so.
THE CHALLENGE OF IMPROVING YOUTH SPORTS
Changing youth sports is a formidable task. Many people have vested interests in keeping them as they are, and those who currently control youth sport programs are mostly concerned with increasing their size, promoting the performance ethic more effectively, providing elite training, and taking teams and athletes to state, regional, and national tournaments.
As public programs have been eliminated, youth sport entrepreneurs have come onto the scene. They have developed sport clubs with travel teams and paid coaches. They have built sport-specific programs that control soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, and other teams and leagues in communities across the United States. They sponsor annual tournaments for qualifying teams—or teams that can pay the costly entry fees—and they crown state, regional, and even national champions at all age levels.
Cities bid to host these tournaments because they boost the local economy as thousands of youth sport tourist families come to town and spend money during stays of three or more days. Some of these tournaments attract high school and college coaches seeking young talent for their programs, and these coaches are used by the entrepreneurs to entice teams and families to pay the entry fees in the hope that their children will be noticed and recruited.
An extreme example of this approach is illustrated by the partnership formed by ESPN and Walt Disney World Resort, both owned by The Walt Disney Company. These partners hold tournaments year-round for athletes of all ages at their massive sport complex in Orlando, Florida. They host many national youth sport tournaments because families come with teams and often stay for extra days to visit Disney World at $100+ per person per day. Hotels and restaurants also benefit—all in the name of youth sports. This pattern of hosting weekend, postseason, off-season, and preseason tournaments has now spread nationwide, so that youth sports have become a money-making industry more than activities that benefit children. It also means that efforts to make youth sports more child-centered and age-appropriate will meet resistance if they don’t support this industry.
The people working with Project Play understand this challenge. But they are motivated by the general sense that in the United States, youth sports are broken: they fail to serve populations with the highest need for physical activity—children who are poor, overweight, disabled, or ethnic minorities. U.S. youth sports also are broken in that many programs and teams have done little to nurture the play element in sports—that is, experimentation, creativity, personal expression, spontaneity, and the intrinsic satisfaction associated with physical movement.
As youth sports have become increasingly organized around the achievement of measurable performance goals, the play element of sport participation Page 96has been marginalized or forgotten. This is a problem because play is the foundation for motivation in physical activities. It is the source of joy and the fuel for good feelings that keep people coming back to physical activities regardless of age, ability, or the likelihood of competitive success. Play is done for its own sake, for the feeling of pleasure that it brings rather than for approval and status. When play is absent or rare in sport experiences, dropout rates are high and the likelihood of returning to sport is low.
Information about concussions and injury rates in certain youth sports may lead parents to seek alternative programs that give higher priority to play and creativity than to organization and conquest.
This means that part of the task of reinventing youth sports is to reinfuse play into physical activities of all types, including traditional organized, competitive sports. Noted triathlon coach Barry Shepley has observed, “Today kids don’t play. They are either totally inactive or they are in a coached, expensive program where they have no time or opportunity to simply play and experiment” (in Richard, 2010). Medal-winning U.S. skier Julia Mancuso explains that memories of childhood play were her source of motivation as she trained and competed in the Olympics and World Cup races: “The only thing that kept me in skiing was all the fun I had when I was little” (Layden, 2010a, p. 34).
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Organized youth sports are a luxury item in most of the world. The parents of this ten-year-old Kenyan boy don’t have the resources to nurture his sport dreams. But using his bare feet and a ball of rags bound with twine, he’s managed to develop impressive soccer skills. The meaning he gives to kicking this ball likely differs from the meanings that privileged ten-year-old North American boys give to kicking dozens of “official soccer balls” purchased by parents and clubs. (Source: © Kevin Young)
Play also is a key factor in achieving excellence in sports. For example, when describing Lionel Messi, reputedly the best soccer player in the world (2011–present), historian and novelist Eduardo Galeano says, “No one plays with as much joy as Messi does—he plays like a child enjoying the pasture, playing for the pleasure of playing, not the duty of winning” (in Longman, 2011c). Messi agrees: “I have fun like a child in the street. When the day comes when I’m not enjoying it, I will leave football (soccer).”
For those interested in attracting and retaining young people in sports of all types, and hopefully producing positive health consequences in the process, the challenge is to develop strategies for facilitating play in sport experiences. This is not an easy task. Externally imposed structures often undermine play. Of course, no policy can make people play. Therefore, the challenge facing Project Play and others concerned about children is to enable and provide incentives to those who manage and coach youth sports to make spaces for play in their programs. If this occurs to at least some degree, parents and children will have alternatives to the costly and often playless programs that are so prevalent today.
The timing for introducing such strategies appears to be good today. Parents are increasingly concerned about the injury rates in youth programs that emphasize the performance principle, and they may be willing to accept changes in existing programs or seek alternative programs that highlight play experiences for young people. At the same time, coaches and program administrators are seeking safer ways to play their sports as well as strategies to retain young people in their programs.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVING YOUTH SPORTS
Recommendations usually focus exclusively on organized youth sports. However, informal and alternative sports also have problems that need to be addressed. Many children opt for these sports because they provide action, exciting challenges, and opportunities for personal expression and maintaining friendships. But they often involve physical risks and various forms of exclusion. This suggests that adults should foster participation opportunities for children interested in joining Page 98informal games and participating in action sports. For example, instead of passing laws to prohibit skateboarding or in-line skating, adults could work with young people to design and provide safe settings for them to create their own activities and norms that are inclusive (Donnelly and Coakley, 2003).
The challenge for adults is to be supportive and provide guidance without controlling young people who need their own spaces to create physical activities. Adult guidance can make those spaces safer and more inclusive—for boys and girls as well as children with a disability and from various ethnic and social class backgrounds. The gender exclusion that exists in certain alternative sports is especially problematic and begs for creative solutions that make the cultures of those sports more inclusive.
As the tradition of informal games has nearly disappeared among young people today, there is a need to develop what might be called hybrid sportsthat combine features of player-controlled informal games and adult-controlled organized sports. Hybrid sport activities have not been studied, but they come in at least two forms. First, there are informal games in which adults provide subtle guidance to children, who create and control most of what occurs as they play games in safe settings that are familiar and accessible to them. Second, there are organized sport teams on which parents and coaches encourage un- or semi-structured play during practices and also include children in decision-making, rule enforcement, and conflict resolution processes. As more adults learn that positive youth development requires involvement in unstructured play and informal games, there will be attempts to facilitate them.
Improving Organized Sports
When considering improvements for organized youth sports, programs and teams should be evaluated in terms of whether they are child-centered and organized to match the developmental age of children. This makes children a valuable source of information about needed improvements. If children define fun in terms of action, exciting challenges, personal expression, and reaffirming friendships (see p. 94), it makes sense to organize youth sports so that these aspects of experience are emphasized.
Action can be increased by altering or eliminating certain rules, changing the structure of games, and using smaller teams and playing areas. But many adults resist these changes because they want games to resemble what occurs in elite, adult sports. They say that children must play “the real thing” to learn the sport properly, and they forget that children are more interested in action than mimicking adults and following rules that were never intended to promote a child’s fun. Therefore, adults should control their emphasis on rules, order, standardized conditions, predictability, and performance statistics, and abandon tactics that slow and stop action; after all, high-scoring games are fun, even if many adults see them as undisciplined free-for-alls.
Exciting challenges are destroyed by lopsided scores. This is why children often include handicaps, “do-overs,” and other adjustments that preserve the excitement of competition when they play informal games. Motivation depends on perceived chances for success, and close games keep children motivated by making the game exciting. When the adults who control youth sports resist changes that affect game scores and outcomes, some people call for “mercy rules” that stop games, or they run game clocks continuously to shorten games with lopsided scores. But this subverts action and excitement for young people, who would alter teams to keep games challenging rather than simply cutting them short. Therefore, adults should use creative rules and strategies to promote exciting and challenging action in youth sports rather than giving priority to winning games, developing a killer instinct in players, and qualifying for postseason tournaments.
Personal expression is maximized when games are organized to allow for creativity and experimentation. Rigid systems of control and specialization Page 99by position restrict players’ experiences and opportunities to express themselves. Reducing team size increases opportunities for personal involvement and expression. For example, ice hockey games for children under twelve years old should always be played across the width of the rink, thereby allowing three times as many teams to compete at the same time. Basketball could be reorganized so that three-player “first-string” teams play a half-court game at one basket, while second- and third-string teams play at other baskets; a combined score would determine the overall winner. But these strategies require adults to revise their approach to youth sports so that encouraging children to claim ownership of their sport experiences is a high priority.
When coaches and parents constantly shout directions during games, it’s unlikely that children will feel comfortable engaging in personally expressive actions. This makes it nearly impossible for children to emotionally identify with and claim ownership of a sport. Instead, many of them view organized sports as an adult thing that they’ll eventually outgrow—much like braces on their teeth (Farrey, 2008). (Source: © Jay Coakley)
Reaffirming friendships is central in the lives of children. Organized sports provide contexts for making friends, but friendships are difficult to nurture when children see each other only at adult-controlled practices and games. Additionally, making friends with opponents is seldom considered in organized sports. Therefore, youth teams should be neighborhood- and school-based whenever possible. Pregame warm-ups should mix players from both teams, and players should introduce themselves to the person they line up with as each quarter or half begins. Unless children learn that games cannot exist without cooperation between opponents, they will have no understanding of fair play, why rules exist, why rule enforcement is necessary, and why players should follow game rules. Without this understanding, children don’t have what it takes to maintain fair play at the same time that they strive for competitive success. When this occurs, youth sports are not worth our time and effort.
summary
ARE ORGANIZED PROGRAMS WORTH THE EFFORT?
Although physical activities exist in all cultures, organized youth sports are a luxury. They require resources and discretionary time among children and adults. They exist only when children are not required to work and when adults believe that experiences during childhood influence individual growth and development. Youth sports have a unique history in every society where they exist, but they characteristically emphasize experiences and values that are central to the dominant culture.
The growth of organized sports in North America and much of Europe is associated with changes in the family and in ideas about children and childhood that occurred during the latter half of the twentieth century. Many parents now see organized sports as the source of important developmental experiences in the lives of their children. The fact that the programs provide adult supervision also makes them attractive to parents who see free time and unstructured activities as opportunities for their children to get into trouble.
Major trends in youth sports today include the privatization of organized programs, an emphasis on the performance ethic, the development of high-performance training programs, and increased involvement among parents. In response to these trends, some young people have turned to informal, alternative, and action sports that they can control on their terms without being controlled and judged by adults.
Children’s sport experiences in the United States have changed dramatically over the past two generations. Informal, player-controlled sports were prevalent in the past, whereas organized adult-controlled sports are prevalent today. The decline of loosely structured, informal play and games has influenced the extent to which physical activities are the source of expressive fun among children. This is important in light of research showing that the talent development process in children usually begins with opportunities to freely and playfully explore multiple activities and discover one or more that enable them to be creative and expressive. Unless young people have opportunities to emotionally identify with physical activities, claim them as their own, and decide what they want to learn, excellence is rarely achieved.
The overall benefits of organized youth sports today are limited primarily because they’ve lost a child-centered focus, neglected the evaluation and training of coaches, and reflect too much the orientations of overzealous parents who have unrealistic expectations. Many programs are costly and designed to favor children who are bigger, faster, and stronger than their peers. This creates access issues that affect children from lower-income families and those whose abilities are average or below. The emphasis on early specialization in a single sport and year-round participation tends to wear out early bloomers, deny access to late bloomers, and exclude those who aren’t inclined or selected to be on elite teams.
Youth sports in the United States are driven by the diverse interests of adults who organize teams, leagues, and programs. As a result, they have failed to meet the needs of young people, especially those who are poor, overweight, disabled, and from marginalized ethnic populations. Given the current crises related to physical inactivity, obesity, and other fitness-related health problems, there is a need to rethink the organization and provision of youth sports in the United States. This is a daunting task because there are so many vested interests in preserving youth sports as they are. However, models for reorganizing youth sports do exist, and the current time may be right to develop strategies to encourage and enable people to make changes.
Recommendations for improving youth sports emphasize that there should be action, exciting challenges, and opportunities for personal expression and the maintenance of friendships. This requires more open and flexible structures and less overt control by adults. The goal of such changes is Page 101to provide young people with opportunities to learn that cooperation and an understanding of rules and rule enforcement is the foundation of competitive sports played fairly and ethically.
A major obstacle to change is that there are vested interests in maintaining and expanding programs as they are currently organized. Coaching education programs could facilitate critical thinking among those who work most directly with children in these programs, but they tend to emphasize organization and control rather than critically assessing and changing youth sports.
Overall, organized sports for children are worth the effort—if adults put the needs and interests of children ahead of the organizational needs of sport programs and their own needs to gain status through their association with successful and highly skilled child athletes.
SUPPLEMENTAL READINGS
1. Reading 1.
Youth sports: What we know
2. Reading 2.
Youth advocacy guidelines: Do we need them in sports?
3. Reading 3.
George H. Mead’s theory on the development of the self: Implications for organized youth sport programs
4. Reading 4.
A self-assessment tool for youth sport parents
5. Reading 5.
Guidelines for participation in youth sport programs: Specialization versus multiple-sport participation (a 2010 position statement by NASPE—the national association of sport and physical education)
6. Reading 6.
The “logic” of sport specialization: Using children for adult purposes
7. Reading 7.
Citizenship through sports alliance: Youth sports report cards
8. Reading 8.
Project play: Re-creating youth sports in the United States
SPORT MANAGEMENT ISSUES
· You work in the sport and recreation division of a city government. As it faces a budget crisis, you are asked to present arguments for and against privatizing all the city’s youth sport programs. List the major points you would include in your presentation.
· You work in the main office of a youth soccer organization that has programs in five states. The actions of players’ parents have become increasingly troublesome and extreme in those programs. Coaches want you to tell them why parents are so obnoxious today and what can be done to minimize their troublesome actions. Outline the points you will include in your explanation and recommendations.
· As the director of programs in a park and recreation department, you have an opportunity to hire two people. They will work with you to reform the youth sport programs in the city. Write the job description for these two positions and identify the skills you are seeking in applicants.
chapter
14
(Source: © ELLEN OZIER/Reuters/Corbis)
SPORTS IN HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
Do Competitive Sports Contribute to Education?
The problem with sports is once you combine it with academics, it starts to take over. So you have to be constantly vigilant to control it and make sure you’re sending kids a message about what’s going to serve their interests for decades to come.
