The Money Mustache Community
Around the Internet => Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy => Topic started by: ch12 on April 07, 2014, 04:40:40 PM
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/07/us/ncaa-basketball-finals-shabazz-napier-hungry/index.html
"I don't feel student-athletes should get hundreds of thousands of dollars, but like I said, there are hungry nights that I go to bed and I'm starving," he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/07/shabazz-napier-hungry-uconn-basketball_n_5106132.html
In an email to The Huffington Post, a University of Connecticut spokesman said all of the school's scholarship athletes, including Napier, receive the maximum meal plan allowed under NCAA rules.
"UConn does not have a cafeteria devoted specifically to student-athletes," he added, "but they have access to the same cafeterias which are available to all our students."
I didn't know where to put this...maybe Off Topic. It may not belong in the Antimustachian wall. There are angry comments on some of the articles about Shabazz that say that it's money mismanagement if you go hungry. Other people are saying that it's due to the cafeteria hours.
I personally think that it's tied to how athletes need to have a caloric intake much higher than someone who has a desk job - or even the average college student. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/07/24/157317262/how-many-calories-do-olympic-athletes-need-it-depends
It makes me sick to think of these guys, powerhouses generating lots of money for their schools, going hungry.
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It makes me sick to think of these guys, powerhouses generating lots of money for their schools, going hungry.
They don't, though http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx (http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx). And "student athletes" at that level are typically more athlete than student. The fact that they want to be treated more like employees I think underscores that. As do articles (and there have been several in recent months) like this one: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/unc-tutor-reveals-10-sentence-term-paper-earned-football-player-a-phony-class-article-1.1737861 (http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/unc-tutor-reveals-10-sentence-term-paper-earned-football-player-a-phony-class-article-1.1737861)
I am of the belief that athletes and students alike would benefit from decoupling academics from sports because the two aren't really related. It's not the most well-supported belief (so don't jump on me for it!) except that they do that in many other countries and it works just fine, or better. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/ (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/)
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I actually don't think this is a joke.
I went to school many years ago on an athletic scholarship and did not get enough to eat. The cafeteria was open until 8pm (5-7pm for everyone and 7-8pm for athletes only because many teams practiced until 7 or 7:30.) We'd practice til 7:30, run (and i mean run) in our sweats to get to the last place open at 7:45, only to find that half the time they had put the hot food away and only the salad bar and captain crunch was still out. Seriously this happened night after night. One night one of my teammates blew an absolute gasket at the cafeteria ladies. I mean five alarm call the police fit because there are going to be some bodies piled up if there isn't food brought out tonight and every night after this dammit you KNOW were are coming at 7:45. There were no alternative eateries for us on campus: just that cafeteria, and most of us did not have one dime of our own to buy a pretzel from the snack machine. I found $8 on the street one day about half way through my freshman year and it took me 2 weeks to decide how to spend it. That's how little spending money I had, and we were missing meals. What I am saying is that this is possibly very real and not a new problem.
Then my little brother went to college in another state on an athletic scholarship (Big state school.) Did he get enough to eat the first week? NO! He was a gigantic 18 year old burning thousands of calories extra per day. He needed to eat more than three times a day and he was missing at least one meal every day due to his practice schedule. He called me pretty upset. He needed substantial snacks and had no snacks. I told him to take food from the cafeteria, but he was worried that was stealing and said they had a lady who watched them to make sure no one took food out (we had a similar door guard.) GODDAMMIT it pissed me OFF! At that point I was a 5th year senior and had a part time job to earn some money, so I borrowed a car and drove a few hours to the his state to take him to the grocery store for as much food as I could afford that he could store in his teeny dorm room (which was a double they had converted into a triple, greedy fuckers.) Then I gave him my last $40 to buy the next batch of groceries. And what did he do for laundry money, you ask? He put out his open guitar case and played until he had enough coins. After 4 years of playing division one sports - with the "take a light load" advising that goes along with it - he did not have enough credits for a degree. And that, my friend, is known as a "free ride."
I really hope it is still not this bad, but nothing would surprise me.
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I actually don't think this is a joke.
No one said it was a joke. If you are referring to the title, I used the quotes for emphasis.
Your story is really intense. I hope that UConn is better than that, but frankly we don't know. I will say that one of the comments pointed out that some of UConn's dining halls are open until 10 PM. http://www.dining.uconn.edu/resident_dining_hours.html I hope that practice doesn't run that late every night. I also went to a school that had a late night place that was open until 2 AM, so I hope that our athletes did actually eat.
I also don't know what "door guards" are (as in, I've never had them), and that's a significant difference. I'm sure that our athletes ate snacks, because I saw them in the school convenience store (paid with meal plan dollars) all the time. I guess it really depends on how the school distributes food to its students.
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Sometimes, AMW (Anti-Mustachian Wall...) threads are sad, not funny.
Shame on administrators (athletic and dining hall) for not working with the student athletes to make sure they can eat.
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You would think that coaches are up on this situation.
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I went to school many years ago on an athletic scholarship and did not get enough to eat. The cafeteria was open until 8pm (5-7pm for everyone and 7-8pm for athletes only because many teams practiced until 7 or 7:30.) We'd practice til 7:30, run (and i mean run) in our sweats to get to the last place open at 7:45, only to find that half the time they had put the hot food away and only the salad bar and captain crunch was still out. Seriously this happened night after night. One night one of my teammates blew an absolute gasket at the cafeteria ladies. I mean five alarm call the police fit because there are going to be some bodies piled up if there isn't food brought out tonight and every night after this dammit you KNOW were are coming at 7:45.
Why have a fit at the poor cafeteria ladies? Why not just leave your practice earlier, so you can get to the cafeteria on time?
As to the rest, you apparently got the chance of a free (or low cost) education in return for doing the same sorts of physical training that the rest of us had to do on our own, often paying gym fees &c (and having to take second place to any 'athlete' who wanted to use the facilities, and while taking real courses and holding down jobs. Sorry if my sympathy is a bit limited.
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I agree the compensation isn't enough for room and board. My daughter has played D1 volleyball for the last two years. She works in the summer to cover the shortfall for during the school year when she can't work. What I couldn't believe is that her scholarship wasn't enough to pay for her to stay in the dorms. The dorms require a meal plan and would leave her with a sizable shortfall each semester. She chose to live off campus and cook her own meals. We aren't complaining because her scholarship is very valuable, and we can afford to help her. But I could see it being hard for some kids coming from harder circumstances.
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Why have a fit at the poor cafeteria ladies? Why not just leave your practice earlier, so you can get to the cafeteria on time?
Players don't leave practice until the coach says. A player can't walk out early to go eat, and coaches are often given certain times to use facilities.
As to the rest, you apparently got the chance of a free (or low cost) education in return for doing the same sorts of physical training that the rest of us had to do on our own, often paying gym fees &c (and having to take second place to any 'athlete' who wanted to use the facilities, and while taking real courses and holding down jobs. Sorry if my sympathy is a bit limited.
I'm sure it wouldn't convince you, but being a student athlete is much more challenging than that. My daughter often missed classes three days a week to travel for games. She still had to study for tests and try to get good grades without half as much lecture and lab time. My daughter has shoulder issues, knee issues and problems with her Achilles. Hardly usual aches and pains most 20 year olds would have due to Zumba and yoga classes. Like it or hate it, but student athletes work a lot harder than you'll give them credit for.
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Holy moly did you ever even play a sport? There is no "leaving practice early." Are you out of your mind? If your family has no money and you are there on an athletic scholarship, then the coach has absolute power over you. They can yell at you nonstop, decide practice is at 4:20 am, make you run up and down stairs carrying a 50 pound bag of dog food until you vomit. But yeah, just announce that you're ducking out of practice before they say it's over. That will fly.
But I didn't take real classes, because I was an athlete, and we all know that athletes don't have to take real classes. So I just majored in chemistry. Easy peasy. And if you don't think playing div1 college sports is holding down a job, then guess again.
By the way, after my first year I couldn't take being hungry anymore so I ALSO worked a second job both in season (although I could only manage 4 hours per week because Sunday was the only day I had any time at all) and out of season (20 hours per week) and in the summers (full time) so that I could have little luxuries like laundry soap and tooth paste. At first I worked at a fast food place on Sunday mornings for $4 per hour. Yeah, that's right, $16 per week ($20 if I clocked in early or out late). Of course the bus was 75 cents each way, so that was $1.50 out of my earnings just getting to work. Oh, and I had to buy the official fast food uniform shirt which was $15, so goodbye first week of pay. After that, though, whoo-hoo, then I could do laundry and perhaps even buy a pair of new socks and a pot to boil my noodles in.
But you are right: all athletes are spoiled and pampered. That's the bottom line.
I was lucky: the worst that ever happened to me playing sports was a ruptured achilles and some chronic shoulder problems. But I have friends who had to have their hips or hands pinned back together due to injury. It makes a torn up knee or ankle look like nothing. One guy can barely walk now because of his hip and has all kinds of problems with leg clots. Another guy can't feel his right foot anymore and has been told he needs to have discs removed and 4 lower vertebrae fused if it gets any worse. At least the knocked out teeth were easy to fix. And we are in our early 40's! Yay, school spirit! We had it so easy with all that premium access to the weight room. Glory days.
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Derp.
This story is silly. Buy a couple 15 lbs bags of oatmeal and throw some boiling water on it in a bowl if you're hungry. Oatmeal costs just about nothing, is stupidly easy to make, and can be made with things that are usually allowed in residence (microwave, hot plate, coffee maker - just don't put grounds in it, etc.)
Yes you eat a lot more when you're physically active. Yes, university and college kids are often broke. No, the athletes are not starving themselves each night in their rooms. Unless they're stupid with money.
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ESPN has a good 30 for 30 on student athletes, highly recommend, is on netflix I think.
I have trouble coming up with a reason why SA, at least in revenue generating sports, should not get a modest weekly stipend. The number of hours they give to the university to then have trouble getting dinner is just a bad situation. Am a bit surprised the coaches were not more accommodating with practice hours, but that might just be when the weight room was available.
Was not a student athlete.
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I actually don't think this is a joke.
No one said it was a joke. If you are referring to the title, I used the quotes for emphasis.
Yeah, that's not how you use them.
Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
It's an amusing irony that people intending to use them to emphasize that part/feature instead do the opposite and imply that it's not that thing.
Example: There is a series of apartments near my house that have a big banner saying (paraphrasing):
Newly remodeled "grand" rooms.
Sure makes those rooms not seem very grand, or those students not very starving.
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Derp.
This story is silly. Buy a couple 15 lbs bags of oatmeal and throw some boiling water on it in a bowl if you're hungry. Oatmeal costs just about nothing, is stupidly easy to make, and can be made with things that are usually allowed in residence (microwave, hot plate, coffee maker - just don't put grounds in it, etc.)
Yes you eat a lot more when you're physically active. Yes, university and college kids are often broke. No, the athletes are not starving themselves each night in their rooms. Unless they're stupid with money.
Yes you eat a lot more when you're physically active. Yes you will be hungry a couple hours later after the glucose spike wears off.
They need (in my minimally processed paleo oriented opinion, {IMMPPOO? catchy}) access to balanced meals with plenty of satiating natural fats and proteins in addition to a crap ton of vegetables and some fruits. Their bodies are not only burning more fuel than the average person, in many cases they are building muscle and changing their body's chemistry (in addition to soaking up everything mentally from their studies and being coached).
I'd save the oatmeal for the frugal person trying to make a cheap meal and not for the athlete whose bodily demands are a bit different.
I'm sure many college athletes are stupid with money. I certainly was at that age, at least more so than I am now. It would still cost a non-zero amount of money to buy the 15 lb bag of oatmeal, no? Where is this money coming from, even if it is less per unit of weight compared to other options? I think the solution is more access to university food, not an expectation that student athletes will be optimal with whatever personal money they have with regard to food.
The word 'starving' certainly is a strong one, especially when used to paint broadly a sizable sub-population in a wealthy country where most would have a different definition of the word compared to those in less fortunate areas of the globe. Still, I feel for the athletes on some level.
