A Map for Getting Lost
April 21, 2014
“It’s just another step in the wrong direction.”
That’s the brief response I’ve been giving to the frequent questions I’m receiving from people wanting to hear my opinion about unionizing college athletes.
When I’m pressed to elaborate, I provide these antecedents:
- Establishing the “athletic scholarship” – allowing athlete performance or potential to replace financial need as the basis for grants in aid.
- Removing intercollegiate coaches from the requirement that they be tenure track faculty members of the university.
- Removing the budget for the intercollegiate athletic department from the overall budget of the university.
- Splitting NCAA governance into divisions so that the more educationally-based programs of the smaller colleges could no longer keep the larger, educational-lost intercollegiate programs in check.
Certainly it has been the escalating and then exploding revenues of broadcast media that helped to ignite, or inflame the impact of, these developments over the past 50+ years.
Treating intercollegiate athletes as employees is a natural but still misguided next step on this road in the wrong direction. It provides a map to where interscholastic sports must not go.
Where are the Adults?
February 2, 2016
According to Jim Tucker, a certified financial planner and National Football League Players Association registered player financial advisor, writing for the Jan. 11-17 issue of Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal: “... university presidents, trustees and athletic directors are failing at their job of upholding the ethical standards of their universities.” They exploit, rather than educate, the so-called “student-athlete.”
He asks the right questions: “Where are the adults at our colleges and universities? Where are the adults to say no to football games on a day other than Saturday? Where are the adults to say no to athletic conferences that crisscross the country? Or adults to say no to a 35-plus-game college basketball season with excessive travel and missed class time?”
Behind the glitz and glamor of major college athletics is a program without, it appears, any rudder but the pursuit of more revenue, and less and less relationship to the educational mission of the sponsoring institutions.
I wouldn’t care about this. Except that the best predictor of what may go wrong in school sports is a look at what already has gone awry in college sports.
Those who pressure school sports to copy the college or AAU model miss the lessons that are all around us. We do not have to make the same mistakes.