—Amanda Ripley, writer and researcher (in Martin, 2013)
High school football has never had a higher profile.… As players grow bigger, faster, and stronger, there are growing concerns about their health and safety.… It all raises a critical question: has the amped-up culture of high school football outrun necessary protections for the boys who play the game?
—Rachel Dretzin, Documentary film maker, PBS (2011)
… inequity in college sports has reached such a comical level that it can no longer be justified with a straight face.
—Matthew Futterman, journalist, Wall Street Journal (2015)
… colleges still send a negative underlying message that black men are only worth educating if they can also play ball. The American university thus remains one of the biggest agents in maintaining stereotypes that say ordinary black men can’t think.
—Nate Jackson, journalist, Boston Globe (2015)
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Chapter Outline
Arguments For and Against Interscholastic Sports
Interscholastic Sports and the Experiences of High School Students
Intercollegiate Sports and the Experiences of College Students
Do Schools Benefit from Varsity Sports?
High School and College Sports Face Uncertainty
Summary: Do Competitive Sports Contribute to Education?
Learning Objectives
· Identify the arguments for and against interscholastic sports.
· Discuss the research findings about the experiences of athletes in high schools.
· Know the ways that varsity sports influence student culture and the overall social organization of high schools in the United States.
· Explain the conditions under which interscholastic sports may be valuable in high schools and the lives of students who play sports.
· Identify differences between intercollegiate sports in big-time athletic programs and smaller, lower profile programs.
· Explain the research findings on the experiences of college athletes and how participation in sports is related to grades and graduation rates.
· Discus the major reforms that have been made in intercollegiate sports, and explain the purpose and effectiveness of those reforms.
· Assess popular beliefs about the benefits of varsity sports in high schools and colleges.
· Identify the major issues faced by both high school and college sport programs, and explain how they might influence sports in the future.
· Explain why some athletes of color have become socially isolated on predominantly white college campuses.
The emergence of today’s organized sports is closely linked Page 440with schools in England and North America. However, the United States is the only nation in the world where it is taken for granted that high schools and colleges sponsor and fund interschool varsity sport programs. In most countries, organized sports for school-aged young people are sponsored by community-based athletic clubs funded by members or a combination of public and private sources.
High schools and universities outside the United States may have teams, but they are usually connected with a national sport system and not solely dependent on individual schools or school systems (Brown, 2015; Erturan et al., 2012; Hédi, 2011; Dziubiński, 2011; Pot et al., 2014). Additionally, their meaning and purpose are unlike the meanings given to school teams in the United States, and they are not integral to the culture and social organization of the schools.
Interscholastic sports are an accepted and important part of U.S. high schools and colleges, but when they dominate the cultures and public profiles of schools, many people become concerned about their role in education.
This chapter is organized around four questions about interscholastic sport programs:
1. What claims do people make when they argue for and against the programs?
2. How are sport programs related to education and the experiences of students?
3. What effects do sports programs have on the organization of schools and the achievement of educational goals?
4. What are the major problems associated with high school and college sport programs and how might they be solved?
ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST INTERSCHOLASTIC SPORTS
Most people in the United States don’t question the existence of school-sponsored sports. However, budget cutbacks and highly publicized problems in some programs raise questions about the relationship between these sports, the development of young people, and the achievement of educational goals. Responses to these questions vary and almost always are based on strong emotions.
Program supporters claim that interscholastic sports promote the educational mission of schools and the development of young people. Critics claim that they interfere with that mission and distract students from learning and taking seriously their emerging responsibilities as citizens. The main points made on both sides of this debate are summarized in
Table 14.1
.
Table 14.1 Claims that are made in arguments for and against interscholastic sports |
|
Claims For |
Claims Against |
1. They involve students in school activities and increase interest in academic activities. |
1. They distract students from academic activities and distort values in school culture. |
2. They build self-esteem, responsibility, achievement orientation, and teamwork skills required for occupational success today. |
2. They perpetuate dependence, conformity, and a power and performance orientation that is no longer useful in society. |
3. They foster fitness and stimulate interest in physical activities among students. |
3. They turn most students into passive spectators and cause too many serious injuries to athletes. |
4. They generate spirit and unity and maintain the school as a viable organization. |
4. They create a superficial, transitory spirit that is unrelated to educational goals. |
5. They promote parental, alumni, and community support for school programs. |
5. They deprive educational programs of resources, facilities, staff, and community support. |
6. They give students opportunities to develop and display skills in activities valued in society and to be recognized for their competence. |
6. They create pressure on athletes and support a hierarchical status system in which athletes are unfairly privileged over other students. |
When people enter this debate, they often exaggerate the benefits or problems associated with interscholastic sports. Supporters emphasize glowing success stories, and critics emphasize shocking cases of excess and abuse. Research suggests that the most accurate descriptions lie somewhere in between these extreme positions. Nonetheless, supporters and critics call our attention to the relationship between sports and education. This chapter focuses on what we know about that relationship.
INTERSCHOLASTIC SPORTS AND THE EXPERIENCES OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Do interscholastic sports affect the educational and developmental experiences of high school students? This question is difficult to answer. Education and development occur in connection with many activities and relationships. Even though interscholastic sports are important in most schools and the lives of many students, they constitute only one of many potentially influential experiences in the lives of young people.
Quantitative research on this issue has seldom been guided by social theories, and it generally consists of comparing the characteristics of athletes and other students. Qualitative research, often based on a critical approach and guided by combinations of cultural, interactionist, and structural theories, has focused on the connections between interscholastic sports, the culture and organization of high schools, and the everyday lives of students.
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High School Athletes1
Studies in the United States consistently show that high school athletes as a group generally have higher grade point averages, more positive attitudes toward school, lower rates of absenteeism, more interest in attending college, more years of college completed, greater career success, and better health than students who don’t play school-sponsored sports.
2 These differences usually are modest, and it’s difficult for researchers to separate the effects of sport participation from the effects of social class, family background, support from friends, identity issues, and other factors related to educational attitudes and achievement.
Membership on a school team is a valued status in many U.S. schools, and for some students it seems to go hand in hand with positive educational experiences, reduced dropout rates, and increased identification with the school. However, research doesn’t explain much about why sport participation affects students, and why it affects some differently from others.
Why Are Athletes Different?
The most logical explanation for differences between athletes on school teams and other students is that school-sponsored sports attract students who have good grades and self-confidence, and are socially popular in school.
Most researchers don’t have information about the pre-participation characteristics of athletes Page 442because they collect data at one point in time and simply compare students who play on sport teams with students who don’t. These studies are limited because they don’t prove that playing school sports changes young people in ways that would not have occurred otherwise.
Fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds grow and develop in many ways whether they play school sports or do other things. This is an important point, because young people who play on varsity sport teams are more likely than other students to come from economically privileged backgrounds and have above-average cognitive abilities, self-esteem, and past academic performance records, including grades and test scores (Child Trends, 2013; Hartmann et al., 2012; Morris, 2013; Shakib et al., 2011; Shifrer et al., 2013). Therefore, students who try out for, make, and stay on school teams are different from other students before they play high school sports.
We let students know: If you participate [in sports], we will control your study life. For kids who really want to play, they’ve been playing their whole lives and they’ll do almost anything to play. —Jay Sailes, high school principal (in Riede, 2006)
This selection-in process is common; students who participate in official, school-sponsored activities tend to be different from other students (Helmrich, 2010). This difference is greatest in activities in which student self-selection is combined with eligibility requirements and formal tryouts in which teachers or coaches select students for participation. Additionally, this combination of self-selection, eligibility, and coach selection, is an extension of a long-term process that begins in youth sports. Over time, students with lower grades and poor disciplinary records decide they don’t want to be involved in sports, or they aren’t academically eligible to participate, or coaches see them as troublemakers and cut them during tryouts.
Research also shows that students who play varsity sports for three years during high school are different from those who are cut from or quit teams. Those who are cut or quit are more likely to come from less advantaged economic backgrounds and have lower cognitive abilities, lower self-esteem, and lower grade point averages than those who remain on teams (Child Trends, 2013; Pearson et al., 2009; Pot et al., 2014; Shifrer et al., 2013; White and Gager, 2007). Furthermore, athletes who receive failing grades are declared ineligible and become “nonathletes” and have low grades when researchers collect data and compare their grades with the grades of eligible athletes!
Another factor that has not been studied is the control that parents, teachers, and coaches have over the lives of athletes on school teams, especially when the athletes are “in season” and their daily activities, especially academic activities, are closely monitored by coaches and parents (Riede, 2006). Homework checks, study halls, grade checks, and class attendance are standard procedures in the lives of athletes when their season is ongoing. Although this probably adds structure to daily schedules, its impact on learning and academic growth is not known.
Overall, school sports have selection-in, filtering-out, and in-season control processes, each of which contributes to differences between athletes and other students. To control for these processes and determine if and when playing sports produces unique, positive educational or developmental outcomes, researchers must collect data at regular intervals over four years from an entire sample of students so they can measure and track changes that are due to sports participation rather than other things.
Studying Athletes in Context
Research published over the past half century presents mixed and confusing findings about the effects of playing school sports. This is because most researchers assume that playing on a school team has the same meaning in all contexts for all athletes in all sports and therefore must have the same consequences. But this is not true. Meanings vary widely depending on three factors:Page 443
1.
The status given to athletes and sports in various contexts
2.
The identities young people develop as they play sports
3.
The ways that young people integrate sports and an athlete identity into their lives
For example, playing on a junior varsity team or being a mediocre player on the varsity fencing team often involves different implications for the status and identity of a young man in comparison with being an all-state football or basketball player on a state-championship team—even if the young man is on a fencing team at a private school that has produced many college and Olympic champions. Similarly, being a young woman ranked the number-one high school tennis player in the state would involve different status and identity implications from being a young woman who is a substitute on the junior varsity softball team.
Self-selection, combined with academic eligibility and coach selection, ensures that athletes often have different characteristics from other students before they ever play on school teams. Athletes may learn positive and/or negative things in sports, but it’s difficult to separate those things from other forms of learning and development that occur during adolescence. (Source: Jay Coakley)
When researchers at the University of Chicago used data collected over four years from two large samples of high school students, they found that interscholastic athletes at schools located in low-income areas were more likely to be identified as good students than were athletes playing at schools located in upper-middle-income and wealthy areas (Guest and Schneider, 2003). Additionally, having an athlete identity was positively associated with grades in schools located in lower-income areas but negatively associated with grades in wealthier areas where taking sports too seriously was possibly seen as interfering with preparing for college and careers. Therefore, the academic implications of being an interscholastic athlete depended on the different meanings given to playing sports and having an athlete identity in different social class contexts in American society (Morris, 2015; Shakib et al., 2011; Shifrer et al., 2013, 2015).
Research also indicates that the meanings given to playing interscholastic sports vary by gender and have changed since the late 1960s (Fox et al., 2010; Hoffman, 2006; Miller et al., 2005; Miller and Hoffman, 2009; Pearson et al., 2009; Shifrer et al., 2013, 2015; Troutman and Dufur, 2007). For example, young women on school teams have had lower rates of sexual activity (fewer sex partners, lower frequency of intercourse, and later initiation of sexual activity) than their female peers who didn’t play sports, whereas young men on school teams had higher rates of sexual activity than other young men in the schools (Miller et al., 1998, 1999). This difference persists because playing on school teams enhances the social status of young people and gives them more power to regulate sexual activity on their own terms (Kreager and Staff, 2009).
During the 1990s, it appears that many young women used this power to resist sexual relationships Page 444that they defined as inappropriate or exploitive, whereas young men used their power to gain sexual favors from young women (Risman and Schwartz, 2002). But these patterns could be different today or change in the future as the meanings given to being on school sport teams change and as there are shifts in students’ ideas about sex.
Research also suggests that identifying oneself as a “jock” in some U.S. high schools connects a student with peers who are socially gregarious and more likely than other students to engage in risky actions such as heavy and binge drinking (Miller and Hoffman, 2009; Miller et al., 2005; Veliz et al., 2015). This issue needs more study, but it seems that playing on certain school teams provides students with more choices for aligning themselves with various cliques or social groups that have different priorities for what they like to do. The choices made by athletes probably influence how others identify them and where they fit into the overall social organization of the school. In some cases, this “positions” them with others who value academic work, whereas in other cases, it positions them so that they focus on social activities with other jocks who like to party even if it detracts from academic achievement.
You’re only 17 once. I have the rest of my life to worry about pain and stuff like that. I can only play football for so long. I might as well use the time I have and worry about the effects later. —High school football player in the Frontline documentary “Football High” (2011)
Identifying the influence of playing high school sports in a person’s adult life is much more difficult than identifying the effects that occur during late adolescence. The meanings people give to sport participation change over time and vary with a wide range of social and cultural factors related to gender, race and ethnicity, and social class. For example, when we hear that many CEOs of large corporations played sports in high school, it tells us nothing about the role of sport participation in the long, complex process of becoming a CEO. The occupational experiences of top CEOs, most of whom are white men, are strongly related to their family backgrounds and social networks, and cannot be separated from the gender, ethnic, and class relations that exist in the United States. This does not mean that these men didn’t work hard or that sport participation was unrelated to their development, but the importance of playing varsity sports cannot be understood apart from many other factors that are clearly related to becoming a CEO.
Overall, research in the sociology of sport indicates that the effects of playing school sports depend on the contexts in which sports are played, the organization of sport programs and teams, and the social characteristics of athletes (Crissey and Honea, 2006; Fox et al., 2010; Hartmann, 2008; Hartmann and Massoglia, 2007; Hartmann et al., 2012; Pearson et al., 2009). Therefore, when young, white women from upper-middle-class families play lacrosse in a small, private, elite prep school where grades are all-important, the effects of participation are likely to be different from the effects that occur when young ethnic minority men from working-class families play football in a large public school where they have opportunities to be noticed in positive ways and to connect with adult mentors more than other students have.
Student Culture in High Schools
Sports are usually among the most important activities sponsored by high schools, and being on a school team can bring students prestige among peers, formal rewards in the school, and recognition from teachers, administrators, and people in the local community. Athletes, especially boys in high-profile sports, often are accorded recognition that enhances their popularity in student culture. Pep rallies, homecomings, and other sports events are major social occasions on school calendars. Students often enjoy these events because they provide opportunities for social interaction outside the classroom. Parents favor them because they’re associated with the school and crowds are controlled by school authorities; therefore, they will allow their Page 445children to attend games and matches even when they forbid them from going other places.