I was not an athlete in college but in high school I remember being naturally irritable most afternoons and especially by the time I got home after tennis or soccer practice at 6 and all I had at lunch was 8 ounces of milk, a few spoonfuls of corn, an apple, and rectangle of sub-standard pizza. I was 6'5" and 180 pounds my senior year. I simply needed more food compared to most others. Was I normal? Of course not, but neither are most athletes in college.
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I actually don't think this is a joke.
No one said it was a joke. If you are referring to the title, I used the quotes for emphasis.
Yeah, that's not how you use them.
Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
It's an amusing irony that people intending to use them to emphasize that part/feature instead do the opposite and imply that it's not that thing.
Example: There is a series of apartments near my house that have a big banner saying (paraphrasing):
Newly remodeled "grand" rooms.
Sure makes those rooms not seem very grand, or those students not very starving.
"Great" explanation. ;)
Enter Chris Farley and his air quotes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_cAS-mvV20
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"Great" explanation. ;)
Enter Chris Farley and his air quotes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_cAS-mvV20
Nice one! I always think of Friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIIm7yBdUG4
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(http://www.lifebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/quote19-620x.jpg)
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I went to school many years ago on an athletic scholarship and did not get enough to eat. The cafeteria was open until 8pm (5-7pm for everyone and 7-8pm for athletes only because many teams practiced until 7 or 7:30.) We'd practice til 7:30, run (and i mean run) in our sweats to get to the last place open at 7:45, only to find that half the time they had put the hot food away and only the salad bar and captain crunch was still out. Seriously this happened night after night. One night one of my teammates blew an absolute gasket at the cafeteria ladies. I mean five alarm call the police fit because there are going to be some bodies piled up if there isn't food brought out tonight and every night after this dammit you KNOW were are coming at 7:45.
Why have a fit at the poor cafeteria ladies? Why not just leave your practice earlier, so you can get to the cafeteria on time?
As to the rest, you apparently got the chance of a free (or low cost) education in return for doing the same sorts of physical training that the rest of us had to do on our own, often paying gym fees &c (and having to take second place to any 'athlete' who wanted to use the facilities, and while taking real courses and holding down jobs. Sorry if my sympathy is a bit limited.
Umm, you can't "just leave" practice earlier. Was that a serious suggestion? You would lose your scholarship in a heartbeat. And I assure you, they aren't doing the same sort of physical training you do on your own and pay gym fees for. When you're a student athlete, at least at D1 schools, you have a job. Playing sports is your job. You don't have time to do anything else. And trust me, playing sports is harder than any 3 jobs + class you would have been doing. And the NCAA is making vast sums of money while you are starving. Why are you surprised people are pissed off?
Oh yeah, and despite popular delusions, athletes take real classes. The same classes everybody else takes. Sure, things like the UNC scandal happen every once in a while but they are extreme outliers. When I was in school one of my athlete friends (who competed in 2 Olympics, btw) majored in Aerospace Engineering, which is probably the hardest major in existence. One of them went into the Marine Corp after graduation, said it was a cakewalk compared to school. Trust me, you don't know what hard work is compared to those people.
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(http://www.lifebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/quote19-620x.jpg)
Picture didn't work for me, but lead me to this link.
http://www.lifebuzz.com/quotations/
I laughed out loud a couple of times.
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Well if you spin something a certain way to get the answer you want, no, probably people won't pick that option.
Also kudos to serpents for using quotes right with "job." ;)
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Overall the collegiate athletics system is all messed up. I believe we should try to model the Canadian or Euro model and just have more development leagues where players are paid. I doubt this will ever happen as there is so much money tied to the NCAA and universities. Or work out a way where the teams are affiliated with a university, but being a player doesn't mean they are also a student.
Transitioning to any sort of paid collegiate athlete opens a floodgate of potential what if scenarios. Which, I believe, would lead to the end of most non-revenue sports at the collegiate level. Would this be a bad thing? I guess that depends on how you feel about athletics role at a university.
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Yes you eat a lot more when you're physically active. Yes you will be hungry a couple hours later after the glucose spike wears off.
They need (in my minimally processed paleo oriented opinion, {IMMPPOO? catchy}) access to balanced meals with plenty of satiating natural fats and proteins in addition to a crap ton of vegetables and some fruits.
It does complicate things if you insist on following fad diets. Athletes need more food if they're hungry. They need food that's cheap, quick, and easy to prepare. Oats are a healthy source of carbs with a moderate amount of both protein and fat. They're cheap, quick, and easy to prepare. I can get 5kg of oats for 8$. That's 30350 calories for 8$ . . . or 40 calories per cent.
Their bodies are not only burning more fuel than the average person, in many cases they are building muscle and changing their body's chemistry (in addition to soaking up everything mentally from their studies and being coached).
I'd save the oatmeal for the frugal person trying to make a cheap meal and not for the athlete whose bodily demands are a bit different.
I have competed in wrestling, judo, and jiu-jitsu tournaments for most of my life. I am fully aware of what hard training does to your body. Your body demands more carbs (which act as fuel basically) under hard training, slightly more protein if what you're doing is endurance based, and lots more protein if what you're doing is strength based.
But none of that changes the fact, we're talking about university students. They can eat all they want when the cafeteria is open the next day. They're just hungry now and again when practice runs late and need something to snack on. Which is why they should keep some quick, cheap food around.
I'm sure many college athletes are stupid with money. I certainly was at that age, at least more so than I am now. It would still cost a non-zero amount of money to buy the 15 lb bag of oatmeal, no? Where is this money coming from, even if it is less per unit of weight compared to other options? I think the solution is more access to university food, not an expectation that student athletes will be optimal with whatever personal money they have with regard to food.
Actually, I can't argue here. It would be optimal if they had access to the cafeterias. But they don't. And presumably they want to continue on in their athletic endeavors at their school. I was a broke university student at one point. I had to pay for school, room, and board from what I earned from my summer jobs and savings. If you can't swing 8$ for food once or twice a month, you need to quit what you're doing. Because you're not going to have money for soap, toothpaste, clothing, etc.
The word 'starving' certainly is a strong one, especially when used to paint broadly a sizable sub-population in a wealthy country where most would have a different definition of the word compared to those in less fortunate areas of the globe. Still, I feel for the athletes on some level.
The people involved in athletics have made their choice. They know the benefits and they know the costs. I don't consider going to bed hungry and then eating a huge breakfast the next morning to be a particularly unbearable hardship. It kinda sucks, but that's about it.
I was not an athlete in college but in high school I remember being naturally irritable most afternoons and especially by the time I got home after tennis or soccer practice at 6 and all I had at lunch was 8 ounces of milk, a few spoonfuls of corn, an apple, and rectangle of sub-standard pizza. I was 6'5" and 180 pounds my senior year. I simply needed more food compared to most others. Was I normal? Of course not, but neither are most athletes in college.
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I'm 6'0. I have cut weight to compete at 170lbs, and gained weight (with a lot of weight room work) to compete at about 200. It sucks when you can't eat. It rocks when you can. It's all part of what you accept to be competitive in your sport though.
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Overall the collegiate athletics system is all messed up. I believe we should try to model the Canadian or Euro model and just have more development leagues where players are paid. I doubt this will ever happen as there is so much money tied to the NCAA and universities. Or work out a way where the teams are affiliated with a university, but being a player doesn't mean they are also a student.
Transitioning to any sort of paid collegiate athlete opens a floodgate of potential what if scenarios. Which, I believe, would lead to the end of most non-revenue sports at the collegiate level. Would this be a bad thing? I guess that depends on how you feel about athletics role at a university.
I doubt non-revenue sports would go away altogether. My husband does musical theater for a living, but it was a hobby of his all through college. The school treated it as a "club" and like every club, the students had to bid for dollars from the pool of money student activity fee money, and make up any shortfall by themselves. It worked out pretty well. The Musical Theater Club mounted 2 big shows a year, along with a handful of revues. Some of the students were music majors, but a lot were hobbyists or students who had done this is high school. Despite no explicit college support, a number of students have gone on the make careers in the field. My school also have Division III sports, but there were self-funded sports, including a rugby team.
Good point. I agree that club teams would still exist. By non-revenue sports I meant teams that are run by the universities athletic program. I suppose it could be possible that many of the sports would just switch to club if they were dropped by the universities athletic program.
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Why have a fit at the poor cafeteria ladies? Why not just leave your practice earlier, so you can get to the cafeteria on time?
Players don't leave practice until the coach says. A player can't walk out early to go eat, and coaches are often given certain times to use facilities.
If you're starving, you do. Maybe you get all your teammates to go with you, and your coach learns an important lesson about his ego. (Are there any college/professional coaches who aren't egotistical assholes?)
And I assure you, they aren't doing the same sort of physical training you do on your own and pay gym fees for. When you're a student athlete, at least at D1 schools, you have a job. Playing sports is your job. You don't have time to do anything else. And trust me, playing sports is harder than any 3 jobs + class you would have been doing. And the NCAA is making vast sums of money while you are starving. Why are you surprised people are pissed off?
Perhaps I am a wee bit biased by having done a hitch in the Marines*, plus a decade of farm & construction work, before finishing college. And I don't agree that playing sports is harder, because I was doing similar activities for fun. Not, I'll grant you, the big-name stuff like football & basketball (because I've never had any interest in those) but biking, cross-country skiing, & various martial arts.
*I wouldn't say that basic training was easier, but at least the schedule was planned so that you got to the dining halls when there was food.
Oh yeah, and despite popular delusions, athletes take real classes. The same classes everybody else takes.
Sure, they can, and some do. Most don't.
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"It would be a lot more reasonable if these folks for paid and weren't part of the university system, which makes a mockery of both athletics and academics."
A thousand times this. These people are being exploited.
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This seems so silly, their is a really easy fix. The universities need to make sure that their is a full service cafeteria open for the athletes after all the practices are done, plus their really should be a snack shop for the athletes, I am not feeding athletes but I am feeding growing boys and 3 hots are not enough at all, they need snacks and they aren't needing 10,000 calories a day yet either.
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This seems so silly, their is a really easy fix. The universities need to make sure that their is a full service cafeteria open for the athletes after all the practices are done
Easy in principle but I am sure much harder in practice, how many of the eating establishments are run on contract by outside for-profits, would you ask the non-athletes to (in one way or another) subsidize extended hours for the athletes, hours that apparently the broader market is not demanding? Also I have always seen the meal plains as being fixed rate independent of usage in the dinning halls, you are a sedentary 100#er 2$k please, you are a 250# football player 2$k in scholarship dollars please.
Now I always ate on the larger portion side so I did not complain on this to much but one can see an imbalance. And yes I assume the smaller eaters are more motivated to move out on there own faster than the larger eaters.
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Why have a fit at the poor cafeteria ladies? Why not just leave your practice earlier, so you can get to the cafeteria on time?
Players don't leave practice until the coach says. A player can't walk out early to go eat, and coaches are often given certain times to use facilities.
If you're starving, you do. Maybe you get all your teammates to go with you, and your coach learns an important lesson about his ego. (Are there any college/professional coaches who aren't egotistical assholes?)
And I assure you, they aren't doing the same sort of physical training you do on your own and pay gym fees for. When you're a student athlete, at least at D1 schools, you have a job. Playing sports is your job. You don't have time to do anything else. And trust me, playing sports is harder than any 3 jobs + class you would have been doing. And the NCAA is making vast sums of money while you are starving. Why are you surprised people are pissed off?
Perhaps I am a wee bit biased by having done a hitch in the Marines*, plus a decade of farm & construction work, before finishing college. And I don't agree that playing sports is harder, because I was doing similar activities for fun. Not, I'll grant you, the big-name stuff like football & basketball (because I've never had any interest in those) but biking, cross-country skiing, & various martial arts.
*I wouldn't say that basic training was easier, but at least the schedule was planned so that you got to the dining halls when there was food.
Oh yeah, and despite popular delusions, athletes take real classes. The same classes everybody else takes.
Sure, they can, and some do. Most don't.
There are so many bad generalizations here...I don't even know where to start. Again, are you seriously suggesting that players just leave practice? What's the rationalization? "My coach is an egotistical asshole, so I have the moral authority to just leave and it'll all be OK?" Yeah, that's enough for me to walk out of practice and lose not only tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships (which would mean I would have to drop out of school immediately), but also my one shot at pursuing my dream of being a D1 and possibly professional athlete.
