Colleges Exploit of College Athletes Essay

It is common issue in our country that students neglect their studies seeking sports fame and they end up their career with incomplete degree, even while their institution themselves earn millions revenues. It is seen that as sports became very commercializing, college sport department exploit students for their own means of earning. A sign that hangs in the men’s basketball locker room at Duke Reads: â€Å"Practice times are as follows†¦. Please schedule class consequently. † (Sarah E. Gohl, 2001) This sign expresses in no indecisive terms the message that basketball, not school, is the top priority. The academic schedule should accommodate the athletic schedule, not vice versa. Duke’s basketball coaches are not unaided in making this demand. Division I coaches normally require athletes to subordinate their academic lives to their athletic lives. Damion Davis, a track and field athlete at Baylor University, told the Chronicle of Higher Education: â€Å"They [coaches] always say its academics [first], then athletics. They’re lying. Its athletics and then academics. You don’t carry out, you’re not here† (Alex P. Kellogg, 2001, pp. A33-A34). Baylor football player Bobby Darnell agreed. Referring to his coaches, he said: â€Å"They don’t want you thinking about the test you have on Monday, just the ‘test’ you have Saturday night,† explicitly, the next football game (Alex P. Kellogg, 2001, pp. A33-A34). In this environment, according to sociologists Patricia and Peter Adler, athletes might become â€Å"engulfed† in their athletic role, giving it priority, and may â€Å"abandon† their academic role, casting aside the non-athletic goals to which they formerly aspired (Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, 1991). Wherever role engulfment exists, academic fraud is certain to follow. Academic fraud not just takes place when a student cheats on an examination or submits a plagiarized paper, or while a high school or college coach or administrator falsifies an athlete’s transcription, but also takes place whenever a college authorizes athletes to be something other than fall-time college students who are joined in degree programs and who pursue their degrees at a rational pace. It surely occurs when coaches arrange course schedules to make sure those athletes will be available for daily practice and that they will earn the grades essential to stay eligible to compete. Coaches did just that at the Division I college where the Adlers studied the men’s basketball team throughout the late 1980s. One player described his â€Å"choice† of a major in the following way: â€Å"They never even asked me what major I wanted. They just assumed that I would be a rec [recreation-physical education] major. They’re perhaps right, but you get a certain message when they don’t even ask you. † (Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, 1991, 67) The message, of course, is that one’s sport comes first and schoolwork is a slight irritant to which one require only pay enough attention to stay eligible to compete. At fall registration some years ago, former Drake University provost Jon Ericson witnessed an incident linking a freshman men’s basketball player who had received this message. The athlete sat impassively while a envoy of the athletic department chose his classes and got him registered. At the same time Ericson observed, in stark contrast to the athlete, a young woman student who moved from line to line and negotiated with the registrar as she chose her classes, â€Å"engulfed† suitably in the role of undergraduate (Katie Funk, 2000). Athletes also accept the message that their sport comes first while coaches force them to subordinate their academic targets to their athletic responsibilities. One of the Adlers’ interviewees recalled the following conversation with a coach, which illustrates this dilemma vividly. The player said: One time I had a paper that was really hard that was due. So I say to Coach Mickey [the â€Å"academic† coach], â€Å"I’m goanna be a little late to practice because I have to go to the library to do some work on my paper. † But he told me, â€Å"You’d better be in the gym by three o’clock. † I think if they were serious about academics, they would cut you some slack on that (Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, 1991, p 150). Ironically, athlete exploitation sometimes occurs even while a college does not stand to earn considerable revenues from sports. A case in point is Marcus LoVett, formerly the star point guard for Oklahoma City University (OCU), a perennial basketball powerhouse in the National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), where visibility is low and profits are unusual. LoVett enrolled at OCU in the fall of 1995, following spending his first two years of college at Hutchinson Community College in Kansas and the College of Southern Idaho, respectively (Alexander Wolff, 1997, pp. 60-66). He remained entitled for basketball at OCU in 1995-96 by taking courses in fishing/angling, beginning volleyball, beginning golf, intramural recreation programs, walking/jogging, varsity sports, and the basics of coaching basketball, and postponed until his senior year the more hard courses that he would need to pass in order to graduate with a degree in physical education. This strategy backfired in December of 1996, when LoVett failed three courses and took an unfinished in two others, causing his GPA to fall below the 2. 0 necessary for athletic eligibility under NAIA rules. OCU declared him disqualified to play basketball during the spring semester, where he filed suit in state court in January of 1997, claiming that OCU had (1) broken its promise to have him tested quickly for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD); (2) failed to provide him with the academic assistance it had promised him, (3) destitute him of a chance to showcase his basketball talents for NBA scouts, and (4) inflicted emotional distress on him (Cohen Greta, 1993. ). The presence of the poor athlete in American schools, his wish to secure the advantages of a college education, and his incapability or unwillingness to distinguish between proper and improper assistance have combined to turn out a fertile field in which to sow the tares of commercialized exploitation and subsidies. Basically, sports always have been attraction to students in their campuses that influenced the commercialization of college sports. Indeed, without the pressure on colleges to raise enrollments and to generate revenue, it is unlikely that college sports would have become a commercial enterprise. In more positive financial circumstances, colleges would not have felt a need to make the monetary commitments and the ethical compromises that commercial success in sports essential to athletes. Colleges in aspiring to win also initiated unethical practices. Chief among these is the enrollment of athletes with little or no regard for their academic qualifications. Some colleges usually hired â€Å"tramp athletes† to represent them on the football field, knowing full well that these athletes had no aim of matriculating as students, or even of playing a full season. An egregious instance occurred in 1896 and featured Fielding H. Yost, who later became famous as the football coach at the University of Michigan. Yost, a â€Å"hefty, six-foot tall, 195-pound tackle for West Virginia University, † â€Å"transferred† to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1896, just eventually to play in the most important football game in Lafayette’s history, against the University of Pennsylvania. Penn brought a 36-game winning streak into its game with Lafayette, but Lafayette ended the streak with a 6-4 win, aided by Yost. Soon after the game, Yost transferred back to West Virginia University, where he completed work for a law degree six months later (Hart-Nibbrig Nand, and Clement Cottingham, 1986). Moreover, it is usually said that â€Å"every athlete is a needy athlete. † That football players, and, other athletes, come from families whose means do not allow them to pay all of the expenses of a college course is usually accepted as fact and, indeed, is broadly true. To the wide-ranging rule that many college athletes are either wholly or partially self-supporting, there are, certainly, exceptions. But when such instances are distributed among the 800-odd colleges and universities reporting to the United States Bureau of Education, almost all of which retain football teams, the well-to-do athlete becomes something of a rarity. Assistance extended to athletes who otherwise would not have thought of going to college, though it increases the disproportion; only emphasizes a condition that is grounded in much deeper causes. Athletic scholarships are in fact important for college athletes. The benefit is not often paid in cash. The partial or complete lessening of tuition through athletic scholarships generally entailed and often takes place in the offices of the institution, which devise methods of award to suit local conditions and the requirements of athletes. Values of athletic scholarships range from part or full tuition at the lower end of the scale, to allotments graduated in amount according to the number of teams for which the recipient is chosen.