The popularity of school sports has led sociologists to ask questions about their impact on students’ values, attitudes, actions, and experiences.
High School Sports and Popularity
For many years, student culture was studied simply in terms of the factors that high school students used to determine popularity. Research usually found that male students wished they could be remembered as “athletic stars” in high school, whereas female students wished to be remembered as “brilliant students” or “the most popular.” Although these priorities have changed over the last two generations, the link between popularity and being an athlete has remained relatively strong for male students (Shakib et al., 2011). At the same time, the link between popularity and being an athlete has become stronger for female students, although other characteristics, such as physical appearance and social skills, are also important—more important than they are for young men.
Sport participation often gives young women opportunities to establish personal and social identities based on skills respected by peers and people in the general community. However, even though playing sports often is enjoyable, as for the members of this soccer team, it usually does not bring as much status and popularity to girls as it does to boys in U.S. high schools. (Source: © Danielle Hicks)
Most high school students today are concerned with academic achievement and attending college; furthermore, their parents regularly emphasize these priorities. But students also are concerned with four other things: (1) social acceptance; (2) personal autonomy; (3) sexual identity; and (4) becoming an adult. They want to have friends they can depend on, control their lives, feel comfortable with their sexual identity, and be taken seriously as young adults.
Because males and females in North America are still treated and evaluated differently, adolescents use different strategies for seeking acceptance, autonomy, sexual identity, and recognition. For young men, sports provide opportunities to demonstrate the physical and emotional toughness that is traditionally associated with masculinity, and successfully claiming a masculine identity is Page 446assumed to bring acceptance, autonomy, and recognition as an adult.
For young women, sports are not used so much to claim a feminine identity that brings acceptance, autonomy, and recognition as an adult, but playing sports is used to achieve and express the personal power that enables young women to achieve these things. My hypothesis is that young women in high school at this point in time are less likely than their male peers to view sports as a self-identification focal point in their lives and more likely to view them as part of a larger project of achievement that involves academic, social, and other personal accomplishments. If this is the case, the visibility and status gained by high school athletes have different implications for young men than for young women in high school student culture and beyond (Shakib et al., 2011).
High School Sports and Ideology
Sport programs do more than simply affect the status structures of high schools. When Pulitzer Prize–winning author H. G. Bissinger wrote the book Friday Night Lights about a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, he observed that football “stood at the very core of what the town was about… . It had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with how people felt about themselves” (1990: 237).
Bissinger noted that football in Odessa and across the United States was important because it celebrated a male cult of toughness and sacrifice and a female cult of nurturance and servitude. Team losses were blamed on coaches who weren’t tough enough and players who weren’t disciplined and aggressive. Women stayed on the sidelines and faithfully tried to support and please the men who battled on behalf of the school and town.
Attending football games enabled students and townspeople to reaffirm their ideas about “natural differences” between men and women. Young men who did not hit hard, physically intimidate opponents, or play with pain were described as “ladies,” and a player’s willingness to sacrifice his body for the team was taken as a sign of commitment, character, and manhood. At the same time, women who didn’t stand by and support their men were seen as gender nonconformists.
Bissinger also noted that high school sports were closely linked with a long history of racism in Odessa, and that football was organized and played in ways that reaffirmed traditional racial ideology among whites and produced racial resentment among African Americans. Ideas about race and certain aspects of racial dynamics have changed since 1988 when many whites in the Odessa area referred to blacks as “niggers” and blamed people of color for most of the town’s social and economic problems. White people are not as likely today to say that black athletes succeed on the football field because of their “natural physical abilities” or that white athletes succeed due to character, discipline, and intelligence.
Bissinger’s book fails to deal with many aspects of high school life, but a study by anthropologist Doug Foley (1990a, 1999a) provides a more complete description and analysis of the place of sports in a high school and the town in which it exists. Foley studied an entire small Texas town but paid special attention to the ways that people incorporated the local high school football team and its games into the overall social life of the school and the community. He also studied the social and academic activities of a wide range of students, including those who ignored or avoided sports.
Foley’s findings revealed that student culture in the high school “was varied, changing, and inherently full of contradictions” (1990a, p. 100). Football and other sports provided important social occasions and defused the anxiety associated with tests and overcontrolling teachers, but sports were only one part of the lives of the students. Athletes used their sport-based status as a basis for “identity performances” with other students and certain adults, but for most students, identity was grounded more deeply in gender, social class, and ethnicity than sport participation.
Foley noted that sports were socially important because they presented students with a vocabulary they could use to identify values and interpret their everyday experiences. For example, most sports came with a vocabulary that extolled individualism, Page 447competition, and “natural” differences related to sex, skin color, ethnicity, and social class. As students learned and used this vocabulary, they perpetuated the culture and social organization of their school and town. In the process, traditional ideologies related to gender, race, and class continued to influence social relations in the town’s culture, even though some people questioned and revised those ideologies and redefined their importance in their lives.
High school sports, once viewed as a bastion of wholesomeness, is being transformed into a cutthroat business at the highest levels of play, with teenage athletes the prized assets. —Benjamin Hochman and Ryan Casey, Denver Post journalists (2011)
The point of Foley’s study and other research on socialization as a community process is that the most important social consequences of high school sports are not their impact on grades and popularity but their impact on the overall culture of the school and community as well as young people’s ideas about social life and social relations. Examples of this are highlighted in the PBS Frontline documentary “Football High” (Dretzin, 2011).
High School Sports as Learning Experiences
Early in the twentieth century, educators included physical education and sports in U.S. schools because they believed that learning should encompass body and mind (Hyland, 2008). Physical activities and sports, they thought, could be organized to teach important lessons. But the widespread acceptance of the great sport myth and the related belief that “sports build character” led to the assumption that playing sports automatically transformed young people in positive ways, no matter how the sports were organized. There was no need for research to identify what participants learned or how to teach things beyond tactics and techniques. Individual testimonials about “sport making me what I am today” fueled the mythology that sport was like an automatic car wash: those who enter will be cleansed, dried, and sent off with a shiny new look.
As a result, there are no “learning evaluations” at the end of seasons, coaches aren’t held accountable as teachers, and there is an amazing lack of systematically collected evidence documenting the dynamics of teaching and learning in various sports played by over seven million high school students every year. The downside of this lack of knowledge is that we can’t prove what young people learn in sports or when and why they learn certain things, either positive or negative. Nor can we rate the effectiveness of various coaching strategies for teaching what we want young people to learn in sports. And what is it that we want young people to learn? If we knew these things, we could present evidence to school boards when they make funding decisions. Too many people simply assume and say the same things: sport teaches discipline, teamwork, and the value of hard work. But they provide only anecdotal evidence about themselves or someone they know. What we need is systematic research identifying the conditions under which school teams provide worthwhile educational experiences for students.
INTERCOLLEGIATE SPORTS AND THE EXPERIENCES OF COLLEGE STUDENTS
Does varsity sport participation affect the educational and developmental experiences of college athletes?3 This question cannot be answered unless we understand that college sport programs are very diverse. If we assume that all programs are like the ones we see or read about in the media, we are bound to have distorted views of athletes, coaches, and intercollegiate sports.
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Intercollegiate Sports Are Not All the Same
The amount of money spent every year on intercollegiate sports varies from less than $500,000 at some small colleges to over $160 million at the University of Texas. Large universities usually sponsor ten to eighteen varsity sports for men and a similar number for women, whereas small colleges may have only a few varsity sports and many club teams. In small colleges, coaches may be responsible for two or more teams and teach courses as well. Larger universities may have twelve or more coaches for football alone and multiple coaches for most sports. Few of these coaches teach courses, and most have no formal connection with academic programs at universities.
Schools with intercollegiate sports are generally affiliated with one of two national associations: the National Collegiate Athletic Association (
NCAA
) or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (
NAIA
). The NCAA is the largest and most powerful association, with 1200 member institutions, about 460,000 athletes, and a budget of over $500 million per year. Member institutions are divided into five major categories, reflecting program size, level of competition, and the rules that govern sport programs.
Division
I includes (in 2015–2016) 351 schools with “big-time” programs. This division contains three subdivisions:
4
1.
Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) consists of 120 universities that have big-time football teams; each institution is allotted eighty-five full scholarships for football players.
2.
Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) consists of 127 universities that have football programs and are allotted only sixty-three scholarships that can be awarded to (or split between) no more than eighty-five students.
3.
Non-Football (NF) subdivision consists of 100 universities that do not have football teams but have big-time basketball and/or other big-time sports.
NCAA Divisions II and III contain 300 and 444 schools, respectively. These schools have smaller programs and compete at less than a big-time level, although competition often is intense. Division II schools may award limited scholarships but rarely give a full scholarship to an athlete. Division III schools do not award athletic scholarships.
Some colleges and universities choose to affiliate with the NAIA rather than the NCAA. The NAIA has about 250 member schools, an estimated 60,000 athletes, and a budget that is less than 1 percent of the NCAA budget. NAIA schools have teams in up to twelve sports for men and eleven for women. Athletic scholarships are not common and seldom cover more than 25 percent of college costs Most member institutions are small private schools, many with religious affiliation, and their athletic programs have minimal budgets. The NAIA struggles to maintain members in the face of NCAA power and influence.
Christian colleges and Bible schools also have sport programs. About 115 of these are affiliated with the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), although many have dual membership in the NCCAA and either the NAIA or NCAA Division III. The National Junior College Athletic Association consists of about 436 junior and community colleges; some of its 50,000 athletes receive scholarships, nearly all of which cover only partial expenses.
Even though the vast majority of intercollegiate sport teams are not big-time, people use what they see and read in the media to make conclusions about all college sports. But this is a mistake because most sports at most schools do not resemble the sports covered by the mainstream media.
Tables 14.2
and
14.3
identify the percentage of schools in each category and the percentage of athletes that play in each category. For example,
Table 14.2
shows that Division I universities comprise
16.5
percent of all institutions of higher education with intercollegiate sports; and
Table 14.3
shows that only
29
percent of all intercollegiate athletes play on teams in Division I universities. NCAA Division III has the highest proportion of athletes—30 percent—in 444 schools that award no athletic scholarships.
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Table 14.2 Percentage distribution of all colleges and universities with sport programs by athletic organization and division, 2014 |
||||||||
Organization |
Division |
Percent of All Institutions |
||||||
NCAA |
Div. I |
16.5 | ||||||
Div. II |
13.8 |
|||||||
Div. III |
20.9 |
|||||||
NAIA |
12.4 |
|||||||
NJCAA |
24.5 |
|||||||
All Others |
11.9 |
|||||||
Table 14.3 Percentage distribution of all college athletes by athletic organization and division, 2014 |
||||||||
Percent of All Athletes |
||||||||
29 | ||||||||
18 |
||||||||
30 | ||||||||
8 |
||||||||
9 |
||||||||
6 |
||||||||
Source: Adapted from association data, 2014. |
Although it’s important to study all these categories, most research focuses on the Division I universities. Therefore, this chapter, based on the literature in the sociology of sport and other disciplines, provides a limited view of intercollegiate sports. This is important to remember when we discuss issues and problems because they vary widely from one division to the next.
Sports in Divisions II and III receive little attention. Little coverage was given to the 2012 Division III national lacrosse championship in which the Salisbury Sea Gulls defeated SUNY Cortland. The experiences of athletes in these programs differ from the experiences of athletes in big-time programs, but research documenting and analyzing the differences and their educational implications is lacking. (Source: © Michael Tureski/Icon SMI/Corbis)
Athletes in Big-Time Programs
Being an athlete in a big-time intercollegiate program is not always compatible with being a student. A recent survey of 21,000 NCAA athletes showed that most of them spend close to forty hours per week doing their sports; football players reported spending forty-five hours a week on their sport (Petr et al., 2011), and most athletes said they spent more time on their sport than on academic work.
Research by sociologists Patricia and Peter Adler (1991, 1999) helps to put these data in context. After five years of observing, interviewing, traveling with, and hanging out with athletes and coaches for a big-time college basketball team, the Adlers concluded that playing on such a team and being seriously involved in academic courses seldom go hand in hand. The young men on the team Page 450began their first year of coursework with optimism and idealism because they expected their academic experiences to contribute to their future occupational success. However, after one or two semesters, the demands of playing basketball, the social isolation that goes along with being an athlete, and the powerful influence of the team culture drew them away from academic life.
The men discovered that selecting easier courses and majors was necessary if they were to meet coaches’ expectations. Fatigue, the pressures of games, and over forty hours a week devoted to basketball kept them from focusing seriously on academic tasks. Furthermore, nobody ever asked them about their academic lives; attention always focused on basketball, and few people expected these young men to identify themselves as students or give priority to coursework. Racial ideology and stereotypes accentuated this social dynamic as many people assumed that young black men playing basketball had no interests or abilities other than their sport.
When these young men received positive feedback, it was for athletic, not academic, achievement. Difficulties in their courses often led them to view academic life with pragmatic detachment—that is, they didn’t become emotionally invested in coursework and they chose classes and arranged course schedules that enabled them to meet the demands of their sport. They knew what they had to do to stay eligible, and coaches would make sure their course schedules kept them eligible. Gradually, most of the players detached themselves from academic life on the campus.
Academic detachment was supported in the team culture. These young men were with one another constantly—in the dorms, at meals, during practices, on trips to games, in the weight room, and on nights when there were no games. During these times, they seldom talked about academic or intellectual topics, unless it was in negative terms. They encouraged cutting classes, and they joked about bad tests and failing papers. They provided each other with support for their identities as athletes, not students.
Academic detachment did not occur for all team members. Those who managed to balance their athletic and academic lives were the ones who entered college with realistic ideas about academic demands, had parents and peers who were familiar with academic demands in college, and entered the university with solid high school preparation and the ability to develop relationships with faculty and other students. These relationships were important because they emphasized academic achievement and provided support for academic identities.
The Adlers also found that the structure of big-time intercollegiate sports worked against maintaining a balance between athletics and academics. For example, as high-profile people on campus, these young men had many social opportunities, and it was difficult for them to focus on coursework instead of their social lives. Road trips to away games and tournaments took them away from classes for extended periods. They missed lectures, study groups, and tests. Their tight connections with fellow athletes isolated them from the academic life of the university.