Guess what? Sometimes practice was scheduled at 9pm-12am because that's the only time we could get the facilities in our offseason. Sometimes 7-10. And you bet your ass the dining halls weren't bending over backwards to accommodate that schedule. Participating in random sports on your own time, or even the military, doesn't make you remotely qualified to comment on the workload associated with that level of athletics.
Sorry, but arguments like this fire me up so much. I played D1 baseball while doing two majors - both of which my school was ranked top 10 in the country for. I worked my ass off to graduate in 4 years with an honor roll-level GPA. It's absolutely infuriating to hear people say (or strongly imply) that most college athletes are idiots who are skating by on the good graces of athletic department-friendly professors. The majority aren't necessarily in my situation either, but they are a lot closer to me than the illiterate UNC players who capture news headlines.
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Hmm, I go to UConn. The dining halls are open until 7:15 pm. There are three of them that are open until 10:00 pm. The Student Union food market is open until around 11. Even the maximum meal plan offered only gives you $500 to spend throughout the semester on UConn food outside of the dining halls.
Would have to take Napier's words seriously. UConn, and many other colleges for the matter rake in zillions of dollars because of their sports programs. It's fair to make sure the athletes are taken care of foodwise - especially since food would make them perform better.
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Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
No, quotation marks like that mean verbatim quotation, not sarcasm.
See also:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
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Participating in random sports on your own time, or even the military, doesn't make you remotely qualified to comment on the workload associated with that level of athletics.
haha I see you've met james
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Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
No, quotation marks like that mean verbatim quotation, not sarcasm.
See also:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
Sure, they can be used like that as well. They are never used for emphasis, and as written in the title of this threadit seems sarcastic to me, rather than direct quoting, but maybe not.
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Participating in random sports on your own time, or even the military, doesn't make you remotely qualified to comment on the workload associated with that level of athletics.
haha I see you've met james
ZING!
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Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
No, quotation marks like that mean verbatim quotation, not sarcasm.
See also:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
Sure, they can be used like that as well. They are never used for emphasis, and as written in the title of this threadit seems sarcastic to me, rather than direct quoting, but maybe not.
It's a quote though. The student said "starving." They are also used for emphasis in other countries, which is why so many of the examples on www.unnecessaryquotes.com are from immigrant-run businesses. Stop being so Americentric!
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Quotation marks like that mean sarcasm, not emphasis.
No, quotation marks like that mean verbatim quotation, not sarcasm.
See also:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
Sure, they can be used like that as well. They are never used for emphasis, and as written in the title of this threadit seems sarcastic to me, rather than direct quoting, but maybe not.
It's a quote though. The student said "starving." They are also used for emphasis in other countries, which is why so many of the examples on www.unnecessaryquotes.com are from immigrant-run businesses. Stop being so Americentric!
Is the HuffPo being sarcastic when it uses quotes to denote that Shabazz used the word starving? My title was an echo of that title, and I didn't mean any offense.
I'm Indiana born and raised, but my intent was not to be sarcastic about him starving. Yeah, the quotes might've been unnecessary, but he's also not actually starving. My boss spent 3-4 years of his life rescuing orphans in Liberia in an NGO he founded. As a result, he corrects himself every time that he says that he's "starving, I mean hungry." (Those quotes are to indicate that he said those words, in a shocking writer's twist! Bold was also added for emphasis!) Deal with severe malnourishment (like I've been seeing with Vietnamese orphans since I was 7 - and dear goodness, before you say that I'm using a silly word because of my immigrant status, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/malnourishment) before you take starving out of the quotes. Shabazz Napier is going hungry, and he doesn't have enough food - but I've personally taught Ecuadorian kids who were actually starving, and that's why I don't use the word lightly.
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Starving would imply that the student was relying on the cafeteria being open by the time they were completed with practice. While it's a screw up on the system's part with the Coach's time exceeding the time set aside for the cafeteria to be open.... systems fail. Shouldn't the student, as a hard-working responsible Adult have a backup plan for occasions where life throws a curveball at them? Food is food, if you have it, you have met that very low expectation we have set for members of society that they can get food from out there in to their mouth.
Did they never consider taking out a student loan for living expenses?
Foodstamps?
Ask family for money?
Dip in to savings?
Get a fricken credit card and shop for food instead of whining and then going to bed hungry.
Do you honestly have zero dollars available to you? Or is this just an excuse that the "system" is not taking care of you. You were "promised" everything would be handed over to you, and then it wasn't. Poor baby..
Zero sympathy. Life is tough. Time to get over yourself and do what needs to get done.
From the post above, Orphans in Vietnam don't have access to these things (and that is truly terrible!), but these college athletes have the access and the means to get more food. They just don't want to(?)
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Did they never consider taking out a student loan for living expenses?
Foodstamps?
Ask family for money?
Dip in to savings?
Get a fricken credit card and shop for food instead of whining and then going to bed hungry.
1) Students on full athletic scholarships are receiving the "full cost of attendance" and therefore not eligible to take out more student loans.
2) Students aren't eligible for food stamps.
3) The people saying they are going hungry rarely have families able to help them out.
4) If they had savings, they would use them for food.
5) Possible, but this is a dangerous road to go down.
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Neither of the referenced articles say anything about the cafeteria hours. Both articles say he was going hungry because he "can't afford food". If the university meal plans don't provide sufficient calories for athletes then yes, that should be looked into. But reading the articles and watching the video I don't think that is really the issue. They players are putting in a LOT of hours, and it sounds like they don't think their compensation for those hours is fair.
FWIW, in the context of this blog and this thread's placement in the "Antimustachian Wall of Shame and Comedy" I thought the quotations indicated sarcasm as well. If they don't, it kinda seems like this thread belongs in off-topic.
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I would say it is def. should be the Universities responsibility to provide for these athletes if that is part of their scholarship. it doesn't take a genius to figure out how to solve this problem by even circumventing the maybe outsourced cafeterias.
They would need a few vending machines placed strategically that the students can use their food cards for, they can even offer healthy solutions, they only need someone to keep them filled, oh look one more student they can hire to do a part time job.
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the quotes bits have made me laugh.
Clearly people in the US use the word starving when they mean just really hungry, and we can probably all agree that the usage is so common we can't hold it against this kid.
GuitarStv, I did figure the oatmeal thing out pretty quick. But first I had to come up with the $8 (actually I only needed $2 for the generic cylinder that I could access at the store walking distance from my room.)
Let's think about this for a minute. What time are the Marquee BigEast or ACC games? Hmmm, that's right, usually 9pm because of TV commercials and to catch the west coast gamblers as well even if its a Tuesday or Wednesday night. What time do you think the bus leaves to go from, say, UNC to NC State. (It's about a 45-60 minute drive if there is rush hour traffic.) Working backwards, that means ready to go on the court for warm ups at 8pm. In the training room dressed and ready to go for taping and therapy no later than 7 pm. Odd are very good that the bus leaves at 5 pm, if not earlier because some coaches think getting there crazy early is their style. So eat right before 5, right? Jeez, that's easy to figure out. What if your physics lab is 2pm - 5pm? Okay, no time to eat dinner, so have a big lunch. Check, big lunch. Plan ahead and snag a banana and some crackers to eat on the bus.
Play game from 9pm to ~11pm. Wait around for media interviews. Bus leaves. Back to campus around 1 am? Maybe bus driver is nice and drops you off near your building door. And now it's time to think about eating your first real meal since lunch.
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GuitarStv, I did figure the oatmeal thing out pretty quick. But first I had to come up with the $8 (actually I only needed $2 for the generic cylinder that I could access at the store walking distance from my room.)
Let's think about this for a minute. What time are the Marquee BigEast or ACC games? Hmmm, that's right, usually 9pm because of TV commercials and to catch the west coast gamblers as well even if its a Tuesday or Wednesday night. What time do you think the bus leaves to go from, say, UNC to NC State. (It's about a 45-60 minute drive if there is rush hour traffic.) Working backwards, that means ready to go on the court for warm ups at 8pm. In the training room dressed and ready to go for taping and therapy no later than 7 pm. Odd are very good that the bus leaves at 5 pm, if not earlier because some coaches think getting there crazy early is their style. So eat right before 5, right? Jeez, that's easy to figure out. What if your physics lab is 2pm - 5pm? Okay, no time to eat dinner, so have a big lunch. Check, big lunch. Plan ahead and snag a banana and some crackers to eat on the bus.
Play game from 9pm to ~11pm. Wait around for media interviews. Bus leaves. Back to campus around 1 am? Maybe bus driver is nice and drops you off near your building door. And now it's time to think about eating your first real meal since lunch.
I'm not raising a bag of oatmeal and bowl of water over my head, and screaming "BY YOUR POWERS COMBINED I AM CAPTAIN OATMEAL SATIETY!!" I'm not saying that someone in university will never feel a hunger pang. I would argue however that occasionally being hungry doesn't kill a person. I'd also argue that if you want to eat something cheap and bland pretty much any college kid can afford to. We're talking some mild discomfort until the free breakfast the next day . . . only if they're too lazy/picky to make something when they get home. This is not a situation worth of pity or concern.
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I went to a big, Southern school with a HUGE emphasis on college athletics. I wasn't a student athlete myself, but my roommate dated a swimmer. We didn't have a piddly little swim program, either. A lot of these swimmers went to the Olympics, and my school boasts several gold-medal winners. I was always astonished at how freaking hard these guys and girls worked. Up at 4 AM for swim practice, full load of classes, and then another 4 hours of practice after classes were over. I remember going to his house once and he was cooking two pounds of chicken breasts (just for himself!). It didn't occur to me to ask how he afforded it at the time, but for people expending that kind of energy in a day, it takes a tremendous amount of real food. I always felt sorry for them knowing that, unlike the football players, they had no paychecks to look forward to after they graduated. They really did need to get a good education, since they were going to have to get jobs after college.
No to malign the football players, though. I took Geology with one of our players (he's now in the NFL!) and he totally kicked my butt in that class. He wasn't the smartest guy I've ever met, but he worked really hard, came to study sessions when he was able, and did really well in the class. There were times when he would come to study groups wet from shower- he had just come straight from practice- so I don't know how he would have gotten dinner. Pretty sure our dining halls closed pretty early.
I don't think it is fair to pretend that these people aren't working like dogs to play elite-level sports and try to get an education. We've all seen interviews of football players who can barely form a coherent sentence, but there are a lot of athletes out there who are really working hard at their schooling in the midst of an incredibly grueling athletic schedule. The demands and pressures that are placed on them are astonishing.
My beloved football team is a big part of my post-school life, but I can't help but feel like we are somehow taking advantage of these students who are bringing in millions of dollars for their colleges and universities. I don't know how to resolve the issue, but it gives me Feelings.
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If you're starving, you do. Maybe you get all your teammates to go with you, and your coach learns an important lesson about his ego. (Are there any college/professional coaches who aren't egotistical assholes?)
No, no you don't. Because if you do, you lose your scholarship immediately and poof, there goes your livelihood and hopes and dreams up in smoke, gone in an instant. The coach wouldn't be the one learning the lesson in this scenario...
And I assure you, they aren't doing the same sort of physical training you do on your own and pay gym fees for. When you're a student athlete, at least at D1 schools, you have a job. Playing sports is your job. You don't have time to do anything else. And trust me, playing sports is harder than any 3 jobs + class you would have been doing. And the NCAA is making vast sums of money while you are starving. Why are you surprised people are pissed off?
Perhaps I am a wee bit biased by having done a hitch in the Marines*, plus a decade of farm & construction work, before finishing college. And I don't agree that playing sports is harder, because I was doing similar activities for fun. Not, I'll grant you, the big-name stuff like football & basketball (because I've never had any interest in those) but biking, cross-country skiing, & various martial arts.
By all accounts, joining the Marine Corp is a vacation compared to D1 athletics. I believe them, based on what I've seen.
Sure, they can, and some do. Most don't.
No, all do. There are occasional easy-A classes thrown in for most of them and of course they have unlimited access to amazing tutors, but all of them take real classes. Every. Single. One. They may not major in Mechanical Engineering or anything, but they all take the legitimate classes that everybody else takes. I went to a very demanding engineering school in the southeast with a large D1 sports programming and knew many athletes both in football/basketball and the non-money sports. Not a single one of them fit the stereotype you are projecting. They were all reasonably intelligent people and they all took their studies seriously. They had to, because if they failed a class they were kicked off the team.
