Tag Archives: college sports

The Final Weigh-In: Are College Sports Good or Bad

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Of course, this simple question does not have a simple answer. But for the final post of this series, I wanted to summarize some of the main points of view to try and reach somewhat of a consensus and better define this civic issue.

The response to this question will vary greatly depending on who you ask. College athletes might have a very different perspective than regular students, and faculty or parents might provide additional viewpoints. But let’s start with looking at universities in general. What do the presidents and leaders of these institutions have to say about sports on their campuses?

The response is pretty uniform for most division one schools: college sports are great. Why? Well because they bring tons of publicity to the school, and with publicity comes money. And lots of it: in 2010, the collective revenue of the 15 highest-grossing college football programs in the United States was more than $1 billion. So in the eyes of big D1 schools, more publicity (from televised games or famous players) means more interested students, which means more parents shelling out hundreds of dollars on college sports memorabilia and thousands of dollars of tuition, which leads to more publicity.. and the cycle continues.

However, if we switch the perspective from the head of a university to a faculty member who works directly with these students, the connotation of college sports completely flips. According to several interviews with professors at D1 schools, the amount of time athletes spend on the field can hinder their performance in class. But that’s what athlete tutors are for, right? Well, according to one professor, these tutors are just “a way for us to justify the so-called educational primacy of college sports while being conveniently blinded to what is really going on.” The pressure to stay eligible to play limits the courses and majors that these athletes can pursue and the time that they can invest into learning, often holding them back from gaining any real knowledge and skills to use after their athletic careers are dried up.

Now let’s turn to science. What does research suggest about the effects of college sports on the students that play them? According to a study by Jason M. Lindo, Isaac D. Swensen and Glen R. Waddell, participation in very involved college sports tends to lead to students’ under-performance in grades during the fall term. Additionally, these students tend to party and consume more alcohol more often than an average, non-athlete student, which correlates with the smaller percentage of time that athletes spend studying. The authors of the study conclude that their results “support the concern that big-time sports are a threat to American higher education.”

But if you were to ask student athletes, they would probably tell you that the findings of this study are a little extreme. When listening to testimonies of prominent college athletes, or when talking to some of my friends who play college sports, I generally hear a similar story: yes, college sports demand a lot of your time, but they are rewarding nonetheless. Obviously, if an athlete is playing at the college level, they both enjoy and are very good at what they do. This explains why most student athletes view college sports as a good thing, because they allow these students to do something they love and to get recognized for it.

So how about the opinion of the rest of the student body? Perhaps this group is where you will find the most varied answers as opposed to a general trend. For some non-athletes, sports are totally irrelevant. They live every day of these four years and do not attend one sporting event or interact with a single athlete. Still, there are other students who, although they do not participate in sports themselves, vehemently hate the sports culture and insist that it is tarnishing the primary purpose of universities: education. The third group consists of the sports fanatics who buy their season tickets to every football game and can be found anywhere from a basketball game to a gymnastics meet.

Of course there are gray areas between these three categories and between all of the diverse perspectives listed above. The truth is that anyone who is associated with college, from deans to athletes to regular students, comes into contact with college sports and probably has an opinion about how they affect the university and the student body. As we have seen both in this post and in our day to day lives, the question of whether college sports are a positive force or a negative influence on campus will be answered differently by different people and will continue to be a topic of debate well into the future.

OMG is that Christian Hackenberg?!

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Last semester as I was walking to lunch at Pollock with my friends from biology, a nice stranger held the door open for me. I thought nothing out of the ordinary of the kind, everyday gesture, so I simply responded with a quick thanks and walked inside. After the guy was gone, my friends looked at me incredulously and screamed “Amelia, do you know who just held the door for you?!” “it was _________ (insert name of some moderately famous Penn State football player whose name I still don’t remember)”. As they stood there swooning about this guy I didn’t recognize and still to this day don’t recall, I kept walking, more worried about dodging the huge lunch line than fangirling over Mr. whatever his name was.

As you can tell, I do not closely follow Penn State football, or any other sport for that matter. (Mildly embarrassing side note to emphasize my point: the other day I was at a club meeting where we were playing the Penn State version of the game “headbands”. I had my character narrowed down to the current coach of the Penn State football team, but I couldn’t for the life of me recall his name.) I would much rather spend my time memorizing the elements and atomic numbers on the periodic table than the names and jersey numbers of guys on a sports team. That being said, my approach to sports seems to be very different than that of my fangirl friends and of many other Penn State students for that matter.

Here, as well as other colleges around the country, college athletes have become on-campus celebrities. Running into Sam Ficken at Penn State is the equivalent of crossing paths with Chuck Bass. And don’t even get me started on Hackenburg. If Sam Ficken is Chuck Bass, Hackenberg is Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. I have a friend (one of the same girls from the Pollock experience) who once saw Christian Hackenberg in Walmart and made her boyfriend take a picture of her with the famous quarterback. I overhear girls all the time talking about how they saw Hackenberg on their way to class and how they “like literally almost died” when he looked at them.

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If you’re not convinced by his impressive 16.7k follower count, these classic fangirl tweets should at least give you some idea of what a big deal the Hack is here. But what about other college athletes?

Why don’t people freak out when they see Taylor Skerpon (infielder for PSU’s baseball team)? Or take pictures in Walmart with Ross Travis (forward on the men’s basketball team)? Why do I even have to put their teams and positions in parentheses? If I wrote the name Christian Hackenberg instead, I wouldn’t have to put (Penn State football starting quarterback) in parentheses because everyone would already know! So, what does this say about athletics and athletes in the college setting?

Well, it tells us that not all athletes, or sports for that matter, are viewed equally. Football is by far the most well known sport here and at most other colleges around the country, so football players usually enjoy the most notoriety compared to baseball players or swimmers or any other of the “less famous” sports.

But the part that I think is really interesting isn’t the fact that some athletes are more famous than others, it’s the fact that these athletes, like Christian Hackenberg, are famous in the first place. Call me crazy, but I would venture to guess that more people know about Hack and his football skills than about Neha Gupta, a member of the Penn State freshman class who just won the prestigious International Children’s Peace Prize, or Sara Ganim, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, or any other of the many students here whose contributions to research and movements for social change have had a significant impact on the world.

Okay. (Deep breath) I have to stop myself before this gets too preachy. I am by no means saying that athletes are not talented and that their talents don’t deserve to be acknowledged. Football players and all athletes alike are obviously great at what they do and their strengths should be celebrated. But what is clear is that our society has a definition of fame, and sometimes, the standards by which we award that fame seem to be a little out of focus. So, I guess the question to ask is: what does this say about our values as a society, not only at the college level, but as a whole?