Unlike other students, these young men generated revenue and publicity for the university, the athletic program, and coaches. Academic detachment was not a problem for the school as long as the young men did not get caught doing something illegal or resist the control of their coach. It became a problem only when it caused them to be ineligible.
The Diversity of Athlete Experiences
Some big-time intercollegiate sport teams are characterized by chronic problems, low graduation rates, and hypocrisy when it comes to education. However, teams in nonrevenue-producing sports are more likely to be organized so that athletes can combine sport participation with academic and social development. This combination is most likely when athletes enter college with positive attitudes about school and the value of a college education and then receive support for academic involvement and the formation of academic identities.
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Athletes in big-time college sports face difficult choices when allocating time and energy to academic work, sport participation, and social activities. Studying for tests is difficult when the stakes associated with your games often involve millions of dollars for your school and when your coach wants you to give 110 percent every day to the team. Also, playing in front of 80,000 people in a stadium with millions watching on television distracts eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds from academic assignments. (Source: © Bobak Ha’Eri)
Athletes on teams in which there is strong support for academic success may train hard and define athletic success as important, but most of them take their education seriously and try to maintain a balance between their academic and athletic commitments. The athletes who do this most effectively are those who have the following: (1) past experiences that consistently reaffirm the importance of education; (2) social networks that support academic identities; (3) perceived access to career opportunities following graduation; and (4) social relationships and experiences that expand confidence and skills apart from sports.
Coaches in programs that actively support academic success may schedule practices and games that do not interfere with coursework. Athletes may miss games and meets to study for or take tests, write papers, or give presentations. Team members may discuss academic issues and support one another when it comes to academic performance. In other words, there are sport programs and teams that do not subvert the academic mission of higher education (Simon, 2008). Usually they’re found in Page 452NCAA Division III and some NAIA programs, but they also exist in some low-profile, nonrevenue-producing Division I and II sports and in many women’s sports. However, as sport cultures are increasingly organized to emphasize year-round dedication to improvement and competitive success, and as coaches must have winning teams to keep their jobs, it becomes difficult to balance athletics and academics even in low-profile sports (Hyland, 2008; Morgan, 2012).
Grades and Graduation Rates: Athletes in Big-Time College Sports
Unlike athletes in low-profile intercollegiate programs, athletes in big-time, revenue-producing sports often have different backgrounds from other students on campus. They’re more likely to be African American, come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and be a first generation college student in their families. This makes it difficult to compare their academic achievements with the achievements of other students. Comparisons are also difficult because grade point averages (GPAs) have different meanings from one university to another and from department to department within a single university. Even graduation rates are poor indicators of academic outcomes because academic standards and requirements vary from one university to another and between programs in universities.
Some studies report that college athletes earn higher grades than other students, and some report the exact opposite. Some studies show athletes attending graduate school more often than nonathletes, and others show athletes taking an abundance of courses requiring less than average academic work.
When comparing the grades received by athletes with grades received by other students, it is important to take into account two factors related to the academic careers of athletes:
1. Athletes in certain sports are overrepresented in specific courses and majors. This phenomenon is known as clustering. It occurs for various reasons: when athletes lack academic confidence and seek support from teammates in the same courses or major, when black athletes find a department where faculty members are aware of racial issues and treat them with respect, and when coaches assign athletes to classes involving little work or classes taught by faculty members willing to give good grades to athletes regardless of the quality of their coursework.
2. Athletes in football and men’s basketball often enter college with lower than average high school GPAs and lower ACT and SAT scores than other students, including most other athletes, at their universities. Their academic goals may differ from the goals of other students, and this influences their academic choices and performance.
Data on academic progress and graduation rates also are confusing because they’re computed in many ways. The NCAA now publishes standardized “six-year graduation rates” for all member institutions and for each major division, which has made is possible to do basic comparisons of universities and sports. These rates for Division I universities during 2011–2012 provide the following information about athletes who receive full or partial athletic scholarships (NCAA, 2012):
· Sixty-five percent of the athletes who entered Division I universities in 2005 graduated within six years, whereas 63 percent of the general student body graduated in six years. Therefore, athletes as a group have a graduation rate similar to other college students—even though athletes have a higher proportion of men and African Americans and a lower proportion of Asian Pacific Americans than there are in the general student body.
· Graduation rates are lowest in revenue-producing sports, especially men’s basketball (47 percent) and football (59 percent); these Page 453rates are below the rates for all athletes (65 percent) and the general student body (63 percent).
· The graduation rate for African American male athletes (49 percent) is significantly higher than the rate for African American men in the general student population (39 percent). The rate for black female athletes (64 percent) is higher than the rate for black women generally (48 percent). Graduation rates for black male athletes have increased since 1986 when minimum academic standards for scholarship athletes were established for Division I universities. However, the data on graduation rates among black students continue to indicate that “predominantly white campuses are not places in which students of color feel welcome and supported, whether or not they are athletes” (Edwards, 2011; Hawkins, 2010; Lapchick, 2005, 2010).
Graduation rates for female athletes are higher than for men who play college sports. However, as women’s teams have become entertainment oriented, graduation rates have declined slightly. Research shows that women tend to allocate more time to academic work as they make choices between school, sport, and social life. (Source: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
What do these patterns mean? With whom should we compare athletes when we assess the academic integrity of big-time sports—with regular full-time students who work full time, who have equivalent scholarships, who enter college with similar grades and test scores, or who come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds?
Richard Southall and his colleagues at the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) at the University of North Carolina have developed an adjusted graduation gap measure that compares athletes with other full-time students. From 2010 through 2016 they found that athletes consistently had lower graduation rates than full-time students, with the differences being dramatic for football and men’s and women’s basketball (
http://csri-sc.org/research/
).
Overall, there is no single ideal comparison. Furthermore, even though graduation is an important educational goal, it should not be the only criterion used to judge academic success. College degrees are important, but they don’t mean much unless sufficient learning has occurred. It’s difficult to measure learning in a survey of athletes, but it is possible to hold athletic departments academically accountable.
The Challenge of Achieving Academic Goals
Graduation rates among athletes have increased as eligibility rules have become stricter. The most Page 454recent new rules for athlete eligibility went into effect in August, 2016. They require that first year athletes must have had at least a 2.3 GPA in sixteen specific core high school courses with ten of those courses completed before starting senior year, be a high school graduate, and have an SAT score of 900 or an ACT score of 75. Lower SAT or ACT scores require a higher GPA. For example, an SAT score of 740 or an ACT score of 61 requires a 2.7 high school GPA in core courses to be eligible for competition and to receive a scholarship at a Division I school (NCAA, 2015).
We’ve reached a point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose. —William E. Kirwan, chancellor, University of Maryland (in Pappano, 2012)
These changes in NCAA eligibility rules were designed to do three things: (1) send messages to high schools and high school athletes that a commitment to academic achievement is required to play college sports; (2) set new guidelines for universities that haven’t taken seriously the academic lives of athletes; and (3) encourage universities to provide athletes with the support they need to succeed academically.
Boosting eligibility standards has been somewhat successful, but many intercollegiate programs still fall short of meeting reasonable academic goals. Reforming big-time college sports is difficult because they are tied to many interests unrelated to education. Some young people in those sports are in college only to obtain the coaching and experiences needed to stay competitive in amateur Olympic sports or to enter professional sports as soon as an opportunity presents itself. Coaches, especially those in Division I, view their sports as businesses, and they are hired and fired on the basis of win–loss records and the amount of revenue that they create for the athletic program.
Academic administrators, including college presidents, generally use high-profile sports as public relations and fund-raising tools instead of focusing on them as educational programs. The corporations that sponsor teams and buy advertising on telecasts of college sports are not concerned about athletes’ education as long as their teams attract positive attention to the company’s products. Similarly, local businesses that make money when the home team attracts fans are not concerned about graduation rates as long as sports fill the town with spectators for every home game.
Because of persisting problems, the NCAA passed new academic rules for institutions in 2005. These rules shifted more responsibility for academic reform to athletic departments in Division I universities. The rules, which now apply to over 6200 Division I teams, establish a minimum academic progress rate (APR) and a minimum graduation success rate (GSR).
The APR is calculated at the beginning of each semester by awarding a team 1 point for each of its players who is academically eligible and 1 point for each player who has returned to school for that semester. A formula is used to adjust the calculations for teams of different sizes, but the perfect score for all teams is 1000 points. A team that does not have a score of at least 925 points—which would imply a graduation rate of about 60 percent—is subject to losing one or more of its allotted scholarships in the following year, depending on the difference between the team’s score and the minimum 925 points. The APR is based on rolling data from the previous four academic years so that one bad year doesn’t affect a team unfairly.
The GSR also is calculated by using four years of rolling data. Therefore, the rate for 2015 was based on the proportion of athletes who entered the university in 2006 through 2009 and graduated within six years after they first registered for courses. The GSR is not reduced when athletes in good academic standing transfer to other universities or enter professional sports.
If the NCAA continues to enforce these rules, coaches and athletic departments have two options: (1) take academic issues more seriously, or (2) find ways to get around the rules without being caught. This makes academic support programs an important part of big-time athletic departments. The Page 455financial stakes are too high to leave eligibility to chance.
“I like your new recruit, coach; he’s an excellent example of higher education!”
In big-time intercollegiate sports, coaches and university presidents have frequently distorted the meaning of higher education.
Academic Support Programs
Athletic departments with big-time sport programs now maintain academic support programs. Although the stated role of people working in these programs is to help athletes succeed in their academic work, the fact that they are administered by and located in athletic departments raises questions about their real goals. These questions are asked every time it is reported that paid staff wrote papers and did other assignments for athletes (Benedict and Keteyian, 2013; Dohrmann and Evans, 2013; Smith and Willingham, 2015).
Although these programs have existed at least since the early 1980s, they’ve attracted little research. A study in the mid-1990s suggested that academic support programs for athletes were useful but they didn’t boost graduation rates (Sellers and Keiper, 1998). The first published evaluation of an academic support program was done at the University of Minnesota in 2007 (Kane et al., 2008). The evaluation resulted in the development of a model and recommendations for how to improve academic support for athletes and how to measure improvements through regular program evaluations. This model was well received by others concerned about academic integrity in college sports, but there is no research on how it has been used and whether it is effective.
When journalists at Sports Illustrated did an eight-month investigation of alleged improprieties in the football program at Oklahoma State University between 1999 and 2011, they found convincing evidence that football players “routinely had their coursework completed by tutors” working for the athletic department or by other university staff members (Dohrmann and Evans, 2013c). Former players also reported that they would be given answers to upcoming tests and that coaches would register them in courses for which they did little work to receive passing grades.
Academic support programs usually operate under the supervision of the athletic department. When coaches of football and men’s basketball—coaches making between $1 million and $9 million per year—receive bonuses of a few hundred thousand dollars when their teams win conference championships and have good GPAs, it creates pressure on the staff in the support programs to do all they can to help athletes stay eligible and receive good grades. We know little about how this occurs, and it is unlikely that athletic departments would give permission for studies to be done.
Future Reforms
For nearly four decades the NCAA has tried to improve the academic experiences and graduation rates of college athletes. But at the same time, research suggests that there is a growing separation between the culture of intercollegiate sports and the general university culture (Bowen and Levine, 2003; Bowen et al., 2005; Lawrence et al., 2007; Smith and Willingham, 2015).
This separation is fueled by historical, commercial, and political factors that currently shape the culture of college sports (Nixon, 2014). These factors are so powerful that a group of college professors Page 456formed The Drake Group (TDG,
www.thedrakegroup.org/
), the goal of which is to reform intercollegiate sports and defend academic integrity in higher education. TDG lobbied the U.S. Congress, asking it to investigate the nonprofit status of college sport teams organized to make profits. When Congress formed an investigative committee, the NCAA acted quickly to highlight academic success stories in college sports and the committee pulled back its investigation. TDG remains active and argues that until intercollegiate sports are monitored by an independent agency, the educational mission of universities will continue to be compromised.
I’m a UCLA Prostitute. I sell my body to them. They pay me to perform for them. When my teammates and I perform well, the school makes lots of money … Regardless of how much money the school makes, we get the same, just our scholarship. —College football player (in Anderson, 2004)
The fact that powerful commercial forces influence big-time college sports leads many of us who have studied college sports to be skeptical about the real impact of reform efforts (Coakley, 2008b; Morgan, 2012; Oriard, 2012; Thelin, 2008; Zimbalist, 2013). But others remain hopeful that meaningful changes will occur if the NCAA makes a serious and sustained commitment to enforcing academic standards and using penalties that have serious financial and reputational consequences for universities and athletic departments (Chelladurai, 2008; Simon, 2008).
DO SCHOOLS BENEFIT FROM VARSITY SPORTS?
High school and college sports affect more than just athletes. In this section, we look at the influence of these programs on high schools and colleges as organizations. In particular, we examine school spirit and budgets.
School Spirit
Anyone who has attended a well-staged student pep rally or watched the student cheering section at a well-attended high school or college game or meet realizes that sports can generate impressive displays of energy and spirit. This doesn’t happen with all sport teams, nor does it happen in all schools. Teams in low-profile sports usually play games with few, if any, student spectators. Teams with long histories of losing records seldom create a spirited response among more than a few students. Many students don’t care about school teams and resent the attention given to some teams and athletes. But there are regular occasions when sports are sites at which students and others associated with a school can come together to express spirited feelings about their teams and schools. These provide the scenes covered in the media and talked about by some people as they reminisce about their time in high school.
Proponents of varsity sports say that displays of school spirit at sport events strengthen student identification with schools and create solidarity among students. In making this case, a high school principal in Texas says, “Look, we don’t get 10,000 people showing up to watch a math teacher solve X” (McCallum, 2003, p. 42). Critics say that the spirit created by sports is temporary, superficial, and detrimental to educational goals.
Being a part of any group or organization is more enjoyable when people have opportunities to collectively express their feelings. However, considerable resources in the form of time, energy, and money are devoted to producing this outcome in connection with sports. Students focus time and energy on these occasions by making signs, planning social events in connection with games, and showing support for players. Cheerleaders practice and attend games. Athletes practice, play, and travel ten to twenty hours a week, think about games, and view their “athlete” status as central to who they are in the school. Teachers attend games, mix with and “police” student spectators, serve as score and time keepers, and perform other game-related duties. Page 457Administrators devote time and energy to making sure the games, athletes, and students represent their schools in positive ways.