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No, all do. There are occasional easy-A classes thrown in for most of them and of course they have unlimited access to amazing tutors, but all of them take real classes. Every. Single. One. They may not major in Mechanical Engineering or anything, but they all take the legitimate classes that everybody else takes.
This is what is supposed to be true. Sometimes it is, and sometimes when it isn't, the offending schools get caught.
In my experience, it tends to be true most of the time outside of the big money-making sports.
But the athletic department has a lot of leverage to pressure adjuncts and grad assistants, too, and that's who teaches the majority of classes at D1 institutions, so there's more than one way to skin that cat.
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No, all do. There are occasional easy-A classes thrown in for most of them and of course they have unlimited access to amazing tutors, but all of them take real classes. Every. Single. One. They may not major in Mechanical Engineering or anything, but they all take the legitimate classes that everybody else takes.
This is what is supposed to be true. Sometimes it is, and sometimes when it isn't, the offending schools get caught.
In my experience, it tends to be true most of the time outside of the big money-making sports.
But the athletic department has a lot of leverage to pressure adjuncts and grad assistants, too, and that's who teaches the majority of classes at D1 institutions, so there's more than one way to skin that cat.
Yes. When I was in college we had a couple "special" programs with recruited students. Not sports, but high profile and important to the school's reputation in those fields. I was fired from a tutoring job in part because I wasn't willing to do what I considered an unethical amount of work for the "special" students. I ended up transitioning to writing tutoring at the drop-in academic center and as a writing assistant in 300 level courses, which was much better. I can't imagine the kind of pressure a grad student TA would face to pass the star RB of a DI football team, or something.
I can. He was a linebacker, though.
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GuitarStv, I did figure the oatmeal thing out pretty quick. But first I had to come up with the $8 (actually I only needed $2 for the generic cylinder that I could access at the store walking distance from my room.)
Let's think about this for a minute. What time are the Marquee BigEast or ACC games? Hmmm, that's right, usually 9pm because of TV commercials and to catch the west coast gamblers as well even if its a Tuesday or Wednesday night. What time do you think the bus leaves to go from, say, UNC to NC State. (It's about a 45-60 minute drive if there is rush hour traffic.) Working backwards, that means ready to go on the court for warm ups at 8pm. In the training room dressed and ready to go for taping and therapy no later than 7 pm. Odd are very good that the bus leaves at 5 pm, if not earlier because some coaches think getting there crazy early is their style. So eat right before 5, right? Jeez, that's easy to figure out. What if your physics lab is 2pm - 5pm? Okay, no time to eat dinner, so have a big lunch. Check, big lunch. Plan ahead and snag a banana and some crackers to eat on the bus.
Play game from 9pm to ~11pm. Wait around for media interviews. Bus leaves. Back to campus around 1 am? Maybe bus driver is nice and drops you off near your building door. And now it's time to think about eating your first real meal since lunch.
I think the larger point is that (to the best of my knowledge) it is opposed to NCAA rules for the coach to bring a cooler of home made sandwiches for the players to eat on the bus ride home, hell they probably could not freely receive uneaten food from the concession stands that would otherwise be donated/thrown away. How messed up is that? Where any non-athletic club could buy members a sit down dinner.
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This is what is supposed to be true. Sometimes it is, and sometimes when it isn't, the offending schools get caught.
No, it's always true. While SOME schools (recent example: UNC) blatantly cheat, it's not as if every class is that way. Those students in the UNC still took regular classes other students took. Hard classes, too. That they had a FEW obviously fake classes to take some pressure off during the season doesn't diminish that fact. And yes, there is a lot of pressure put on professors to pass star players. But they're still taking the classes. There are no athletes anywhere ever who get to skip real classes and focus solely on sports. It just doesn't happen. Yes UNC cheated, but they weren't just passing out diplomas, either.
But even if this OCCASIONALLY did happen, it doesn't change the fact that in 99% of the cases, it doesn't. The stereotypes are conclusively false.
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In order to get my diploma, I had to pass a range of classes, in a variety of subjects, as well as the ones in my major concentration. If 25% of my classes had been fluff courses with 10-sentence papers, then my diploma would be "passed out" not earned. There's really no other way to put it. Those students with fluff classes to take the pressure off didn't meet the requirements for a degree in the same way that all the other students on campus did. In effect, their diplomas were giveaways. No other student would have gotten a diploma presenting that level of work.
So all students have to take just as hard of classes to get an diploma? Or all classes are equally hard provided they are open to all students?
That might be news to some of us from the engineering department (among others). Granted we also had a guy taking PE classes to get his GPA high enough to graduate. Not sure he got a job but his diploma did say "Aerospace Engineering".
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There are so many bad generalizations here...I don't even know where to start.
You seem to have found a spot :-) Seriously, though, regardless of the quality of the generalizations, that's all any of us have, simply because there's so much variation.
Again, are you seriously suggesting that players just leave practice? What's the rationalization?
The rationalization is that you need to eat, and that if your coach wasn't an egotistical asshole, s/he should realize that poorly-nourished players aren't going to be performing at their peak.
"My coach is an egotistical asshole, so I have the moral authority to just leave and it'll all be OK?" Yeah, that's enough for me to walk out of practice and lose not only tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships (which would mean I would have to drop out of school immediately), but also my one shot at pursuing my dream of being a D1 and possibly professional athlete.
Is all that worth going to bed hungry? If so, you put up with it. If not, you don't have to allow yourself to be walked on. Unlike the military, you can quit any time.
Guess what? Sometimes practice was scheduled at 9pm-12am because that's the only time we could get the facilities in our offseason. Sometimes 7-10. And you bet your ass the dining halls weren't bending over backwards to accommodate that schedule.
Well, now you're generalizing your own experience, which is vastly different from mine, and what I think is typical of most major sports programs in most schools. Where I went, the student athletes in the big sports had their own special dorm, which had been a fairly nice hotel until the university bought it (and part of which still was a hotel for visiting scholars and the like). As I mentioned earlier, athletes got first priority at all gym facilities.
Athletic training may or may not have been difficult, but it didn't seem to keep a significant number of major sports players from partying, getting arrested, or taking advantage of the (rumored) free passed at the local brothel.
Participating in random sports on your own time, or even the military, doesn't make you remotely qualified to comment on the workload associated with that level of athletics.
Why not? I could observe what those student athletes were doing, and compare it to what I & other non-athletes were doing, as well as anyone can - at least without hooking everyone up to a bunch of instrumentation, and I can't find anything like that in a quick search.
Sorry, but arguments like this fire me up so much. I played D1 baseball while doing two majors - both of which my school was ranked top 10 in the country for. I worked my ass off to graduate in 4 years with an honor roll-level GPA. It's absolutely infuriating to hear people say (or strongly imply) that most college athletes are idiots who are skating by on the good graces of athletic department-friendly professors. The majority aren't necessarily in my situation either, but they are a lot closer to me than the illiterate UNC players who capture news headlines.
Now who's making (bad, IMHO) generalizations from their own experiences? Yes, there are people like you who manage to do both athletics and academics, but they aren't anywhere near the majority, especially in the big-name sports. Which baseball isn't, at the university level.
So all students have to take just as hard of classes to get an diploma? Or all classes are equally hard provided they are open to all students?
That might be news to some of us from the engineering department (among others). Granted we also had a guy taking PE classes to get his GPA high enough to graduate. Not sure he got a job but his diploma did say "Aerospace Engineering".
This. Sure, many of those RPED classes are real classes, which can be taken by non-athletes. But most of the non-athletes took them as recreation, while for the athletes they were the mainstream.
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@serpentstooth: maybe we are coming at this from different angles, where I more highly value my department's name and you value your schools name? Perhaps this lets me look at it as an "over there problem" as the athletes in question were not taking fluff computational heat transfer classes. Lets try keep this mildly OT and not let it diverge into "mine was harder", "no it was not" or relative vs absolute levels of difficulty.
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Is all that worth going to bed hungry? If so, you put up with it. If not, you don't have to allow yourself to be walked on. Unlike the military, you can quit any time.
Well, no you can't. Do you think these people come from middle-class families and have backup plans? Of course not. IF they quit, those lose their livelihood and their college education. In short, they are dooming themselves to a lifetime of poverty. SO no, they can't just quit.
Now who's making (bad, IMHO) generalizations from their own experiences? Yes, there are people like you who manage to do both athletics and academics, but they aren't anywhere near the majority, especially in the big-name sports. Which baseball isn't, at the university level.
You just have no idea what you're talking about.
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The rationalization is that you need to eat, and that if your coach wasn't an egotistical asshole, s/he should realize that poorly-nourished players aren't going to be performing at their peak.
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Is all that worth going to bed hungry? If so, you put up with it. If not, you don't have to allow yourself to be walked on. Unlike the military, you can quit any time.
I think Kyle covered this in addition to my previous answer, but quitting isn't a reasonable option. It's a laughable one. D1 athletes have been playing their sport for 10 years or more by the time they reach college (with a few exceptions). You're suggesting they throw away their scholarship and potential athletic career for a fucking sandwich?
Athletic training may or may not have been difficult, but it didn't seem to keep a significant number of major sports players from partying, getting arrested, or taking advantage of the (rumored) free passed at the local brothel.
So...if we ever throw a party, attend a party, or do something dumb and get arrested, it instantly nullifies the time we spent training and playing. Got it. Makes perfect sense. Don't hide behind this "may or may not" crap to imply D1 training isn't absurdly difficult.
Why not? I could observe what those student athletes were doing, and compare it to what I & other non-athletes were doing, as well as anyone can - at least without hooking everyone up to a bunch of instrumentation, and I can't find anything like that in a quick search.
Ah, so you personally observed the 6AM hill sprints? The extra lifting sessions? Missing class on both Thursday and Friday for 5-6 hour bus trips, followed by two weekend doubleheaders and arriving back on campus at 2AM on Monday, with an 8AM class coming up?
Now who's making (bad, IMHO) generalizations from their own experiences? Yes, there are people like you who manage to do both athletics and academics, but they aren't anywhere near the majority, especially in the big-name sports. Which baseball isn't, at the university level.
Right. So I didn't play in a "big-name" sport, therefore...I'm not qualified to comment on a D1 experience? I hope you can see the irony in you saying this. Plus, we were all friends with/lived with the football players, basketball players, lacrosse, soccer, etc., so I had a front-row seat to the whole show.
And do you realize that, even if what you say is completely true (spoiler alert: it's not) for every single jock in all the big-money sports (which are really just football/basketball), you're talking about a small percentage of students in a small percentage of sports, in a small percentage of D1 powerhouses, which themselves make up a small percentage of all colleges that offer athletics? That sounds like a pretty good basis for a bad generalization.
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But the athletic department has a lot of leverage to pressure adjuncts and grad assistants, too, and that's who teaches the majority of classes at D1 institutions, so there's more than one way to skin that cat.
At many schools - probably most schools - the athletic department has no leverage at all over instructors. None. They can try to apply pressure by having someone contact the instructor, they can check in to request frequent "progress reports," but at the end of the day any decent academic department is going to support the way grades are assigned if the syllabus is followed no matter who earns what grade. I'm not saying that an instructor never has felt pressure, but I think that the pressure is somewhat imaginary.
I think the larger point is that (to the best of my knowledge) it is opposed to NCAA rules for the coach to bring a cooler of home made sandwiches for the players to eat on the bus ride home, hell they probably could not freely receive uneaten food from the concession stands that would otherwise be donated/thrown away. How messed up is that? Where any non-athletic club could buy members a sit down dinner.
I don't know if that is a rule or not, although it certainly could be as my coach never brought us sandwiches. The team could stop for food on road trips, but probably there were some guidelines or regulations for this. We just never stopped on those types of "short" trips :-), but my buddy on the soccer team said they would stop on the way home at somewhere like Wendy's. Definitely receiving free concession food would be a BIG NO NO!
The NCAA outlawed athletic dorms and "training table" cafeterias for athletes only in the early 1990's. So, for at least a couple of decades student athletes have been fully integrated with the student body. There are pros and cons to this.
