Month: February 2023

In 2021, after nearly a century of turmoil and strife between college athletes and the institutions they played for came to a seeming end, with the passage of the Name, Likeness, and Image rule, or NIL. NIL was the culmination of a long fight started in the late 2000s by a UCLA basketball player and 19 other athletes, who argued that the colleges they played for were in the wrong for not paying them anything despite making millions and millions of dollars every year off TV broadcasts and merchandise sales. The creation of NIL sounds like a great leap forward for athletes and a great, fair solution to the problem that plagued them for years. However, it has opened a whole other can of worms about the civic issue of allowing these now professional athletes to still be students. So, in this blog, I want to investigate whether or not NIL should further accept the previous status quo.

First, the term student-athlete. It is extremely ironic, as many of these athletes much closer represent the latter than the former. For example, if one takes a cursory glance at the Penn State Men’s Ice Hockey roster, he or she will very quickly be able to see that every last player on the team plays for a minor league hockey team when college hockey is not in season. Additionally, many of these players have also been drafted to NHL teams and can leave their universities at a moment’s notice to play professionally. How does this justify putting the term “student” in front of “athlete”, in the sense that they were more one than the other. Well, until very recently, the term still had a precarious merit to it, as all these players were not getting paid a penny for the sports they played, making them amateurs, and their primary function technically still being that of a student. However, NIL is where this façade comes crashing down.

The student athletes at Penn State and other universities are extremely talented and play at a practically professional level. They spend almost as much time training and practicing as professional athletes themselves do.  The only thing stopping them from being full on professionals was the fact that they were not being paid a penny for their services. But, with the introduction of NIL, they are, and that raises a massive civic issue. Should their status be changed?  Is it justifiable anymore to force or even allow these professionals to attend classes at the universities they play for? You hear stories often of NFL players going back to college and getting their degrees, but that is during the offseason. If college athletes are being paid, albeit less than their truly professional counterparts, should they have to do the same. In my opinion, I do not think so. I think the tradition for having student athletes still have to go to class and study as well as play their sport is a cool tradition and still builds a good foundation and work ethic for them. So, in conclusion, the creation the civic issue caused by NIL should not change the current status of student athletes.

Top: an illustration of NIL

Bottom: Ed O’Bannon, the first NCAA athlete to sue his college for not allowing him to make money off of playing college sports

For any sports fan, Penn State is almost like paradise.  The largest sports at PSU, Football, Men’s Basketball, Men’s Ice Hockey, and Wrestling all draw large crowds every time they play and are perennially very good. However, one of these, the hockey team, has a problem the others do not. Pegula Ice Arena, a very new, and very beautiful arena, is the place the Nittany Lions call home. It is a great place to host hockey. It gets super loud inside, and every seat in the house gives the fans a really good view. However, its capacity is just 6,000 seats. It is a rather good problem to have, but the hockey team often finds itself with its home ice overly full. Although it is only 10 years, the Athletic Department should start thinking about expanding Pegula Ice Arena. It would probably be a massive project, but the hockey team has grown exponentially in the last decade and continues to draw massive crowds. There are also several other issues that Pegula’s current small capacity causes.

Penn State’s men’s ice hockey team has proven that it can draw very large crowds. It is a quality program that people are willing to watch. Home games have always been full or very close to full, and its attendance record has been broken twice this season. It would not be far fetched at all to believe that even larger crowds could be drawn at a larger venue.

The small capacity of Pegula is especially a hassle for students. The stadium’s student section is very, very small, and there are no restrictions on who can sit there. Because of this, students must arrive as soon as gates open in order to have any chance to sit in the student section. This often leaves them sitting around the otherwise empty stadium for nearly two hours waiting for puck drop. It got particularly bad during the Lion’s last home series against Notre Dame. On a Saturday afternoon, students were encouraged to arrive at the arena two and a half hours early to ensure they could get a good seat in the student section. By the time gates opened and hour later, the line to get in snaked around the arena, almost reaching the end of the adjacent Field Hockey field. This turnout from the students shows that interest in hockey is very high, and that Pegula is getting too small for the growing program.

The Big 10 conference for hockey only formed 10 years ago, and Penn State has been considered an outlier and a black sheep since it joined, as its status as an NCAA was practically brand new at the time. However, the team has proven it can hang with the other, much older programs, both on the ice and in the stands. Despite this, Penn State still has the second smallest arena in the Big 10, and if it wants to keep up with its rivals, should consider expanding what they have.

Obviously, expanding Pegula would be extremely difficult and unwarranted, as the stadium is just 10 years old. But this is a civic issue that I believe is still in its infancy and will grow in the coming years.

Top: a packed student section at Pegula Ice Arena while the game was being played

Bottom: a packed student section Pegula Ice Arena, nearly an hour before the game even started