Is this a display of school spirit? If it is, what does it mean? Will these students study harder, graduate at a higher rate, or donate more money to the school than other students? Is this an expression of identification with the school, and what does that mean? Unless we can answer these questions, how do we know if school sports should be supported because they foster school spirit and identification? (Source: © Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos)
Parents pay participation fees, assist coaches with never-ending fund-raising for teams, run concession stands, and work behind the scenes to support their children who play or watch games. Coaches and school athletic program staff are paid, and they are part of a district and state structure consisting of people who are full-time sport management staff with offices and expense accounts. There also are people hired to do pre- and post-game cleanup of gyms, bleacher areas, and outdoor fields. Others are hired to groom and line the fields, repair damage to equipment and facilities, and set up bleachers and scoring tables. Referees are trained and hired, and the physical facilities of the entire school are managed to host up to three or four events per week smoothly and safely. Finally, local journalists and other newspeople come to and report on games as the only school activities worth covering in local news.
Now imagine if all this time, energy, and material resources were used to create curricula, engage in well-planned course projects, maintain classrooms and laboratories, train and pay teachers, reward students for academic accomplishments, and present the school as a valuable learning site to the entire community (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b). Would learning be defined as more central to students and in the overall organization of schools? This is what occurs in many other post-industrial countries that are ranked far higher than the United States when it comes to knowledge and test scores in math, reading, and world affairs.
In contrast, in the United States, people, including educators, uncritically assume that sports are so crucial in the organization of schools that Page 458no one even thinks of discussing this issue or what U.S. education might be like if sports were community-based rather than school-sponsored activities. Again, the great sport myth is accepted in a way that undermines thinking about how school spirit might be more effectively organized around something other than sport teams and the sport events that increasingly conflict with academics rather than compliment them (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b).
The spirit associated with high-profile intercollegiate sports is exciting for some students, but only a small proportion of the student body attends even highly publicized games. Either the students aren’t interested or the athletic department limits student tickets so they can sell seats at a higher price to other fans.
The games of big-time sport teams often are major social occasions that inspire displays of spirit on many university campuses, but research suggests that this spirit has little to do with the educational mission of the university or creating general social integration on a campus (Clopton, 2008, 2009, 2011; Clopton and Finch, 2010; Pappano, 2012). It does create regular occasions for a segment of students, more often white males than women or ethnic minority students, to party, binge drink, avoid the library, and study less, especially when their team is successful and winning games regularly (Clotfelder, 2011; Higgins et al., 2007; Lindo et al., 2012).
Finally, we know that sports can generate impressive displays of school-related spirit in local communities. In fact, games played by teenagers, who often are perceived as “problems” in shopping areas and neighborhoods, become the main source of local entertainment in many towns and smaller cities in the United States. Does this lead to support for the schools and their educational programs, or does it focus attention more on the performance of sport teams rather than the academic performance of local students?
Research is needed on this issue. People assume that support for teams translates into support for schools, but we don’t know how or under what conditions this occurs. For example, people regularly watch, talk about, and cheer for high school and university sport teams at the same time that they vote down bond issues to fund local schools and vote for state legislators who cut billions of dollars from state university funding. How and under what conditions do those cheering fans support funding for the high schools and universities that sponsor the teams they follow? We know little about this, although many people uncritically assume that spirit generated by sports is always good for education.
School Budgets
Public high schools and colleges have different budget issues because of the ways they are funded, although private high school and colleges face similar issues. The financial stakes associated with big-time intercollegiate sports puts about 250 universities in a budget category of their own. For example, when a nineteen-year-old sophomore shoots a crucial free throw during the NCAA tournament, it could be worth $1.5 million for his university—and this does not include the millions of dollars that will be won or lost by gamblers who have bet on the game. This is not the case in high school sports. Therefore, high school and college budget issues are discussed separately.
High Schools
Most interscholastic sport programs are funded through school district appropriations that come from property taxes. In most cases, expenditures for these programs account for less than 1 percent of school operating budgets. When certain sports have large budgets, money also comes from gate receipts and booster clubs.
In the face of recent budget shortfalls, many high schools have used various fund-raising strategies: (1) collecting sport participation fees from the families of students who play on school teams; (2) fostering booster clubs; and (3) seeking corporate sponsorships. But each of these alternatives creates problems.
Participation fees privilege students from well-to-do families, discourage students from low-income families, and create socioeconomic divisions in the student body. But they are widely used and range Page 459from a low of $25 to a high of over $1000 for some sports that require big budgets to pay for equipment, travel, and facilities. Some families pay thousands of dollars for their children to play school sports, which creates serious problems for coaches when parents who have just written a check for $500 make it known that they don’t want their child sitting on the bench.
Relying on booster club support also creates problems because most community boosters want to fund boys’ football or basketball teams rather than the athletic program as a whole, and many parent booster clubs focus only on the sports that their children play (Fry, 2006). This practice intensifies existing gender inequities and has led to Title IX lawsuits, none of which have been decided in favor of boosters who ignore girls’ teams. Additionally, some boosters feel that they have the right to give advice to coaches and players, intervene in team decision making, and influence the process of hiring coaches. Community boosters may focus on win–loss records so they can tout their influence when they interact with friends and business associates; for them, educational issues may take a back seat to building a team that will win a state championship and boost their personal status.
Corporate sponsorships connect the future of interscholastic sports to the advertising budgets and revenue streams of businesses. This means that schools can be left empty-handed when advertising budgets are cut or sponsorships are not paying off enough to satisfy company owners, stockholders, and top executives. Other problems occur when the interests of corporate sponsors don’t match the educational goals of high schools. For example, promoting candy, soft drinks, and fast-food consumption with ads and logos on gym walls, scoreboards, and team buses contradicts health and nutrition principles taught in high school courses. This subverts education and makes students cynical about the meaningfulness of their curriculum. Additionally, certain corporations want to “brand” students as young as possible so they sponsor sports in the hope of turning students into loyal consumers.
High school budget issues have become increasingly contentious with the rising expectations of parents and athletes seeking athletic programs that match the individualized attention they’ve received in private club programs (Hochman and Casey, 2011a). As more students come out of club programs, they are focused on obtaining a college scholarship, so they expect coaches, trainers, equipment, and facilities that will help them achieve this goal, even if it is unrealistic.
This issue is not going away, even though budget crises are forcing some schools to drop all sports. The result is emerging inequality with public schools in upper-middle-class areas and private schools with students from wealthy families funding elaborate sport programs and facilities while schools in low-income areas struggle to maintain a few teams using outdated and rundown facilities and equipment.
Colleges and Universities
The relationship between sports and school budgets at the college level is complex (Lifschitz et al., 2014). Intercollegiate sports at small colleges are usually low-budget activities funded through student fees and money from the general fund and the college president’s office. The budgets at 128 NCAA FBS universities range from about $18 million to $160 million. However, athletic departments use many different accounting methods, making it difficult to compare them. For example, some departments may “hide” profits to maintain their nonprofit status for tax purposes, and others may “hide” losses to avoid criticisms that sport teams are too costly and take money away from academic programs.
There are about 1900 intercollegiate sport programs in the United States. Less than twenty of them consistently make more money than they spend.
Table 14.4
shows the amount of debt incurred in 2012 by universities with the biggest and “most successful” sport programs. Among the 128 FBS universities—the ones with top-rated football and basketball programs—annual losses averaged about $12.3 million per university. Among the 125 FCS universities, average losses were $10.2 Page 460million per university, and among the 94 universities in the No Football Subdivision, average losses were $9.8 million (Berkowitz and Upton, 2013; Berkowitz et al., 2013).
Table 14.4 Median university revenues and expenditures by subdivisions in Division I, 2012 |
||||
Median Total |
Median Generated |
Median Total |
Median Net Revenue |
|
Football Bowl |
$55,976,000 |
$40,581,000 |
$56,265,000 |
−$12,272,000 |
Football Championship |
$13,761,000 |
$ 3,750,000 |
$14,115,000 |
−$10,219,000 |
Division I—No |
$12,756,000 |
$ 2,206,000 |
$12,983,000 |
−$ 9,809,000 |
Source: NCAA 2004–2012 Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Revenues and Expenses Report (https://www.ncaapublications.com/p-4306-revenues-and-expenses-2004–2012-ncaa-division-i-intercollegiate-athletics-programs-report.aspx). |
The general pattern since 2007 is that athletic department income has increased primarily due to increased television rights money, but spending has increased at a similar rate. Most athletic departments spend more than they take in, and then use student fee money and money from the general university budget to make up the difference. This has occurred during a period when student tuition and fees have soared at a record pace and faculty salaries have been nearly frozen and their workloads have increased.
Two facts that shock most people are these: (a) during the 2011–2012 academic year, the 227 FBS and FCS universities received $2.3 billion in subsidies from student fees, state government money, and the university’s general fund. This amounts to about one-third of all the money that these athletic departments spent during the year; and (b) during
2010–2011
, FBS universities spent $92,000 per athlete on all their teams, but spent only $13,600 per student—a nearly a 7-to-1 ratio (Berkowitz and Upton, 2013; Desrochers, 2013). In the Southeastern Conference, where universities pour money into their football teams, $164,000 was spent per athlete and $13,400 was spent per student—more than a 12-to-1 ratio. In FCS universities, $36,700 was spent per athlete and $11,800 was spent per student—more than a 3-to-1 ratio. It is also expected that these athlete-to-student spending gaps have increased since 2010 as athletic departments continue on what is an unsustainable spending spree.
Another troubling issue is that the twenty-three athletic programs that claimed to have made more than they spent during 2011–2012 collectively received about $52.4 million in subsidies from student fees and the universities. For example, Florida State generated $92.3 million in income during 2011–2012 and spent $90.3 million, but received subsidies of $7.8 million—so they reported just over $100 million in so-called “income” and a so-called “profit” of $9.8 million.
“Generated” or real income consists of money from ticket sales, media rights contracts, donations, and some merchandise sales. “Subsidies” consist of student fees and money from the universities’ general funds and state appropriations. But subsidies do not include other forms of government support such as the tax deduction taken by the wealthy Page 461fans that buy luxury suites and high-priced tickets to football and men’s basketball games and deduct up to 100 percent of their costs as either “business expenses” or “charitable contributions,” thereby cutting about 40 percent of total costs off their taxes—money that could be used to fund public programs; additionally, tax-free bonds, often held by wealthy individuals and institutions, are used to build new university sport stadiums with luxury suites for wealthy fans and their friends.
Budget information for most colleges and universities shows that sport programs exist because they are funded by student fees and by money from general university funds and the state. Every now and then a wealthy individual or corporation gives a large amount of money to an athletic program so it looks like it is profitable. This has occurred at the University of Oregon, where Phil Knight, CEO of Nike and an Oregon graduate, has donated about $300 million to the athletic department. This has led some people to suggest that it should change its name to Nike University. The athletic program at Oklahoma State University received $265 million from billionaire T. Boone Pickens and used it to help turn its football team from a perennial loser into a consistent winner. Unfortunately, Pickens did not know that this turnaround was allegedly aided by improprieties such as paying football players, maintaining their eligibility through academic fraud, tolerating their drug use, and recruiting skilled players with sexual favors supplied by female students helping out the team.
NCAA data show that the median athletic expenditures at Division II schools with football teams increased from $2.9 million in 2004 to $5.1 million in 2011, and a few schools had expenditures over $15 million, but no school generated more than $9.7 million; the median amount of revenue generated was only $618,000 (Fulks, 2012a).
For schools without football teams, expenditures were $3.6 million in 2011, with median revenues of $297,000. The median loss for men’s programs in Division II was $1.9 million and for women’s programs it was just under $1.2 million. Football lost the most money of any teams—a median of about $1 million, compared with women’s basketball, which lost a median of $313,000. Because most Division II revenues come from student fees and there are more female than male students in these schools, men’s sports, especially football, are disproportionately subsidized by women. In Division II programs without football, the net cost of men’s and women’s programs was nearly the same.
In most NCAA schools, women’s sport programs have smaller financial deficits than men’s sports. This means that men’s sports have a higher net cost than women’s sports in most schools. The budget for this 2008 and 2011 Division I championship bowling team at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a small fraction of the budgets for most men’s sports. (Source: © Alyssa Schukar/NCAA Photos)
Page 462A similar pattern exists in Division III. For schools with football, the median expense for the athletic program was $2,858,000 in 2011, an increase of almost 85 percent over expenses in 2004. Schools without a football team spent a median of $1,383,000 in 2011—a 109 percent increase from the median $660,000 spent in 2004. Revenues are negligible in Division III sports, most games and matches have free admission and there is no television coverage for which teams are paid. This means that the expenses per athlete are relatively high—in 2011, about $5600 in schools with football and $5100 for schools without football. Football remains the costliest sport; men’s programs cost a median of $985,000 with football but only $380,000 without football. In programs with football, the women’s programs average $649,000, but only $423,000 in programs without football. In the latter case, women’s sports cost more than men’s sports by about $40,000 per year.
Although the cost of sport programs in Divisions II and III pales in comparison to many programs in Division I, schools in each division are sites for increasing tension between core educational values and decisions that favor intercollegiate sports in admissions and resource allocation in campus budgets (Bowen and Levine, 2003; Bowen et al., 2005). This tension has been building since the 1980s, and some faculty members now believe that academic quality suffers when so many campus resources are dedicated to recruiting athletes, financially supporting teams that have ever-growing training and travel expenses, and building facilities for sports that are not systematically organized to be educational. They also ask if it is sensible to provide coaches with money to recruit students with highly specialized sport skills when the head of the sociology department or the faculty advisor for the school newspaper does not have a similar recruiting budget. Sports, they say, can exist without recruiting because many students want to play on school teams for reasons other than athletic scholarships and media coverage.
Current research indicates that sports and sport experiences have a wide range of consequences depending on the meanings that people give to them and the ways they are integrated into people’s lives in particular social and cultural contexts. At this point, we’ve only begun to study those meanings, contexts, and consequences in education, even though U.S. schools have sponsored competitive sport teams for well over a century.
HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE SPORTS FACE UNCERTAINTY
Despite their popularity, interscholastic sports are surrounded by uncertainty today. Some of the issues causing that uncertainty are similar for high schools and colleges, whereas others are unique to each level. In this section we focus first on the similar issues and then deal with issues unique to each level of participation.