The biggest hurdle that causes this problem is that, by NCAA regulation, the schools have to make the full ride athletic scholarship equal to what is considered full financial aid at that school for any student. It makes no consideration for the fact that athletes might need more flexibility in something like a food plan due to hugely increased caloric needs and weird schedules causing missed mealtimes. It makes no consideration for the fact that prices of foods sold on campus are generally inflated like it's a giant quickie mart, so $500 in "food points" doesn't go very far.
"Full financial aid" actually offers almost no flexibility to the student about how and where money is spent, especially during Freshman year. Most, if not all, of the money goes directly to the school. The freshman athlete or other student on full financial aid can't say "please give me the $500 in food points as a $500 gift card (or store credit) at the local grocery store," even though that would make good fiscal sense for the student and would result in the money going a lot further. They also can't request that money for missed meal "swipes" due to road trips or weird practice times be converted into food points that can be used after hours.
The only thing that coach can do is try to arrange it so students don't miss the meal times unless absolutely necessary. But guess what? Not all of the coaches think that much about it because they are not missing meals themselves. After all, coaches have real dollar bills to spend at any time of the day or night.
I'll even go so far as to say that not all of the coaches really care about their players beyond what the players can do for them in terms of advancing their own coaching careers. While most of the going to bed hungry is probably benign or uninformed neglect, I wouldn't be surprised if some coaches even sometimes think "so what if the kid goes to bed hungry tonight!? He isn't playing that well and I'm pissed at him. We lost, I'm pissed, and we're not stopping for dinner. He can get breakfast in the morning." It's an employer-employee relationship on steroids. Ever had a bad boss? Think all coaches are saints? Well, it's MUCH harder to switch schools if you are a scholarship athlete than it is to switch jobs. NCAA regulations regulate player movement. Coaches can refuse to release you, which means you can go, of course, but you can't play anywhere else. Bye bye scholarship. The coach can take a better job or be fired at the drop of a hat and, if the new coach is a self-centered sadistic idiot, then the athlete has less say now about playing for a jerk than you do about a company reorg. I think people on a FIRE message board can probably appreciate this.
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Well, no you can't. Do you think these people come from middle-class families and have backup plans? Of course not.
Err... Why not? Not always, of course, but why shouldn't the majority of college athletes be coming from middle or upper income families? And if they're not, isn't that prima facie evidence of discrimination, and yet another fundamental problem with college sports programs?
IF they quit, those lose their livelihood and their college education. In short, they are dooming themselves to a lifetime of poverty. SO no, they can't just quit.
Humm... So the alternatives are either sports or a lifetime of poverty? Now could you run that one by me again? You might look at the percentage of college athletes who go on to pro careers. (It's less than 2% for most sports: http://www.businessinsider.com/odds-college-athletes-become-professionals-2012-2?op=1 ) It's also perfectly possible for someone from a background of poverty to get a college education (I did) or, if they're not college material academically, to make a more than decent living at a trade.
But again, if that's what they really want to do with their lives, fine. I just ask that they suck it up and quit whining about how mistreated they are, when all my observation (personal & otherwise) says just the opposite.
You just have no idea what you're talking about.
And just how would you know?
I think Kyle covered this in addition to my previous answer, but quitting isn't a reasonable option. It's a laughable one. D1 athletes have been playing their sport for 10 years or more by the time they reach college (with a few exceptions). You're suggesting they throw away their scholarship and potential athletic career for a fucking sandwich?
See above about realistic odds of a pro career &c.
So...if we ever throw a party, attend a party, or do something dumb and get arrested, it instantly nullifies the time we spent training and playing. Got it. Makes perfect sense. Don't hide behind this "may or may not" crap to imply D1 training isn't absurdly difficult.
Now tell me, if D1 training is so 'absurdly difficult', how do the athletes manage to find time & energy to party or get arrested? I can tell you for sure that, even if there had been opportunities for such on Parris Island, I sure wouldn't have had the energy. Same with trying to do college, job, and my recreational sports: there just wasn't time for significant partying.
Ah, so you personally observed the 6AM hill sprints? The extra lifting sessions? Missing class on both Thursday and Friday for 5-6 hour bus trips, followed by two weekend doubleheaders and arriving back on campus at 2AM on Monday, with an 8AM class coming up?
Not the 6AM stuff, but yes, I've done the lifting sessions, and the afternoons running or biking up mountains. And spending hours at work, then hurrying to class, and back to work until late at night.
Right. So I didn't play in a "big-name" sport, therefore...I'm not qualified to comment on a D1 experience? I hope you can see the irony in you saying this. Plus, we were all friends with/lived with the football players, basketball players, lacrosse, soccer, etc., so I had a front-row seat to the whole show.
Weren't you the one who originally complained about generalization? This may have been the case wherever it was that you went to school (I'm not asking), but your experiences are not the same as where I went, and - at least according to many media reports - are far from typical of conditions in most college athletic programs.
It's an employer-employee relationship on steroids. Ever had a bad boss? Think all coaches are saints? Well, it's MUCH harder to switch schools if you are a scholarship athlete than it is to switch jobs. NCAA regulations regulate player movement. Coaches can refuse to release you, which means you can go, of course, but you can't play anywhere else. Bye bye scholarship. The coach can take a better job or be fired at the drop of a hat and, if the new coach is a self-centered sadistic idiot, then the athlete has less say now about playing for a jerk than you do about a company reorg. I think people on a FIRE message board can probably appreciate this.
Which, I think, says that there is a very fundamental problem with the whole idea of giving college scholarships for athletics in the first place.
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But the athletic department has a lot of leverage to pressure adjuncts and grad assistants, too, and that's who teaches the majority of classes at D1 institutions, so there's more than one way to skin that cat.
At many schools - probably most schools - the athletic department has no leverage at all over instructors. None. They can try to apply pressure by having someone contact the instructor, they can check in to request frequent "progress reports," but at the end of the day any decent academic department is going to support the way grades are assigned if the syllabus is followed no matter who earns what grade. I'm not saying that an instructor never has felt pressure, but I think that the pressure is somewhat imaginary.
Have you taught at a D1 school? Legitimately a question; I think I remember you saying what you do somewhere, but I don't remember what it was. Anyway, I have, more than once, so my evidence is firsthand, not imaginary.
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http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24096940/grambling-players-walk-out-on-meeting-skip-practice
Players have walked out before. Just because you miss a practice doesn't mean your scholarship automatically vanishes. That statement is ridiculous. Players at many of these schools are being paid under the table. Not all but some. I go to what is currently the worst D1 football school in the country, and players are still being paid. These people work hard, but some people are certainly exaggerating the time aspect.
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Have you taught at a D1 school? Legitimately a question; I think I remember you saying what you do somewhere, but I don't remember what it was. Anyway, I have, more than once, so my evidence is firsthand, not imaginary.
Yes, two different places, both powerhouses in D1 sports. I get emails from athlete "handlers"; sometimes I send an update and sometimes I just ignore them. The first school put in a new system the athletic dept wanted us to use for updating progress of student athletes and I just totally ignored it because it was extra work for me and I already send academic progress warnings in one batch for all students. No one in my department at either school has ever said anything to me about it even thought I have D's and F's every year (not usually for athletes, though, but sometimes.) I teach undergrad courses at all levels from intro to upper level courses and a gen ed course for nonmajors with a fair numbers of athletes in all sports enrolled every year. My department also has the lowest average grades assigned in the entire college (according to our student paper, so take that how you will, but it appeared to be from real data.)
The football players at my current school are a pleasure to have in class. Always on time, pay attention, sit near the front, participate. This is a new feature of particularly proper behavior (better than the normal students) and probably comes from the culture that the coach hired a few years ago provides. Just like regular students, some of them earn an A+ and some of them struggle to pass, but none of them blow off class or miss assignments or tests.
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Have you taught at a D1 school? Legitimately a question; I think I remember you saying what you do somewhere, but I don't remember what it was. Anyway, I have, more than once, so my evidence is firsthand, not imaginary.
Yes, two different places, both powerhouses in D1 sports. I get emails from athlete "handlers"; sometimes I send an update and sometimes I just ignore them. The first school put in a new system the athletic dept wanted us to use for updating progress of student athletes and I just totally ignored it because it was extra work for me and I already send academic progress warnings in one batch for all students. No one in my department at either school has ever said anything to me about it even thought I have D's and F's every year (not usually for athletes, though, but sometimes.) I teach undergrad courses at all levels from intro to upper level courses and a gen ed course for nonmajors with a fair numbers of athletes in all sports enrolled every year. My department also has the lowest average grades assigned in the entire college (according to our student paper, so take that how you will, but it appeared to be from real data.)
The football players at my current school are a pleasure to have in class. Always on time, pay attention, sit near the front, participate. This is a new feature of particularly proper behavior (better than the normal students) and probably comes from the culture that the coach hired a few years ago provides. Just like regular students, some of them earn an A+ and some of them struggle to pass, but none of them blow off class or miss assignments or tests.
...And that's the sign of a good coach. I work with one of those now, so I do know they exist (I'm also no longer at a D1). But trust me, the other extreme happens, too. I never had a D1 football player who was in any way a "pleasure" to have in class, but then they were virtually never in class, so that may have been a wash. The players of some of the other sports were much more like what you describe, and of course they had different coaches. I got extremely inappropriate pressure and intimidating visits to my office by the athletic staff over a starter on the football team who could not reliably spell his own name -- this was a big GenEd section and at the time, I was not in a position of any power. That's where I would expect the pressure to fall now, on the contingent, the grad assistants, and the untenured, likely in that order.
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http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/eye-on-college-football/24096940/grambling-players-walk-out-on-meeting-skip-practice
Players have walked out before. Just because you miss a practice doesn't mean your scholarship automatically vanishes. That statement is ridiculous. Players at many of these schools are being paid under the table. Not all but some. I go to what is currently the worst D1 football school in the country, and players are still being paid. These people work hard, but some people are certainly exaggerating the time aspect.
The Grambling State situation has pretty much nothing in common with what we're discussing on this thread so I'm not sure why you think it invalidates that argument. The entire team leaving practice early is different from one person leaving practice early. And even then, it depends ENTIRELY on the coach. Also, this is Grambling State we're talking about, not Alabama or Texas. Based on my direct experience, nobody on this thread is exaggerating the time aspect.
Furthermore, nobody anywhere ever suggested just missing practice would automatically cause a scholarship to vanish.
But the most hilarious part of this thread is this (and this is in no way directed at you, jmm120): you have MULTIPLE athletes from MULTIPLE institutions, completely unrelated to each other all saying the same thing: they are treated unfairly and it's not uncommon to go to bed starving. And what is the response of some people here? "No they aren't." Based on what? Absolutely nothing. No direct experience. No direct observation. Not even indirect rumor. Based on absolutely nothing, SOLELY because it doesn't fit what they already decided to be true long ago. What a ridiculously stupid and ignorant response. If somebody says they are going to bed hungry and you didn't directly observe them eating a steak 5 minutes before going to sleep, you sound less stupid if you don't contradict their statement.
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The entire team leaving practice early is different from one person leaving practice early. And even then, it depends ENTIRELY on the coach.
Sure, just as one person walking off the job is different from the entire workforce going on strike. But that was, I thought, implied in my suggestion: if the whole team is not getting sufficient food, then they need to do something about it. Same holds if they think they are being treated unfairly in other ways.
Now my observation of college athletes suggests that they're already in a position of considerable privilege (as compared to me in my undergrad days, anyway), so I have little sympathy for them, but that's just my personal opinion. The real problem is the whole thing about colleges running athletic programs that are really thinly-disguised pro sports leagues.
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Wow...
My brother is an SEC football player. I've seen the crap he has to go through.
The amount of incorrect information in here is amazing.
Leaving practice early?
Ha, yeah. Let me just come up with the $50,000 for this degree that I'll give up with this plan in order to spend $3,000 a year on food. Yep. Totally makes sense.
Easy classes?
Yes, I'm sure that is why I was paid nice bucks to tutor players... because they didn't actually need to do anything. Suuure... Every degree has the basic classes that everyone has to pass. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, some PE credit, some History credit (which is often dumbed down for everyone because people are bad at history), and English are the common ones. Usually 101 courses. 101 courses are dumbed down for everyone. They are actually insulting to be in. But everyone has those.
