Being a college student, it's difficult sometimes not to feel a little fire kindling down deep inside when I see a student athlete complaining about their workload between school and practice. I am a full-time student working to pay for college on my own, so you can probably guess that I'm not the first to sympathize with those that will be leaving college with little to no debt after a few hard practices. From the outside looking in, being a student athlete looks like the dream: you wake up, practice, go to school, practice and come home to finish your studies and make something of yourself. In return, the National Collegiate Association of Athletics (NCAA) gives you a free education and room and board.
To outsiders, this seems like a fair trade. That's just the thing — like most, I had always just been looking from the outside in, I had never taken a moment to put myself in their Nike shoes to realize that those Nikes weren't as comfortable as I'd thought. The NCAA is providing bare minimum to a group of some of the most talented college athletes, disregarding all that athletes bring to a college including, but not limited to, the millions of dollars in revenue that they provide the school every year. Now that I am more informed as to what goes on between the NCAA and its athletes, there is no doubt in my mind that college athletes deserve to be monetarily compensated for the full time "job" that they hold while attending school.
According to a survey of 21,000 NCAA football players, the average player puts 44.8 hours of their time into their sport a week, even more than most full-time employees. Universities place the word “student” before “athlete,” strategically trying to convince the public that the education of these athletically skilled individuals comes before their athletic commitments. How could this be though when these athletes are too exhausted from their full time “job” to keep their eyes open in lecture? How could this be when athletes are pulled from merely a month of classes in March in order to play in a tournament that brings millions of dollars to an institution? Are these athletes really supposed to be putting school before a sport that determines if they keep their scholarships to stay in school? Universities put these athletes into a vicious cycle of trying to obtain the grades to play a D1 sport and trying to play their sport well enough to keep their scholarship for an education. These expectations make it almost impossible for a student athlete to give 100 percent to their sport while also trying to succeed in school.
Along with the ridiculous time commitment, these athletes are a face for their university, their contracts allow for a university to benefit from their name and face without any further compensation. A myriad of incoming college students, whether they’d admit it or not, are concerned with attending a “brand name” school, and athletics usually give the school that brand. I would be interested to see if Ohio State's application rate went up after their football program's championship win this last year, or if Penn State's went down after news of the Sandusky scandal broke. Athletics and athletes are the talk of the town, and we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't think that they drew a huge crowd in terms of admission every year. Having good sports teams brings attention to a school, and people witness that. Star athletes are role models and subconsciously market their university at all times. Athletes become the face of a university. Danica Patrick would never do a GoDaddy! commercial and Jared Fogle would never represent Subway without just compensation, so why should athletes have to?
These athletes are also bringing in copious amounts of money and revenue to their universities, but being so constricted in regulations that the NCAA fails to recognize their need for a basic necessity stipend. If an athlete is lucky enough to be on full scholarship, which many aren't, they are provided with a food and living stipend. That often isn't enough to make ends meet, and on top of that, they are ineligible to be employed outside of the university, so they have no way of making an income. Recently, after picking on one of the football players at my university for never wearing anything but his football warm ups, he jokingly told me that he would if he had money to wash the rest of his clothes. Normally I would just brush this off, but instead, my heart sunk, because for the first time I realized that this wasn't a joke anymore. The NCAA is happy to rake in the revenue brought in by top athletes, but fails to return full gratitude. When players become real people as opposed to just celebrities that we see on TV on Thursday Nights and Saturday afternoons, that’s when one realizes that these student athletes are going through trials and tribulations of their own while taking on a full-time job at the same time.
The argument to compensate and consider college athletes as employees is compelling, but there are some who refuse to see it as such. I was one of those people, and there are many out there. This is a topic that can hardly be fought from the inside out without fear of losing a scholarship or credibility in the sports world. Only a few athletes are privileged to go on to play their sport professionally after college, so for most this is their only shot. They spend all of their college years trying to perform at their highest level, with little to show in comparison to the work they've put in. It's important that we bring such a topic to the forefront and hold the NCAA responsible for providing for these athletes what the athletes provide for them.