Issues Facing High School and College Sport Programs
High school and college sport programs both face issues related to cost containment and growing budget inequality between programs in schools at the same level of competition. The second issue is the changing orientations and rising expectations of parents and athletes, who now make their own sport-related goals a priority when searching for a sport program.
A third issue facing both high school and college programs is how to minimize concussions, repetitive head trauma, and other serious injuries that could significantly reduce participation in certain sports and bring about major structural and cultural changes in athletic departments.
A fourth issue is how to create and maintain sport programs that support the educational mission of the school and promote learning experiences for all students without overshadowing the academic focus of teachers and students. Finally, both high schools and colleges continue to face the issue of gender inequities and the issue of providing participation opportunities for students with disabilities.
Viewed collectively, these five issues are bringing high school and college sport programs to a Page 463crossroads. The people running these programs are facing serious decisions on matters that can no longer be pushed aside and ignored. Dealing with these issues requires systemic strategies as well as strategies matched to individual schools and sport programs, regardless of the competitive level at which their teams play. However, these issues are not just matters for sports. They have implications for the quality of education in the United States. Sports have become such a central component of U.S. schools that strategies for dealing with them have implications far beyond the playing field and the lives of individual students.
Cost Containment and Budget Inequality
The cost of programs at both high school and college levels has been increasing at a rate that far exceeds inflation and the cost increases for other segments of secondary and higher education. With growing pressure to contain costs and eliminate operational deficits, most sport programs today face serious budget questions. Money is tight across all of education, and those who administer sport programs cannot assume that their desires to spend can be covered by increases in general funding at either the high school or college level.
In fact, college athletics in general are more the province of the privileged than the poor … Beneath the thin layer of sport entertainment that makes its way onto television are the bulk of college athletes: Well-off and white. —Tom Farrey, ESPN, in Game On (2008)
As academic and athletic programs deal with funding cuts, both have used special fees and fund-raising to preserve what they currently do. Schools in wealthy districts or schools that draw students from relatively wealthy families have usually been able to sustain and even increase spending as other schools face grim or desperate circumstances. In some schools, programs have been trimmed to teams in just a few sports, and in others the entire sport program has been dropped. But across all programs there is growing inequality in funding for sports, even among schools that compete at the same level.
Budget and program inequality among high schools is related primarily to the residential distribution of wealth across neighborhoods, towns, and even regions of the country. At the college level it is related to the distribution of media rights revenues and gate receipts for spectator sports. As a result, a relatively small percentage of programs enjoy the resources needed to build state-of-the-art facilities, attract skilled athletes, and pay qualified coaches and staff. At the same time other programs struggle to meet expenses and they cut corners that sometimes raise safety issues for athletes.
Exacerbating this inequality at the high school level is the emergence of private schools that have the resources to field excellent teams across a number of different sports (Hochman and Casey, 2011b). These schools can recruit students without being limited by the geographical restrictions that exist for public schools, so they can pick the best athletes and offer them tuition assistance or even full scholarships. If they also have an attractive academic program, students from wealthy families will bypass the public school in their area and attend a private school with a well-funded sport program and a collection of highly skilled athletes.
As this occurs around the United States, schools with top teams in football and boys’ and girls’ basketball seek national ranking and play games out of state as they face off with the other high-budget teams across the country. Some people have suggested that there should be regional or even a national conference for these teams so they could play each other every year and sell broadcast rights to games.
Sport program inequality is gradually becoming a castelike system in which inequality reproduces itself year after year. Adding to this trend is the fact that the best high school athletes are increasingly coming out of youth sport club programs in which participation costs are so high that they exclude well over half the young people in most regions of the country. This means that the socioeconomic Page 464haves are the young people with the best opportunities to develop their skills, attend high schools with large budgets, and then receive the majority of athletic scholarships in college—scholarships that, for some of them, have more status value than financial value, because they have enough money to pay college expenses. In this way, inequality in high school programs increases the inequality in college programs.
The sport program inequality at the college level is easy to see in Division I of the NCAA, but it also exists in Divisions II and III. The absolute dollar differences in Division I budgets are staggering, although the proportional differences in all three divisions show massive budget gaps. For example, the University of Texas spent about $161 million on its sport programs in 2013–2014, which is more than the combined athletic expenses of the twenty lowest-budget programs in the FBS and FCS subdivisions of Division I. Big-budget schools don’t win all their games, but they continue to have income that increases the budget gap in college sports. This is why, as of 2012–2013, about 92 percent of all NCAA Division I championships in history have been won by fewer than seventy schools—about 20 percent of the Division I membership—a pattern that has become even more apparent in recent years.
Inequality at the college level has become so great that representatives of schools in Division I can no longer agree on rules, rule changes, and rule enforcement procedures (Nixon, 2014). This is because about sixty-six of these athletic departments from the top five out of thirty-four athletic conferences exist in a totally different world than the athletic departments in the other schools. Basically, they are running professional programs while everyone else runs wannabe or amateur programs. The professional programs want rules that fit their situation, although they still want their workers (the athletes) to toil under a strict minimum wage as they receive many millions of dollars from deals with media companies.
Efforts to reduce inequality in the United States always run into massive resistance regardless of the context. The resistance to cost-containment policies is also strong. Could there be a ceiling on college team budgets and coach salaries? Could television rights money be redistributed across more schools? The chances of doing these things are slim, which means that program inequality will continue to shape the sports landscape at both the college and high school levels.
Changing Orientations and Rising Expectations
As the stakes associated with sport participation have increased, there has been a corresponding increase in the expectations and goals of parents and athletes. Young people today have been raised in a culture emphasizing self-improvement, growth, and achievement, and in no sphere of society is this emphasis stronger than it is in sports. At the high school level, a growing number of athletes seek opportunities to develop the skills and visibility that maximize their chances to receive a college athletic scholarship. They also believe that year-round involvement in a single sport is essential to achieving this goal, and they seek schools and coaches that fit their expectations.
When a local public school does not meet their expectations, parents and athletes seek other schools if they have a choice. If not allowed to switch schools, they might seek a private school or even move into another area where there is a public school program that offers what they want. In either case, they will expect to receive personal attention and coaching. Another alternative that is becoming increasingly popular in soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, and a few other sports is to remain on a high-profile club team that plays year-round and regularly goes to state, regional, and national tournaments scouted by college coaches. But these clubs are expensive, often costing $10,000 or more per year depending on the travel and tournament fees.
The president of Biocats, a multi-state scouting service for young athletes, has observed this change in many high schools:
… parents and kids have never experienced anything beyond “It’s all about me” in club sports. We have to re-educate kids and parents when they get to high school: “This isn’t a club.” (In high school) it’s not about you. It’s Page 465about team, school, and community. You are serving them. In the club, they are serving you (Hochman and Casey, 2011b).
It is difficult to say how these changing orientations and rising expectations play out at the college level. Certainly there are more prima donna athletes focused on their personal goals. This results in more athletes switching schools to find the attention they expect, and it may lead to more athletes joining collective efforts forcing schools to provide better health care and insurance, compensation for the use of their names and images to boost revenues, and regulations limiting the hours they must spend on their sports each day and week. If this is where changing orientations and rising expectations lead, it will have a dramatic impact on the organization of college sports.
Concussions, Repetitive Head Trauma, and Other Serious Injuries
Concussions and the possibility of incurring permanent brain damage while playing school sports, especially football, is a hot-button issue for high school and college sports. It is also an anxiety-provoking liability issue for coaches, athletic directors, and school administrators. With football being the most popular and heavily promoted sport in high schools and college, the fact that half of all reported concussions in organized school sports occur in football raises this anxiety level even further.
High school administrators know that the vast majority of athletes on interscholastic teams are under the age of informed legal consent, and that the school has a special responsibility to protect them while they are under their supervision. If studies continue to show that sport-related concussions or repetitive sub-concussive head trauma can cause death, permanent brain injuries, or an inability to meet academic expectations, they must drop football and possibly other sports, or find ways to drastically reduce head trauma during practices and games. Some teams now limit practice hours spent doing full contact drills and scrimmages, but they have increased the number of games that football teams play in a season, including playoffs (Brady and Barnett, 2015). Many coaches now teach tackling moves that limit head involvement, but these moves often are lost in the speed of real game action. New concussion diagnosis and treatment protocols are mandated in high school sports, but these only reduce the likelihood of playing with a head injury rather than preventing head injuries.
As research continues to show that repetitive subconcussive head trauma can cause temporary or permanent brain damage that could affect grades, college admissions, future job prospects, and general health and well-being, lawsuits will be filed. Defendants in those lawsuits are coaches, school athletic directors and principals, district and state athletic directors, and boards of education. Regardless of the possible legal outcomes, the mere threat of personal and school liability raises the cost of insurance and puts school personnel in an uncertain legal position. This means that dealing with head trauma among athletes is no longer a choice. To avoid assertive actions puts your school, school district, and state high school activities association on the line as well as the careers and family assets of personnel associated with sports.
The issue of concussions and other serious injuries plays out in a slightly different way at the college level. Athletes in college have reached the age of (informed) legal consent. But this means that the NCAA, universities, athletic departments, and teams have the responsibility to fully inform athletes of the risks they agree to take in their sport. Until now all these parties have been grossly negligent. There has been no NCAA policy on concussion protocols, even though the stated purpose of the organization is to protect “student-athletes.” Universities have not provided in-depth education sessions to inform athletes of the risks they face in certain sport situations, despite having concussion and brain trauma experts on their faculties and in their medical schools, and despite claiming that college sports are important educational experiences.
A concussion lawsuit was filed against the NCAA and other defendants in 2011 by an individual, Page 466but he was joined by additional former players with alleged symptoms of brain injuries. Therefore, the suit sought approval as a class action claim on behalf of thousands of former college athletes (AP, 2013; Hruby, 2013a, 2013b).
The case was settled in July 2014, with the NCAA agreeing to establish a $70 million fund to pay for exams to assess whether former players have neurological ailments possibly related to previous concussions. The NCAA also agreed to provide an additional $5 million for research on concussions, and to create a protocol on when athlete can return to play after sustaining a concussion. No damages would be paid to any players for the treatment of neurological ailments.
Although college athletes suffered over 30,000 reported and diagnosed concussions between 2004 and 2009, they were denied an opportunity to file a class action suit in which all of them would be represented in one case. This enabled the NCAA to escape the payment of significant damages, such as those being paid to former players by the NFL. Former college players may now sue as individuals, but that is very expensive to do, and the chances of winning such a case is remote at best.
Like the NFL, the NCAA avoided an admission of negligence or wrongdoing in failing to inform players what was known about head injuries. Therefore, they will pay no damages to any former players, and their insurance will cover nearly all of the settlement. A few of the former athletes involved in the suit did not accept the settlement because it failed to cover any treatment, but they could do nothing to reopen the case.
Although the settlement in this case did not hurt the NCAA financially, and high schools have not yet paid a major settlement, emerging research on brain injuries continues to make concussions and head trauma a “crossroads issue” for high school and college sports. If scientists don’t develop a way to prevent a brain from moving inside a skull when the head comes to a sudden stop or is twisted violently, the people who run school-sponsored sport programs will be forced to turn in a safer direction as they enter the crossroads. Staying the course will not be an option.
Educational Relevance
As a form of physical activity and exercise, sports can be important in educational terms. However, this depends on how they are organized, the context in which they are played, and the meanings given to them. Unfortunately, when it comes to high school and college sports we have ignored these conditional factors and used the great sport myth to assume that all sports are essentially “educational” and that playing sports always involves positive and valuable learning experiences. This has prevented educators, including coaches, from having critical discussions about what they want to happen in school-sponsored sport programs, how they can use teaching and learning theory (pedagogy) to make those things happen, and how they can determine whether they have been successful.
Much of the reason why sport programs have become increasingly detached from academic programs is that many people simply assume that sport is education and that playing sports is learning. On the basis of these assumptions, which research shows to be faulty, educators in the United States have made a very specialized form of elite, competitive sports a central feature of our schools without having systematically collected evidence or sound educational theory to justify this decision or guide its implementation.
These assumptions about sport participation are especially problematic when we consider the power of sports in U.S. culture. Once sports are integrated into the culture and structure of schools, there is a tendency for them to dominate the public profile of the school; capture the attention of students, teachers, staff, and administrators; and take on a purpose and importance of their own—a purpose that is connected with winning records, championship trophies in the entrance of the school, public relations, entertainment, and media coverage. Overall, sports become both the symbolic and the real representation of the school itself.
When this occurs, sports are likely to collide with and overshadow the academic mission of the school (Nixon, 2014). Page 467Then people say that we have to have sports because they are the reason many of our students come to school every day. Or we need to have them because they are the only things that bring us together as a school community. Or we need them because they are the “front porch” of the university. And these statements are accepted without asking why our curriculum is so bad that students tolerate it only because they must do so to play sports, or without asking what other ways we might come together as a community, or create ways to make Nobel Prize winners and cutting-edge knowledge the front porch of the university.
Without asking these critical questions, schools end up spending much more to support athletes than regular students (Marklein, 2013). To question these spending patterns in the United States is to invite widespread criticism grounded in highly charged emotions, defensiveness, and personal attacks (Martin, 2013). The criticism consists mostly of statements about “what sports meant to me” and “what sports mean to my kids.” But these responses actually support the relevance of the question, because they clearly show how important sports have become in schools, and how people take this for granted without asking serious questions about their educational relevance.
Such spending patterns would be viewed as strange by students from countries with highly rated educational systems, where the academic context of the school is where they learned about teamwork, how to constructively handle failure and success, how to work hard and complete projects, how to be resilient when learning is difficult, and how to see learning as the reason for the existence of schools and their attendance at school (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b). This is not to say that young people from these countries do not play sports. They do, and sports are important to many of them. But for them, sports are community-based and do not dominate the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of their schools.
It is unrealistic to suggest that schools drop sport programs, although budget cuts are forcing some to do so. But it is not unrealistic to suggest that educators ask critical questions and take seriously the research that explains how and when sports alter the cultures and organization of their schools. Then they can make a decision to keep, change, or abandon sport programs. A good place to start is to ask what they would think about a higher education system in a country where the highest-paid person in all the top universities is either a football or men’s basketball coach, the most revered people on campus are football or male basketball players, and the university spends six times more money per capita to support athletes than to support students who are not on college teams.