Group strike?
Ha! That's a great way to move up! Someone tells someone else they are going to have a strike. Tell the coach so that you are bumped up to their slot!
Seriously... so many people without any experience in this are posting ridiculous answers on here. If someone is hungry, don't you think they are going to try to think of a way to get food?
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Easy classes?
Yes, I'm sure that is why I was paid nice bucks to tutor players... because they didn't actually need to do anything. Suuure... Every degree has the basic classes that everyone has to pass. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, some PE credit, some History credit (which is often dumbed down for everyone because people are bad at history), and English are the common ones. Usually 101 courses. 101 courses are dumbed down for everyone. They are actually insulting to be in. But everyone has those.
Dumbed down for everyone? Good God, what were they teaching for History and English classes at your school? Those are not supposed to be joke classes. This is my college's mandatory freshman seminar reading list for the spring semester. Having taken the class, there are also 5, 5-page essays due in the course of the term. English and History classes are not supposed to be dumbed down, even at the 101 level. If nothing else, it's an awful lot of rather dense literature to grind though, and a non-negligible amount of original writing to produce. And if you didn't pass this, you didn't get to be a sophomore. This is easier than any other humanities course I took for my degree; easier than the other 100 levels. And I didn't go to a top ranked school.
The New Revised Standard Version Bible with Aprocrypha (Oxford University Press)
Paradise Lost, John Milton, (Oxford University Press), S. Orgel & J. Goldberg, ed.
Republic, Plato (Hackett Publishing Company), C. Reeve & G. Grube, trans.
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, Philip Ivanhoe & Bryan Van Norden (Hackett Publishing Company), 2nd ed.
On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius, (Oxford University Press), Ronald Melville, trans.
Confessions, St. Augustine (Penguin Classics), Pine-Coffin, trans.
Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, Ibn Tufayl, (University of Chicago Press), L. Goodman, trans.
The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne, (Penguin Classics), M.A. Screech, trans.
The Freedom of a Christian, Martin Luther (Fortress Press), Mark Tranvik, trans.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, (Penguin Classics), Peter Baehr, trans.
Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes, (Hackett Publishing Company), Donald Cress, trans.
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Galileo Galilei, (Anchor/Random House), Stillman Drake, trans.
There are two types of English at my old (now my brother's) school. English for Peer Audience and English for General Audience. Peer audience is broken up into science and humanities. The Science side reads a good portion of your list, and fills in the rest of the list with scientific journals. Your writing style is judged on a journal review basis. The Humanity side is practically what you posted. The General Audience reads the majority of your list and fills in the rest with modern literature. The point is to compare the different styles and be able to thoroughly explicate.
5-page essays are a dumbed down version.
All the lab classes I was taking at the time were 15 + pages (one lab per week) freshman year, with the entire piece being graded at the publishing level. And only 2-3 pages of that is describing the lab. The rest is entirely interpretation of the results, proposing explanations, and listing references to show supporting evidence. And before the lab even starts, you are reading other reports to prepare. That takes just as much time as reading a book.
What you described... that was what I was calling the 101 dumbed down versions. That is a freshman level course that if you don't pass, it is your own fault. No SEC athlete I have ever met (or my brother has played with) has had any classes lighter than that. Most are much harder than what you described.
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Sorry, you touched a raw nerve. I took some summer courses at another local public college in the summer to save money, and the classes there were on a par with what I had been doing at a (public, non-accelerated) middle school. I've seen some really BS college-level English and History curricula in my time. I'm glad to hear your UG's minimum standard is on a par with mine.
Now, there are lower versions of those classes, but they do not count towards graduation credit. It is if you weren't prepared for the college version while in highschool. Some athletes do take those, but they do not count towards graduation or towards their credit count. So that means taking 12 - 15 hours + the fluffy class that teaches you how to handle the real classes later.
They were helpful for those that came from the middle-of-no-where schools with horrible funding and worse teachers (I'm looking at you, Tennessee). But as I said, we couldn't count them towards our official schooling.
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Easy classes?
Yes, I'm sure that is why I was paid nice bucks to tutor players... because they didn't actually need to do anything. Suuure... Every degree has the basic classes that everyone has to pass. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, some PE credit, some History credit (which is often dumbed down for everyone because people are bad at history), and English are the common ones. Usually 101 courses. 101 courses are dumbed down for everyone. They are actually insulting to be in. But everyone has those.
Dumbed down for everyone? Good God, what were they teaching for History and English classes at your school? Those are not supposed to be joke classes. This is my college's mandatory freshman seminar reading list for the spring semester. Having taken the class, there are also 5, 5-page essays due in the course of the term. English and History classes are not supposed to be dumbed down, even at the 101 level. If nothing else, it's an awful lot of rather dense literature to grind though, and a non-negligible amount of original writing to produce. And if you didn't pass this, you didn't get to be a sophomore. This is easier than any other humanities course I took for my degree; easier than the other 100 levels. And I didn't go to a top ranked school.
The New Revised Standard Version Bible with Aprocrypha (Oxford University Press)
Paradise Lost, John Milton, (Oxford University Press), S. Orgel & J. Goldberg, ed.
Republic, Plato (Hackett Publishing Company), C. Reeve & G. Grube, trans.
Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, Philip Ivanhoe & Bryan Van Norden (Hackett Publishing Company), 2nd ed.
On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius, (Oxford University Press), Ronald Melville, trans.
Confessions, St. Augustine (Penguin Classics), Pine-Coffin, trans.
Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, Ibn Tufayl, (University of Chicago Press), L. Goodman, trans.
The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne, (Penguin Classics), M.A. Screech, trans.
The Freedom of a Christian, Martin Luther (Fortress Press), Mark Tranvik, trans.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, (Penguin Classics), Peter Baehr, trans.
Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes, (Hackett Publishing Company), Donald Cress, trans.
Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, Galileo Galilei, (Anchor/Random House), Stillman Drake, trans.
If you had a decent high school education these were basic and the amount of writing was comparable or less than your senior year, well at least if you had a decent private school education.
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Back to the original article, maybe some of the salaries of the coaches needs to be switched to the players in some way
http://blog.syracuse.com/sports/2013/05/jim_boeheim_earns_highest_sala.html
We lived near Syracuse university, and the basketball team often makes it to the final four
The games have almost 30,000 attend. They make money on concessions, merchandise, parking, and at the gate. It seems a shame that the players don't get some special treatment. Really. They can't figure out a way to ensure these guys and gals can eat enough high quality food? Really bad system.
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Leaving practice early?
Ha, yeah. Let me just come up with the $50,000 for this degree that I'll give up with this plan in order to spend $3,000 a year on food. Yep. Totally makes sense.
So what percentage of athletes are a) going to get a degree; b) in anything that'll let them earn a living? And for those who do have the smarts to do the above, why do they need athletics? After all, lots of us make it through college without athletic scholarships. Some of us even went to bed hungry on occasion: not because we had to stay late at practice, but because we didn't have money.
Or in other words, you're getting a $50K scholarship, and all the perks that go with it, so why are you whining?
Yes, I'm sure that is why I was paid nice bucks to tutor players... because they didn't actually need to do anything.
Seems like you're arguing against yourself there. You were getting paid specifically to tutor players, while the rest of the students had to make it through on their own. That's not even asking how often 'tutoring' turns into 'writing the damn paper for them'.
Suuure... Every degree has the basic classes that everyone has to pass. Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Mathematics, some PE credit, some History credit (which is often dumbed down for everyone because people are bad at history), and English are the common ones. Usually 101 courses. 101 courses are dumbed down for everyone. They are actually insulting to be in. But everyone has those.
Not so. Granted that there are dumbed-down 101 (or lower numbers) courses, most of us start out at a higher level (yes, even if we came from one of those backwoods high schools). If they're required, you can often take them by exam.
Dumbed down for everyone? Good God, what were they teaching for History and English classes at your school? Those are not supposed to be joke classes. This is my college's mandatory freshman seminar reading list for the spring semester.
I know I'm digressing, but how does your reading list fit in an English or History class? Especially English, when all but one are translations from other languages? Seems more suited to a split between survey course in philosophy and an introduction to Christian theology.
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Hello all, long time lurker joined specifically to reply to this thread.
I'm English and not a teacher but I read a lot about the American college system online, often through blogs like Cal Newport and Penelope Trunk. I have never understood college athletics and this thread makes it seem even crazier than I thought. Maybe you chaps can clarify some things for me?
1. Some of you appear to be saying that there are special classes for college athletes that are easier than "normal" classes. This can't be true, surely! I know some classes must be easier than others, but the easy classes must be open to everyone who wants them, right?
2. Are there no independent auditors who can catch athletes being passed in classes even though they are not of the required academic standard? Most of my university papers were assessed by a three hour anonymous (candidate-number identification only) examination at the end of the year and the few that were assessed by extended essay were also extensively anonymised. A tutor wouldn't know who to fake-pass even if they wanted to! Do athletics coaches really think that tutors will pass people who are obviously not of the required standard?
3. Why is college regarded as the appropriate environment for advanced athletic training? I graduated from an Oxbridge college a few years ago, and our elite athletes are called "Blues". The best Blues in rowing compete in the Boat Race every year (held last weekend). They are all accused of not being "real" students (see also: University Challenge!). While I would love to see it being limited to domestic undergraduates, one cannot deny that they are all pursuing real academic courses and rowing is really just an elaborate hobby. Anyone wanting to pursue Olympic-level sport in Britain wouldn't think that going to university was the best place to fulfil their ambitions!
4. Who wins here? The players seem to get dud degrees they don't want which limits both their academic career (too much sport) and their sporting career (too much studying). The university has to carry the load of a group of people on full scholarships who are not pulling their weight academically. The coach has to sacrifice training time to classes and obviously has a less-than-optimal daily schedule including eating and games. What is the point of this system?
5. If an athlete did quit the team and lost their athletic scholarship, wouldn't they then be eligible for student loans like a normal person so they could still carry on their degree?
6. Do all the other students hate the athletes, or does anyone else actually care about their university's sporting prowess?
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So what percentage of athletes are a) going to get a degree; b) in anything that'll let them earn a living? And for those who do have the smarts to do the above, why do they need athletics? After all, lots of us make it through college without athletic scholarships. Some of us even went to bed hungry on occasion: not because we had to stay late at practice, but because we didn't have money.
Or in other words, you're getting a $50K scholarship, and all the perks that go with it, so why are you whining?
Because you don't have time for a job at the same time as doing sports, so you can't make money to eat like other students can.
The scholarship is great, but that is not the overall goal. The overall goal of anyone that enters college is to leave in a better position than they are in. Not to make the most scholarship money. That just helps to get you there.
That better position can be going into professional sports. It can be getting your degree in a sports related field. It can be using the sports scholarship to get a degree in something else along the way. Example: Peyton Manning. Actually a very smart guy that loves football. Why did he need sports? Because he decided to go into football as a professional job. So, a sports background is a big duuh. I know many sports guys that go into journalism because they know they won't make it professionally as a player, but they want to at least be close to the sport. A background in sports is very useful in that. There are many reasons to get a degree and also do sports. It is their version of an internship.
This is like a Mustachian having a $150k salary, and he tells a friend how he is glad that he only has a couple of years until retirement. The friend goes "sure, you can't stay home or do your own projects right now, but you got a $150k job. So why are you complaining?"
Except, you know, food is more important than getting to sleep in.
Seems like you're arguing against yourself there. You were getting paid specifically to tutor players, while the rest of the students had to make it through on their own. That's not even asking how often 'tutoring' turns into 'writing the damn paper for them'.
You seem to have bad feelings towards athletes. I tutored many students, athletes and non-athletes. I certainly never did any work for them. In fact, we weren't allowed to answer any questions. Including "does this answer look right?" after they have done all the work. We could refer them to specific book page numbers if they were getting close (I tutored beginner level physics) for the equations needed, but I couldn't tell them which one it was on that page. Due to being a "Professor Approved Tutor" I could charge more and get more students. That means following very strict guidelines.
No one I knew would ever do work for a student. That is grounds for getting kicked out yourself.
And, sadly, the students that could come to me had families that could support them in order to pay my rates. I needed the money to eat, but that meant that some students had to decide between picking tutoring or food.