Gender Inequity
A program in which students in the United States play the same sports across multiple generations ignores educational theory and fails to recognize the changing and diverse sport interests that exist in a culture that prizes individuality and innovation. For example, when high schools emphasize the same few power and performance sports for over a century, they discourage participation by some boys and many girls who prefer sports emphasizing pleasure and participation—sports that may not have existed 40 to 100 years ago. The progress that has been made toward achieving gender equity is due to adding new sports, such as soccer and lacrosse, to athletic programs, and further progress toward equity requires similar changes.
Students who do not measure up to their bigger, faster, taller, and stronger classmates require alternatives to or modifications of traditional power and performance sports. Although sports like football and basketball receive much attention and many resources, there could be teams in Ultimate (Frisbee), disc golf, racquetball, flag football, in-line skating, orienteering, slacklining, wall climbing, mountain biking, BMX, water tube polo, roller hockey, skateboarding, and other sports for which there is enough local interest to field teams. With guidance, the students themselves could at least partially administer and coach these teams and coordinate exhibitions or meets and games with teams from other schools. Does there really have to be an official state champion for a sport to be educational?
Page 468Girls’ sports in high school continue to lack the support that boys’ sports enjoy. This problem has a history that goes far beyond high school, but the result, as illustrated in
Table 14.5
, is that many more boys than girls play high school sports—nearly 1.3 million more in 2015. Additionally, progress toward gender equity stalled in 2000 and there has been some backsliding during recent years (
Table 14.5
).
Table 14.5 Girls and boys participating in high school sports, 1971–2015 (in millions) |
||||
Academic Year |
Girls | Boys |
Difference |
|
1971–1972 |
0.29 |
3.66 |
3.37 |
|
1975–1976 |
1.65 |
4.11 |
2.46 |
|
1980–1981 |
1.85 |
3.50 |
||
1985–1986 |
1.81 |
3.34 |
1.53 |
|
1990–1991 |
1.89 |
3.41 |
1.52 |
|
1995–1996 |
2.47 |
3.63 |
1.16 |
|
2000–2001 |
2.78 |
3.92 |
1.14 |
|
2005–2006 |
2.95 |
4.20 |
1.25 |
|
2010–2011 |
3.17 |
4.49 |
1.32 |
|
2014–2015 |
3.29 |
4.52 |
1.23 |
|
Source: National Federation of High Schools; http://www.nfhs.org/ParticipationStatistics/ParticipationStatistics |
Gender inequities at the college level are grounded in similar social and cultural dynamics, but the inequities go deeper and are manifested in many realms, such as operating budgets, recruiting money, and coaches’ salaries. These differences in all NCAA programs for 2014 are shown in
Figure 14.1
. Even though women were 53 percent of the student body, they constituted only 44 percent of the athletes. Additionally, they received 46 percent of the scholarship dollars, 33 percent of recruiting dollars, 35 percent of Page 469the total athletic department operating expenses, and 31 percent of the salaries for head coaches (although they have more teams than the men do).
FIGURE 14.1 Gender equity in all NCAA institutions, 2014. (Source: The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool; http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/GetAggregatedData.aspx)
Many people justify these gender inequities by noting that men’s teams generate more revenues than women’s teams. Others say that a portion of the revenues claimed by men come from student fees and state funds plus the potential for men to generate revenues is due to larger gender inequities that lead people to value men’s sports more than women’s sports. This means that the question for colleges and universities is whether gender inequities in the larger society should shape funding priorities in their sport programs. At this point, it appears that they do.
Gender-related participation inequities in high school and college are due primarily to the size of football teams and the increasing costs associated with fielding football teams. A few universities in the top five intercollegiate conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and Southeastern) have football and men’s basketball teams that generate enough revenues to fund the overall budgets for women’s sports, but as the expenses for football and men’s basketball increase, there is a need for increased subsidies to sustain women’s and most other men’s teams.
In terms of gender equity, the supporters of intercollegiate football face a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, they say that football is an educational activity and that they should not have to pay taxes on their increasing revenues or treat players as employees. On the other hand, when gender equity is discussed, they claim that college football is a business affected by objective market forces out of their control and that it should not be treated as an educational activity. This is why Title IX remains controversial—it exposes the contradictions of big-time sport programs and turns football supporters into flip-floppers.
The current organization and operation of high school and college football are the primary causes of persistent gender inequities in participation and funding because teams are large and the sport is expensive.
The other major reason for persistent gender inequities is that athletic programs remain grounded in a culture based on the values and experiences of men. This will not change until more women are hired as coaches of both women’s and men’s teams and as athletic directors. But the chance of this happening in the near future is remote for at least three reasons. First, most people working in school sport programs today are not familiar with the full meaning of gender equity as it is described in Title IX law, and certainly don’t know how to implement the law (Staurowsky and Weight, 2011). Second, when football is the centerpiece of sport programs at the school and conference levels, women are not likely to be hired in top leadership positions because it is widely believed that they cannot effectively work with a football coach and team (Schull et al., 2013). Third, when women who are coaches or lower-level administrators raise questions about gender inequities, they are usually defined as troublemakers and marginalized in the athletic department or in the coaching job market (Fagan and Cyphers, 2012).
If it weren’t for our football team, women’s teams would have no funding on this campus.
Many people do not know that major college football teams, with a few exceptions, lose money each year and are supported by student fees and other external funds. Consequently, they perpetuate misleading information year after year.
Page 470Changing the organization and culture of sport programs is a formidable task, and it is nearly impossible when those in charge see no reason to change or see change as a threat to their status and power. However, in the case of programs described and funded as “educational,” there’s no justification for paying women any less than men or defining women as unqualified for leadership jobs because some people believe that they cannot understand football or work effectively with powerful and highly paid football coaches. Ellen Staurowsky, a former athletic director and a respected scholar in sport management, points out that everyone in athletic departments at the high school and college level should have regular opportunities to receive training in Title IX law and how to effectively implement it in their programs (Staurowsky and Weight, 2011). This would be a valuable step forward in achieving gender equity.
Opportunities for Students with a Disability
Where are disability sports in high schools? For all practical purposes, they are invisible. The “adapted sports” of basketball, bowling, floor hockey, soccer, softball, and track are sanctioned by the National Federation of State High School Associations, but only 0.7 percent of high schools—fewer than 130 out of nearly 18,000 U.S. high schools—have teams in any of these sports, and these are located in only seven of the fifty states. More than 7.71 million students play on “standard” high school sport teams; fewer than 9000 students play on adapted sport teams, and nearly half of these play in three sports—bowling, softball, and soccer (NFHS, 2013).
Some athletes with a disability play on standard teams, but apart from them, there is only one varsity athlete in adapted sports for every 950 athletes on high school teams. Students with a disability are “off the radar” for most high school sport programs and nearly all college programs. Consequently, students miss opportunities to play with and watch their peers with various (dis)abilities compete and share sport experiences with them. This is a missed educational opportunity for all students.
Competitive sport participation by students with a disability often requires a combination of creatively designed programs. There are sports in which athletes with a disability can be included in standard games, meets, and matches, but when this isn’t possible there should be school teams in one or more adapted sports. When there’s a shortage of athletes at individual schools, there should be teams from districts or combinations of schools; when practical, another alternative is to have students without disabling impairments play with “handicaps” to provide the required number of team members.
Finally, when students lack school teams and play on community-based teams sponsored by disability organizations, their participation should be publicized, supported, and formally rewarded, as is done for athletes on school teams.
There are many ways to support athletes with a disability. Appropriate strategies will vary from one school to another, but they can be developed if people are creatively inclusive in how they organize sports. However, this seldom occurs unless there are people at the school and district levels who are active and assertive advocates for students with impairments that prevent them from playing on existing school teams. These advocates now have guidelines established by the U.S. Department of Education to increase their legitimacy and political clout within the schools.
Colleges and universities have done little to nothing to provide sports for people with a disability (Wolverton, 2013). Only a dozen programs have recognized programs, and they are funded through student services rather than athletic departments. The programs are at the universities of Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Central Oklahoma, Oregon, Edinboro (Pennsylvania), Penn State, Rutgers (new program), Texas at Arlington, and Wisconsin at Whitewater. The sports offered include men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball, Page 471track and road racing, tennis, golf, rowing, and wheelchair rugby (Gerber, 2015).
Although some Paralympians train in these programs, it is difficult to schedule games and meets with other university teams due to the distance between schools and the expenses associated with travel.
At a few of these universities participation occurs totally in-house in the form of training and intramural competitions. Despite recommendations and guidelines provided by the U.S. Department of Education, few people in higher education have done anything beyond mentioning disability sports in passing conversations. Brad Hendrick, the Director of the Division of Disability Resources and Education Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign notes that administrators and athletic directors are quick to list reasons that programs can’t be developed rather than thinking creatively about how they can be developed (Walker, 2013).
The existence of the Paralympics has not had an impact on program development, even though it would make sense for universities to sponsor Paralympic sports just as they sponsor Olympic sports in their athletic departments. As it is now, college students with a disability must seek opportunities to play sports outside the university, even though they pay student fees and should have access to the same opportunities that other students have.
It is difficult to predict how quickly people in the schools will respond to the Department of Education guidelines and take seriously the sport participation of students with disabilities. It could take decades for measureable progress to be made and at least a generation before sport participation opportunities for students with a disability are a taken-for-granted part of secondary and higher education.
Issues in High School Sport Programs: A Focus on Sports Development
Some high school administrators, athletic directors, and coaches think that educational quality is somehow linked to the development of a sport program that focuses on winning records and being ranked highly among schools in the state or nation. Their goal is to create a sport program that resembles a big-time intercollegiate program. This leads to excessive concerns with building high-profile programs that become the focus of attention in the school and community.
People who focus on sports development often give lip service to keeping sports in proper perspective but fail to acknowledge that emphasizing sports in the school often marginalizes many students with no interest in sports. Additionally, in their zeal to create and maintain high-profile programs, administrators often make decisions that overlook the educational needs of all students in the school.
Sports development today goes hand in hand with informal requirements that athletes specialize in a single sport year-round, even though this may limit their overall social and educational development. This approach turns off students who want to play sports but don’t want to make them the center of their lives. At the same time, other students become so dedicated to sports that they see education as secondary in their lives at school.
Adherence to a sports development model often is driven by boosters and booster organizations that raise funds and provide other support to one or more sport teams in a school. However, individual boosters and booster organizations are seldom regulated by schools or school districts, and they exist primarily in wealthier areas, often giving unfair advantage to a single team in a school or an entire athletic program relative to programs in poor areas where resources are scarce and teams struggle to exist. Many boosters who provide resources, sometimes out of their own pockets, feel they have a right to intervene in the process of evaluating and hiring coaches, and they generally focus on coaches’ win–loss records rather than their teaching abilities.
Issues in College Sport Programs
This is a challenging time for college sports, especially at the big-time level. They are facing more Page 472issues today than at any time in the past century. Scandals and rule violations, lawsuits related to player compensation, and distorted racial and ethnic priorities are discussed in this section.
Scandals and Rule Violations
A steady and sometimes overwhelming number of scandals in college sports capture headlines and much attention. The most publicized and horrific case involved Jerry Sandusky, a retired assistant football coach at Penn State, who used his affiliation with the Penn State football program to lure boys into relationships and sexually abuse them. When an assistant coach observed an incident of Sandusky committing sodomy on a young boy in a Penn State football shower, he reported it to head football coach, Joe Paterno, rather than to state child protection authorities. Paterno took his time reporting it to Penn State officials, who took no action. It wasn’t until a former victim came forward that an official state investigation began; this led to Sandusky’s conviction on forty-five counts of child abuse and child sexual abuse.
The independent investigation of this case concluded that the university administration’s failure to take state-mandated actions and report the incident was due to “a culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community” (Freeh Sporkin and Sullivan, LLP, 2012, p. 17). As a result, a serial sexual predator operated freely for at least thirteen years alongside the football program. The Penn State president, athletic director, and director of campus security were all fired for their cover-up of Sandusky’s actions. It appeared that protecting the football program was a higher priority for them than following state law or protecting children from Sandusky’s predatory behavior.
The Penn State scandal, along with other scandals, led many people to conclude that universities have lost institutional control of their sport programs. For example, when Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, was asked if he would dismiss the football coach for failing to report multiple NCAA rule violations by members of the football team, he said, “No—are you kidding? Let me be very clear, I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me” (Wickersham, 2011). Gee was the highest-paid university president in the United States, but when he made his comment he was making almost $2 million less than the football coach. He made his comment in a joking manner, but many saw it as an indication that big-time college sport programs had become more powerful than the universities that sponsor them. Under these conditions, it is not difficult to understand that the hubris and the sense of entitlement that come with such power open the door for scandals and rule violations.
Player Rights and Compensation
The increased revenues and stakes in big-time college sports, especially in football and men’s basketball, have raised questions about the rights of athletes and the compensation they receive. Furthermore, athletes in these sports now realize that this “system is entirely based on their acceptance of their own powerlessness as the gears of this machine [and if] they choose to exercise their power, the machine not only stops moving, it becomes dramatically reshaped” (Zirin, 2015a).
This realization led Kain Colter, quarterback for Northwestern University’s football team, to organize his teammates and petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to form a union. Their goals were fourfold: (1) to prevent their coach from terminating the scholarships of injured players; (2) to have the university take player safety more seriously, especially related to concussions and head trauma; (3) to have health insurance that cover full treatment for football-related injuries, even after eligibility ends; and (4) to limit the hours that coaches could keep them in practices each week, because they often worked 50-hours or more. Notably, they were not seeking to be paid for their participation.
The response to this move was immediate and dramatic. Their coach, the university president, and people around the country said that the players would destroy college sports. Eventually, the NLRB stated that even though the players fit the definition of employees and had the right to vote on unionization, Page 473such an action would impact all of college sports, and the board members didn’t think they should make such a momentous decision.
The Northwestern players lost, but their case raised questions about the rights and treatment of college athletes, especially those whose labor generates billions of dollars in revenues. This forced the NCAA to respond and part of that response was to allow the wealthiest and most powerful conferences more autonomy to make their own rules. Subsequently, this has led to series of changes so that universities can now award multiple year scholarships and increase the amount of a scholarship to cover the full cost of attendance at the university. Additionally, meal restrictions were lifted so athletes could have more food without violating NCAA rules, which would also give them the calories needed to meet in-season energy needs.
The Pacific 12 conference went further to guarantee four-year scholarships for athletes receiving full awards. Aid is now available to athletes needing to complete graduation requirements after their eligibility ends. Medical insurance is expanded to cover athletes up to four years after leaving the university. Athletes are now allowed to transfer to another Pac-12 school and receive a scholarship immediately rather than waiting for a year. And the conference now includes athlete representatives in the conference governance structure. Clearly, such changes benefit athletes at the same time that they alter the dynamics of recruiting, coach–athlete relationships, the overall health care received by athletes, and the potential power that athletes have in their sports.
More potentially disruptive challenges to the NCAA and the operation of college sports were initiated in 2009 by former UCLA basketball star, Ed O’Bannon, and Sam Keller, a former Arizona State and Nebraska quarterback. When O’Bannon noticed that his likeness was being used in an EA Sports video game, he along with Keller and other players whose likenesses were also being used filed a class action suit against EA Sports, the Collegiate Licensing Company that negotiates licensing fees for the NCAA, and the NCAA that receives fees for selling rights to the players’ likenesses.
The former athletes won this case and were awarded $40 million. All athletes who had appeared in the video games since 2003 were eligible for compensation. But O’Bannon continued his suit against the NCAA saying that it violates anti-trust laws by preventing athletes from earning money from the sale of their names, images, and likenesses. In practical terms, he wanted athletes to share in the revenues generated by the sale of media rights, jerseys and apparel bearing their names, and other commercial ventures using their names and images.
A judge decided in O’Bannon’s favor in a 2014 decision stating that the NCAA was in violation of anti-trust law and that universities could pay athletes up to $5000 per year that would be available to them after their college sport careers ended. The NCAA appealed this decision and a panel of judges disallowed the lower court’s ruling on compensation, but also ruled that the NCAA ban on athlete compensating athletes was anti-competitive and in violation of anti-trust law. Therefore, it questioned the NCAA’s claim that the integrity of college sports required that athletes remain unpaid amateurs and it requested a full analysis of the NCAA’s “amateurism defense” that has been used since 1984 to legally deny payments to athletes.
If the O’Bannon suit is not settled out of court, it is likely to go to the U.S. Supreme court. More important, the case leaves open the door for other lawsuits charging that the NCAA violates anti-trust laws by putting any limits on the amount of an athletic scholarship and prohibiting cash payments to athletes. In fact, Jeffrey Kessler, a high powered attorney representing college football and men’s basketball players, is arguing in Jenkins v. NCAAthat there should be a free market for recruiting and compensating athletes in revenue producing sports. In the early 1990s, Kessler represented NFL players in their successful quest for free agency, and now he is representing college players in a similar quest. If there is a ruling in favor of the athletes, universities would Page 474be forced to make scholarship and payment offers to high school recruits who would choose the best offer on the table.
The NCAA predicts disaster if it loses this case (or similar cases), but lawyers representing the players note that the NCAA uses a free market argument to justify multi-million dollar contracts for football and men’s basketball coaches. They say that if that argument applies to coaches, it also should apply to athletes, and if coaches’ salaries have not destroyed college sports, players’ salaries won’t destroy it either; the free market will set its own limits. But it would also impact the entire system of college sports.
Distorted Racial and Ethnic Priorities
In 2015, black students made up about 12 percent of the total student body at Division I universities.
Figure 14.2
shows that at the same time, black men and women were 22 percent of the athletes, 53 percent of football players, 66 percent of the men’s and 57 percent of the women’s basketball players.
FIGURE 14.2 Percentages of students and athletes in NCAA Division I universities by race and ethnicity, 2014–2015. (Source: Lapchick, 2015; http://web1.ncaa.org/rgdSearch/exec/saSearch; http://www.census.gov/hhes/school/data/cps/2014/tables.html)
Sixty-seven percent of all black male athletes played football or basketball—the only sports that produced revenues and the sports with the lowest graduation rates. This also means that, in some big-time sport programs, black male athletes consistently generate revenues that fund other sport teams on which all or nearly all of the players are white.
Page 475Overall, 1 of every 7 black men on Division I campuses is an athlete; this is the case for 1 of every 29 white men, 1 of every 25 black women, and 1 of every 33 white women. This gives many people the impression that black males are super-athletes who attend college only because of their physical skills. At the same time it leads people to overlook the fact that more than 99.5 percent of all black American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three do not have athletic scholarships.
Overall, these data suggest that if African Americans excel in revenue-producing sports, universities will actively identify and recruit them, but the same universities do a poor job of recruiting African American students who don’t excel at scoring touchdowns or making jump shots. There is no denying that a few African Americans benefit from athletic scholarships. But the problem is that universities have capitalized on the racist myth that blacks can use sports to improve their lives, while ignoring their responsibility to recruit black students and change the social climate on the campus so that black students feel welcome, supported, and respected, even if they don’t score touchdowns or score 20 points a game.
A related problem is that many black athletes feel isolated on campuses where there are few black students, faculty, and administrators (Bimper, 2015; Bruening et al., 2005; Comeaux and Fuentes, 2015; Hawkins, 2010; Martin et al., 2010; Singer and Carter-Francique, 2013; Smith, 2009; Torres, 2009). This isolation is intensified by many factors, including these:
1. Racial and athletic stereotypes make it difficult for black athletes to feel welcome on campus and develop relationships that support their academic success.
2. Athletes must devote so much time to their sports that it is difficult for them to become involved in other spheres of campus life.
3. Campus activities often fail to represent the interests and experiences of black students, who consequently often feel like outsiders.
4. When campus life is unrelated to their experiences, black athletes may withdraw from activities that could connect them with other students.
5. White students who lack experience in racially diverse groups might feel uncomfortable interacting with black students from backgrounds unlike their own.
6. When white students think that black athletes have things easy and are unfairly privileged, it creates tension that undermines meaningful interaction.
Feelings of social isolation are especially intense when black athletes come from working-class or low-income backgrounds and white students come from upper-middle-income backgrounds (Torres, 2009). This combination of ethnic and socioeconomic differences can also create tensions, unless the administration, faculty, and professional staff provide regular opportunities for students to interact in ways that increase their knowledge of peers from different backgrounds. Putting athletes in their own dorm wings, creating special academic support programs for them, and giving them athlete centers where they eat and hang out with other athletes might make general campus isolation more tolerable, but it does not foster learning and development (Hawkins, 2010).
Most research on black players in the sociology of sport has focused on black men, so we don’t know much about the experiences of black women who play sports in predominantly white institutions. Black women athletes face the dual challenges of complex racial and gender dynamics on campus and in the athletic department (Bernhard, 2014; Bruening, 2004, 2005; Bruening et al., 2005; Carter-Francique, 2014; Carter and Hawkins, 2011; Carter-Francique et al., 2011; Gabay, 2013; Hughes, 2015). They see few women of color in positions of power and authority in their schools and athletic departments, so they might not feel fully included in either sphere.
A key issue for some black women is that Title IX law has benefited white women more than black women. For example, over 75 percent of all black women with scholarships in Division I NCAA Page 476schools in 2015 were playing on basketball or track teams, and black women received less than 4 percent of the scholarships in the other sixteen women’s sports. This means that nearly 25 percent of all black women with scholarships play on teams where they may be the only black athlete, and it’s likely that their experiences are different from the experiences of black women on basketball and track teams.
Title IX has fueled the growth of soccer, crew (rowing), golf, rifle, and lacrosse, but these sports are played primarily by white women in upper-middle-class families. Most black women who play on these teams in college do not have black teammates and their experiences can be socially isolating. For this reason, Tina Sloan Green of the Black Women in Sport Foundation claims that “Title IX was for white women” and that the experiences of black girls and women have been overlooked in the expansion of college sports for women (Suggs, 2001).
Universities must be more aggressive and creative in recruiting and supporting ethnic minority students who aren’t athletes and in doing the same for ethnic minority coaches and faculty. It’s not fair to recruit black or other ethnic minority athletes to campuses where they have little social support and feel that students and faculty don’t know much about their history, heritage, and experiences. If universities effectively included racial and cultural diversity within all spheres of campus life, recruiting black athletes would not indicate a distorted set of campus priorities. When universities present to the world images of physically talented black athletes and intellectually talented white scientists, racism is perpetuated, whether intentionally or not.
summary
DO COMPETITIVE SPORTS CONTRIBUTE TO EDUCATION?
The United States is the only nation in the world where it is taken for granted that high schools and colleges will sponsor and fund interschool sport programs. There are arguments for and against this practice, but most of the claims made on both sides are not based on good research.
Generalizing about high school and college sport programs is difficult because programs and the conditions under which participation occurs are so diverse. However, it’s important to study school sports to determine if and when they contribute to positive educational outcomes for athletes, the overall organization of the school, and students in general. At a minimum, if the programs provide no educational benefits for the athletes, they cannot be justified as school-sponsored activities.
Research shows that young people who play on high school teams have better overall academic records than those who don’t. But much of this difference is explained by the processes through which students are selected-in and filtered-out of school teams. Young people with characteristics consistent with academic achievement are favored in these processes, so it is not surprising that athletes, on average, have different characteristics from other students.
The most effective way to determine what occurs in connection with school sport participation is to study athletes and teams in context over time. This enables a researcher to identify the factors that influence sport experiences, the meanings that young people give to those experiences, and how young people integrate them into their identities and everyday lives.
Sport experiences vary widely and are given different meanings that tend to be influenced by gender, race and ethnicity, social class, (dis)ability, and the social and cultural context of the family, school, and local community. Although there is reasonably consistent evidence indicating that the social dynamics on certain high school sport teams increase the likelihood of binge drinking among all athletes and higher rates of sexual activity and bullying among certain male athletes, most studies suggest that athletes have higher than average rates of educational achievement and fewer problems than other students.
Research also indicates that some schools, coaches, parents, and athletes lose sight of educational goals in their pursuit of competitive Page 477success in sports. Sports can be seductive, and people connected with high school teams usually require guidance to keep their programs in balance with the academic curriculum. Unless sport teams are explicitly organized to achieve positive educational outcomes, the chances of achieving them decrease. When people assume that sport participation automatically builds character and enhances learning, it undermines the planning and evaluation that must be a part of any school activity, especially those that are as costly and popular as school sports.
The possibility that sport participation interferes with the education of athletes is greatest in big-time intercollegiate programs. The status and identity that often comes with membership on highly visible and publicized sport teams makes it difficult for many young people to focus on and give priority to academic work. This is especially the case among young men who see their destinies being shaped by sport achievements, not academic achievements. With this said, data indicate that athletes as a category have higher graduation rates than the general student population. However, graduation rates among athletes vary widely by gender, race, and sport.
High school and college sports usually create spirited feelings among some students, faculty, and staff in schools. But little is known about the characteristics of this spirit or if and when it contributes to the achievement of educational goals—or disrupts the achievement of those goals. Although many different activities can be used to unite students and link them with community and society, sports often are used to do this in the United States. Sports are popular activities, but there is much to be learned about the conditions under which they are most and least likely to produce particular educational and developmental outcomes.
Most high school sport programs don’t seriously cut into funds for academic programs. The money they require is well spent if they provide students with opportunities to learn about their physicality, develop physical and interpersonal skills, and display their skills in ways that lead them to be recognized and rewarded by others. However, when budgets are strained, many sport programs depend on participation fees, boosters, and/or corporate sponsors to survive. When this occurs, schools in lower-income areas are at a serious competitive disadvantage. Over time, these strategies to fund school sports lead to and intensify social class and racial/ethnic divisions in schools and school districts.
Funding issues are complex and often confusing in intercollegiate sports. However, it’s clear that very few programs are self-supporting and nearly all of them depend on subsidies from student fees, donations, and general campus funds. As intercollegiate programs boost their focus on achieving commercial goals, the likelihood of achieving educational goals usually declines. The allocation of general funds and student fees to intercollegiate sports becomes an increasingly contentious issue when athletic departments and sport teams have become so separate from the rest of campus culture that faculty and students see no reason to support them.
High school and college sport programs now face a number of “crossroads issues.” These include cost containment and budget gaps between schools; rising expectations among athletes and their parents; dealing with concussions, repetitive head trauma, and other serious injuries; creating and sustaining programs with explicit educational relevance; eliminating gender inequity; and creating opportunities for students with a disability. Each of these issues creates a serious challenge for athletic directors and coaches.
Issues unique to high school sport programs consist of clarifying the meaning of sport development so that it is compatible with the education mission of schools and making sure that boosters and other community supporters understand that clarification. The unique issues faced in college sport programs are reducing scandals and rule violations, settling the class action likeness lawsuit filed on behalf of Ed O’Bannon, dealing with increasing the cash value of scholarship awards to cover the full cost of attending college, and eliminating the Page 478distorted priorities related to race and ethnicity in the university and in athletic departments.
The decisions made on these crossroads issues will have a significant impact on the future direction of high school and college sports.
SUPPLEMENTAL READINGS
1. Reading 1.
Research faculty are not eager to study intercollegiate sports
2. Reading 2.
A brief history of NCAA academic reforms
3. Reading 3.
School–community relations
4. Reading 4.
Bibliography of research on college sports
5. Reading 5.
Ethnicity and sport participation among high school girls
6. Reading 6.
Conformity or leadership in high school sports
7. Reading 7.
Should intercollegiate athletes be paid?
SPORT MANAGEMENT ISSUES
· You’re a reporter for a newspaper in a small midwestern U.S. city. A chronic budget crisis leads the local school board to consider dropping varsity sports. The board has scheduled a meeting to discuss this issue with people in the community. To prepare for the meeting, you review the arguments you expect to hear on both sides of the issue. What are those arguments, and who do you expect to be the most vocal proponents of each?
· You’re a member of a school board in an urban school district. The board has just been presented with data showing that varsity athletes in the fifteen high schools in your district receive higher grades than nonathletes. A group of parents is using the data to request more funds for interscholastic sports in the district. What are the questions you would ask about the data, and why would you ask them?
· The academic experiences of athletes in colleges with big-time sport programs are different from the experiences of athletes in colleges with lower-profile programs. If you were talking to a group of high school seniors interested in playing college sports, how would you explain these differences?
· The intercollegiate sport programs at your school are in bad financial shape. Because of large losses, the students have been asked to increase their student fees by $100 per semester to maintain the programs. If the fee increase does not pass, all the intercollegiate sport programs will be dropped and replaced by low-cost, student-run club sports. How would you vote? Use material from this chapter to support your decision.