Not so. Granted that there are dumbed-down 101 (or lower numbers) courses, most of us start out at a higher level (yes, even if we came from one of those backwoods high schools). If they're required, you can often take them by exam.
You have to have credit for the 101 classes, whether by testing out or by taking the class. A majority of students take the classes. Not all of the classes, but almost all students took at least one 101 class. Engineers are typically not the best at English. Humanities students are typically not the best at Chemistry.
Everyone has to prove they can pass it. Which can be insulting. But the ridiculousness is the same whether taking the class or the exam.
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1. Some of you appear to be saying that there are special classes for college athletes that are easier than "normal" classes. This can't be true, surely! I know some classes must be easier than others, but the easy classes must be open to everyone who wants them, right?
Yes, these classes are open to everyone. There are classes that are inherintly easier than others. You can't take a course load of only these classes and get a degree, of course. And anyone can take those classes. What people forget is that in sports, you are learning how to run a sports program. It is like its own class, but no credits.
2. Are there no independent auditors who can catch athletes being passed in classes even though they are not of the required academic standard? Most of my university papers were assessed by a three hour anonymous (candidate-number identification only) examination at the end of the year and the few that were assessed by extended essay were also extensively anonymised. A tutor wouldn't know who to fake-pass even if they wanted to! Do athletics coaches really think that tutors will pass people who are obviously not of the required standard?
Yes there are. And that is why UNC was caught cheating. The sporting organizations are actually very good at catching these things, because no school wants any of the others to get an unfair advantage. So schools are quick to call each other out in an unofficial setting, thus leading to investigations if one wasn't already in place.
Coaches can try to put pressures on teachers the same way a rich donor can try to put pressure on professors. They technically have no power. It is up to the professor to report them if it happens (like any other crime - if you are the only witness you should make sure it is reported). In the US, typically TAs grade your papers. All students can compare their results, so if one is being unfairly graded it can be easily pointed out.
Honestly, the thing I typically see is that professors are harder on student athletes. A lot of extra classwork can be assigned for missing classes for travel.
And here, tutors can only help you learn the material. Tutors do not have official positions where they can touch grades. That is typically a TA (Teacher's Assistant).
3. Why is college regarded as the appropriate environment for advanced athletic training? I graduated from an Oxbridge college a few years ago, and our elite athletes are called "Blues". The best Blues in rowing compete in the Boat Race every year (held last weekend). They are all accused of not being "real" students (see also: University Challenge!). While I would love to see it being limited to domestic undergraduates, one cannot deny that they are all pursuing real academic courses and rowing is really just an elaborate hobby. Anyone wanting to pursue Olympic-level sport in Britain wouldn't think that going to university was the best place to fulfil their ambitions!
College athletics was around way before professional athletics were considered "professional." The more upscale sports were like a gentleman's hobby to show yourself publically while you could study. Other sports were simply a way to be active and get some recognition before school was over. They didn't have internet. No one knew your name unless you did something. Therefore, it was a bit harder to get noticed unless you did something special.
Publishing research papers, being a star sports player, being a famous musician ... all of these are ways to get noticed during school.
Professional football became a thing after college football was already big. So, college football is the default.
4. Who wins here? The players seem to get dud degrees they don't want which limits both their academic career (too much sport) and their sporting career (too much studying). The university has to carry the load of a group of people on full scholarships who are not pulling their weight academically. The coach has to sacrifice training time to classes and obviously has a less-than-optimal daily schedule including eating and games. What is the point of this system?
The winners are the players that are on the border line between too poor to pay for school and too stabilized to "need" financial assistance according to the government. Most student athletes do not go pro in sports.
Coach Pat Summit is a good example of how it should work. She used to be coach of the Tennessee Lady Volunteers Basketball team. she held her students to very high standards. Her standards were much higher than the school's. Even if the rules said a player could play, a C meant on the bench. She coached women that later became Olympic stars and leaders in the community. She took girls and made them strong women. Which is one of the many reasons why she has been so well honored throughout her coaching history.
That is what the system should be doing.
5. If an athlete did quit the team and lost their athletic scholarship, wouldn't they then be eligible for student loans like a normal person so they could still carry on their degree?
If they qualify. You have a much smaller time window to find your funding (a month or two instead of your whole senior year). And now they have the added pressure of every other student knowing you quit the team. TV shows mocking you, making you the joke of the day. Societal pressure sucks.
6. Do all the other students hate the athletes, or does anyone else actually care about their university's sporting prowess?
Most athletes I have met are normal people. They just happen to play sports.
It gives you a great story to pick up girls. But that is about it. You have to watch yourself at all times, because you are representing the team. If someone gets a picture of you doing something stupid, the world is going to know you did something stupid. College kids get in trouble all the time. Only makes sense that some of them are going to be sports players. No excuses for them, they desrerve to be punished for any wrong doings. But to say all sports players are school-lazy, cheaters, and muscle-heads is like saying all artists spend their whole day in a coffee bar, smoking weed, and posting nonsense on facebook. Generalizations are silly.
You just see people online that didn't like that one football bully in highschool and take their anger out on all other athletes.
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I'm English and not a teacher but I read a lot about the American college system online, often through blogs like Cal Newport and Penelope Trunk. I have never understood college athletics and this thread makes it seem even crazier than I thought.
Then you're beginnning to understand :-)
1. Some of you appear to be saying that there are special classes for college athletes that are easier than "normal" classes. This can't be true, surely! I know some classes must be easier than others, but the easy classes must be open to everyone who wants them, right?
Yes, there are easier classes, and indeed, whole programs. Technically, the classes are open to everyone, but there are ways around that. For instance, having one section with say 20 openings, then automatically signing up the football team the second registration is open. Then anyone else who wanted that section would get a 'Sorry, section full' message.
2. Are there no independent auditors who can catch athletes being passed in classes even though they are not of the required academic standard?
Supposedly, but if every college did that all the time, their teams would be decimated. It seems that the conduct has to be egregiously bad, and has to be publicized by an outside whistleblower. Then the offending school is given a wrist slap, and things go back to normal.
Do athletics coaches really think that tutors will pass people who are obviously not of the required standard?
In American usage, a tutor is someone who helps a student study - sort of an individualized teacher. They don't have control over grading, but could effectively do most or all of the coursework for a student.
3. Why is college regarded as the appropriate environment for advanced athletic training?
Beats the heck out of me :-) But to be fair, there are two entirely different types of sports in most universities. The big-time sports, typically football & basketball but sometimes others, are in many colleges essentially professional teams. Then there are any number of minor sports that people do for fun. They're encouraged on the mens sano principle, but don't attract anything like the same amount of attention or money. As for instance, I was on the school fencing team as an undergrad, but the only support we got was use of a van to go to meets.
4. Who wins here?
Sports fans, who get to watch college games on TV, and the athletic boosters who somehow tie their ego into a team's success.
6. Do all the other students hate the athletes, or does anyone else actually care about their university's sporting prowess?
Hate is entirely the wrong word. Certainly there's a good bit of resentment over the special treatment athletes get, and not a little contempt. But most of the resentment isn't directed at the athletes themselves, but at university administrations who take millions away from academics to spend on sports programs (few of which actually make money for the school).
And of course it's not all the other students. Some buy into the support the school team thing, others pretty much ignore it all.
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Because you don't have time for a job at the same time as doing sports, so you can't make money to eat like other students can.
Yes, I understand that. The point is that you can give up sports. As I've said several times, the great majority of college students, even those from disadvantaged backgrounds, manage without athletic scholarships.
That better position can be going into professional sports.
But again, the odds of that are under 2%. Would it have been sensible for me to get a CS degree if I had less than 50:1 odds of finding a job? So the college sports system is taking advantage of a lot of scholarship athletes.
You seem to have bad feelings towards athletes.
Not towards the athletes themselves (unless they, as individuals, deserve it), but at a system that takes advantage of them while draining funding from academics, just to feed the egos of the sports booster types.
I tutored many students, athletes and non-athletes. I certainly never did any work for them.
That's you, not the system as a whole.
Engineers are typically not the best at English.
I have to disagree with that. My experience is that people in STEM courses (at least the small fraction of them who are native English speakers) average out pretty close to the top in English & most humanities too.
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Yes, I understand that. The point is that you can give up sports. As I've said several times, the great majority of college students, even those from disadvantaged backgrounds, manage without athletic scholarships.
People can live without artwork. Music isn't necessary for life, let's cut that too. I mean, most artistically talented people don't make very much money. So they should just quit, right?
Do you have a hobby? Something you have done since you were little? What if you were told that you would not have to work to go to school. All you had to do was do that hobby you've had your whole life.
As I stated elsewhere, sports is also something you can put on a resume. It is nearly an internship in that it teaches you how to run a team. You are working hard! Most people are impressed by that time management.
I knew a good amount of people in the marching band, as well. They weren't getting scholarships. But do you know how great it sounds in interviews? They have hours and hours of practice - like any other athlete. They often missed dinner, too. But it sends your resume to the top of the pile. Just like doing an internship does.
And I knew many people with disadvantaged backgrounds. "Manage" isn't the word I would use. Terrified, depressed, and overworked would be the words I would use. Talked one down from suicide because she didn't want to take out another set of student loans and she was at her breaking point. She realized that her parents wouldn't be liable since she didn't have a cosigner, and saw an escape. I was lucky enough to be from a middle-class family, so I didn't see this side of it until living with people in hard situations.
But again, the odds of that are under 2%. Would it have been sensible for me to get a CS degree if I had less than 50:1 odds of finding a job? So the college sports system is taking advantage of a lot of scholarship athletes.
Most athletes know they aren't going into professional sports! I only listed it because it was an option! I notice you ignored the other options I put up.
Not towards the athletes themselves (unless they, as individuals, deserve it), but at a system that takes advantage of them while draining funding from academics, just to feed the egos of the sports booster types.
You do know that only a few schools fund the athletic programs? Most are self sufficient. In fact, my school is not allowed to pay anything towards the athletic department. They make their own money. I was under the impression that this is the common practice.
I have to disagree with that. My experience is that people in STEM courses (at least the small fraction of them who are native English speakers) average out pretty close to the top in English & most humanities too.
My fellow engineering students would like a word with you, but they are still trying to figure out how explicating a book where the author himself insisted there was no meaning makes any sense. How many engineers do you know? As a mechanical engineer, I will say that I refused to let anyone else format team project papers. No one knew how to format an AMA style report. Give them free reign? Sure, they write very well. But explication was a very rare skill among my classmates.
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As I stated elsewhere, sports is also something you can put on a resume. It is nearly an internship in that it teaches you how to run a team. You are working hard! Most people are impressed by that time management.
I knew a good amount of people in the marching band, as well. They weren't getting scholarships. But do you know how great it sounds in interviews? They have hours and hours of practice - like any other athlete. They often missed dinner, too. But it sends your resume to the top of the pile. Just like doing an internship does.
Humm... Things must be very different in whatever your field is than in STEM. I don't think I've ever seen sports mentioned on a resume (not that I see all that many, to be honest), and my impression is that mentioning a 'big name' sport like football or basketball would be a definitite negative. Rock climbing, martial arts, or similar, maybe.
Most athletes know they aren't going into professional sports! I only listed it because it was an option! I notice you ignored the other options I put up.
That's not my impression - again, in the 'big name' sports.
If I ignore some things, it's because I don't have anything useful to say, and don't want to make already-too-long posts even longer.
You do know that only a few schools fund the athletic programs? Most are self sufficient. In fact, my school is not allowed to pay anything towards the athletic department. They make their own money. I was under the impression that this is the common practice.
I do believe your impression is wrong, and that your school must be a decided outlier.
My fellow engineering students would like a word with you, but they are still trying to figure out how explicating a book where the author himself insisted there was no meaning makes any sense.
Ever stop to consider that they just might have a point? Which is why I think STEM students average better at English, because they immediately realize that a lot of what goes into criticism is, quite bluntly, verbiage-coated BS.
How many engineers do you know?
Engineers & scientists, hundreds. Those whose native tongue is English, dozens.
As a mechanical engineer, I will say that I refused to let anyone else format team project papers. No one knew how to format an AMA style report.
AMA = American Medical Association, or ? Regardless, these days you just use the appropriate LaTeX template for whatever journal you're submitting to. Most are, I think, pretty close to AMS style: http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/tex/amslatex But why is this something a student should know? To the extent it isn't handled automatically by software, you look it up.
Give them free reign? Sure, they write very well. But explication was a very rare skill among my classmates.
Pardon me. I don't often complain about word use in forums, but in this case (just for snark*, and to make a point about the English capabilities of stem types :-)) I'll note that the correct expression is "give them free rein". It derives from horsemanship, and means allowing the horse to do what it wants. See e.g. http://grammarist.com/spelling/free-rein-free-reign/
As for explication, see above.
*The double meaning is intended :-)
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Kentucky Wildcat fan here. Curse you Shabazz!!
A lot of people are saying that it's the responsibility universities to make sure their athletes get fed.
Well, they can't. http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2012-12-25/hungry-athletes-ncaa-rules-limit-players-food-intake (http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2012-12-25/hungry-athletes-ncaa-rules-limit-players-food-intake)
I also see a lot of generalizations about student athletes being made in this thread. I'm sure it's easier to lump them all together, but be aware that you're doing it. Not every student athlete is Dorial Green-Beckham, who was just kicked off of Missouri's football team over an alleged assault. There are also guys like Adreian Payne of Michigan State and Nerlens Noel of the University of Kentucky, who spent a lot of their free time at local children's hospitals.
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^This story does not surprise me. Thank you for posting the link.
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Humm... Things must be very different in whatever your field is than in STEM. I don't think I've ever seen sports mentioned on a resume (not that I see all that many, to be honest), and my impression is that mentioning a 'big name' sport like football or basketball would be a definitite negative. Rock climbing, martial arts, or similar, maybe.
I work as a research scientist, and one of my colleagues is a former D1 athlete (track). He mentions it on his CV. In contrast, given that climbing is overwhelmingly a hobby sport, I see that as less appropriate to mention.
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My buddy across the hall has his undergraduate academic all american award certificate on his office wall (actually I think it's stuck on his cork board with a tack) which I think is funny because his diplomas from getting two degrees at MIT are not on his wall. I assure you he lists the college sports experience somewhere/somehow on his CV, as do I. Mine shows up in the Honors and Awards section.
Calipari should be fairly powerful, and he can't get together with his buddies and change this? What the hell is wrong with the NCAA that they can't allow snacks?!
The president of the NCAA doesn't want to bend on this issue of "compensation" for athletes. Of course, he made $1.7 million in 2011, so not being able to eat when he is hungry likely doesn't resonate much with him. Just for reference, that's more than 4 times more pay per year than the President of the United States makes while he is in office.
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I work as a research scientist, and one of my colleagues is a former D1 athlete (track). He mentions it on his CV. In contrast, given that climbing is overwhelmingly a hobby sport, I see that as less appropriate to mention.
OK, though see lots of previous comments about the dangers of generalizing. However, the question really isn't about whether some people put athletic credentials &c on resumes, but whether doing so is generally advantageous. Maybe if you know ahead of time that the hiring manager is a sports fan, but just blind? I'd suspect you'd run into more than a bit of 'dumb jock' stereotyping.
Personally, I don't think any sports (or military experience, political activity, religious groups, &c) are really appropriate on a resume (unless they're directly related to the job, of course), but if they were mentioned, I'd rate the 'hobby' stuff higher than team/athletic scholarship things.
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Kentucky Wildcat fan here. Curse you Shabazz!!
A lot of people are saying that it's the responsibility universities to make sure their athletes get fed.
Well, they can't. http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2012-12-25/hungry-athletes-ncaa-rules-limit-players-food-intake (http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-basketball/story/2012-12-25/hungry-athletes-ncaa-rules-limit-players-food-intake)
I also see a lot of generalizations about student athletes being made in this thread. I'm sure it's easier to lump them all together, but be aware that you're doing it. Not every student athlete is Dorial Green-Beckham, who was just kicked off of Missouri's football team over an alleged assault. There are also guys like Adreian Payne of Michigan State and Nerlens Noel of the University of Kentucky, who spent a lot of their free time at local children's hospitals.
Thanks for posting this. I think what was suggested in that article is very reasonable. The kids should be able to eat more than three meals, and should be able to bring some of it back to their rooms for snacks.
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Because you don't have time for a job at the same time as doing sports, so you can't make money to eat like other students can.
Yes, I understand that. The point is that you can give up sports. As I've said several times, the great majority of college students, even those from disadvantaged backgrounds, manage without athletic scholarships.
This makes about as much sense as a hard-working student with an academics-based full scholarship giving it up in order to let their GPA slide and use some of that studying time to work a part-time job.
I'm not American, but it seems clear to me that being on the team and having the scholarship provides the greatest overall benefit to the student. I really don't understand why it's so unacceptable to acknowledge downsides and problems in the system. I've also noticed a lot of comments treating hunger like it'll be a one-time thing - the student can just eat tomorrow! No big deal! But college sports are not just one big event and then it's done... students could easily be facing months on end of living like that. From where I stand, it seems like American college sports have gotten too big, and players are being treated like livestock.
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Has anyone been following that Chicago university's athletic unionization efforts? Details a re fizzy obviously, hopefully someone knows what I am talking about.
I am hugely in favor of decoupling college sports from academics. There should be developmental leagues for pro sports, and colleges should have intermurals and that's about it.
But in the meantime, that is no excuse not to fix some of the problems with the current system. I have a really hard time believing the UNC case is an isolated incident. I have no doubt that it is very widespread. The graduation rates of revenue-producing teams are appalling. There is absolutely no excuse for the NCAA not to tackle that. Same with the food issues- the rules should allow for players to be fed following away games mad do other travel scenarios, but it should also be allowing for their huge caloric needs to be met during regular practice days. Whether that means extended meal hours, access to extra snacks, etc, I can't believe that is allowed to happen.
I also am wondering about the rule about no separate atheletic dining halls. I went out a div 1 school in the early 00's, and my roommate was a trainer so she had the inside scoop. There was most definitely a special athletics dining hall and they had wayyyyyyy better food. Maybe they skated around the rule because all team-related people were allowed to eat there? The trainers and other student volunteers could eat with the athletes. They did have extended hours at that dining hall, too. And it was in the dorm that all the athletes lived in, near the athletic fields, so it was convenient for them.
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Humm... Things must be very different in whatever your field is than in STEM. I don't think I've ever seen sports mentioned on a resume (not that I see all that many, to be honest), and my impression is that mentioning a 'big name' sport like football or basketball would be a definitite negative. Rock climbing, martial arts, or similar, maybe.
...as I stated, I am an ME (Mechanical Engineer). I also helped students through the professional practice for engineers section, in which our training (given by hiring managers from many big name companies in the SE US) specifically stated that anything that shows strong time commitment is great to show on a resume. Specifically sports, musical talent with exhibition, and other time heavy activities.
So the hiring managers that were looking for freshly graduated engineers wanted to see if you did college sports on the resume.
That's not my impression - again, in the 'big name' sports.
Then I guess you never really looked at the numbers. Only one sport (baseball) had more than 2% of NCAA players go pro. For the others, it is a way to get scholarships or to beef up the resume.
Ever stop to consider that they just might have a point? Which is why I think STEM students average better at English, because they immediately realize that a lot of what goes into criticism is, quite bluntly, verbiage-coated BS.
Which is why most of my engineering peers get graded poorly in English classes. Professors don't like to hear that it is bullshit half the time. And most of the good explication they give is then ignored. There is such thing as good explication, but hardly anyone will listen to you if you call bs on someone else's bad explication.
AMA = American Medical Association, or ?
I was typing from my phone, that was supposed to be MLA. Which was what our English classes required. Journal templates were only used for the labs or research classes.
Pardon me. I don't often complain about word use in forums...
Again, typing from phone. Typos do exist in the world. You seem very quick to just poke fun at individual words rather than actually use numbers about these points. Athletes are people. Not just big pieces of muscle with names. They are doing what they are doing to put themselves in a better position for the future. Some students do this by using grocery money to buy text books, so they can't eat. Some students do that by attending practice to pay for textbooks, so they can't eat.
It is advantageous to put down sports on a resume because it shows your ability to (1) work with a team for a goal, (2) manage your time, (3) show responsibility and can do your share, (4) look beyond the immediate goals of one project (one game) and look at the big picture (how it matters in the season), (5) provide a list of references that have worked closely with you, (6) keep you cool under pressure.
These are all things needed to secure a job or keep one.
Listing college sports on a resume and then discussing them in the interview works extremely well in your favor unless the person on the other end has a biased view of sports players. At that point, you are just dealing with someone that shouldn't be working in human resources. In a majority of cases, you deal with at least a decent human being on the other end, so they can see how much work you are willing to put out there for your goals.
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Has anyone been following that Chicago university's athletic unionization efforts? Details a re fizzy obviously, hopefully someone knows what I am talking about.
I am hugely in favor of decoupling college sports from academics. There should be developmental leagues for pro sports, and colleges should have intermurals and that's about it.
But in the meantime, that is no excuse not to fix some of the problems with the current system. I have a really hard time believing the UNC case is an isolated incident. I have no doubt that it is very widespread. The graduation rates of revenue-producing teams are appalling. There is absolutely no excuse for the NCAA not to tackle that. Same with the food issues- the rules should allow for players to be fed following away games mad do other travel scenarios, but it should also be allowing for their huge caloric needs to be met during regular practice days. Whether that means extended meal hours, access to extra snacks, etc, I can't believe that is allowed to happen.
I also am wondering about the rule about no separate atheletic dining halls. I went out a div 1 school in the early 00's, and my roommate was a trainer so she had the inside scoop. There was most definitely a special athletics dining hall and they had wayyyyyyy better food. Maybe they skated around the rule because all team-related people were allowed to eat there? The trainers and other student volunteers could eat with the athletes. They did have extended hours at that dining hall, too. And it was in the dorm that all the athletes lived in, near the athletic fields, so it was convenient for them.
This is a great response. I agree that while the coupling is ridiculous, the problems in the current system could stand to be fixed. Honestly, I don't see why schools big enough for NCAA sports don't have at least one 24-hr dining hall. Or why coaches can't make an effort to feed their players. Athletic performance, after all, isn't just about training, but also about the overall health and state of one's body. Which includes whether it's been fed enough lately.
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Has anyone been following that Chicago university's athletic unionization efforts? Details a re fizzy obviously, hopefully someone knows what I am talking about.
I am hugely in favor of decoupling college sports from academics. There should be developmental leagues for pro sports, and colleges should have intermurals and that's about it.
But in the meantime, that is no excuse not to fix some of the problems with the current system. I have a really hard time believing the UNC case is an isolated incident. I have no doubt that it is very widespread. The graduation rates of revenue-producing teams are appalling. There is absolutely no excuse for the NCAA not to tackle that. Same with the food issues- the rules should allow for players to be fed following away games mad do other travel scenarios, but it should also be allowing for their huge caloric needs to be met during regular practice days. Whether that means extended meal hours, access to extra snacks, etc, I can't believe that is allowed to happen.
I also am wondering about the rule about no separate atheletic dining halls. I went out a div 1 school in the early 00's, and my roommate was a trainer so she had the inside scoop. There was most definitely a special athletics dining hall and they had wayyyyyyy better food. Maybe they skated around the rule because all team-related people were allowed to eat there? The trainers and other student volunteers could eat with the athletes. They did have extended hours at that dining hall, too. And it was in the dorm that all the athletes lived in, near the athletic fields, so it was convenient for them.
This is a great response. I agree that while the coupling is ridiculous, the problems in the current system could stand to be fixed. Honestly, I don't see why schools big enough for NCAA sports don't have at least one 24-hr dining hall. Or why coaches can't make an effort to feed their players. Athletic performance, after all, isn't just about training, but also about the overall health and state of one's body. Which includes whether it's been fed enough lately.
The last article said that the NCAA rules said only 3 meals when not on the road and no removing the food from the hall.
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Has anyone been following that Chicago university's athletic unionization efforts? Details a re fizzy obviously, hopefully someone knows what I am talking about.
I am hugely in favor of decoupling college sports from academics. There should be developmental leagues for pro sports, and colleges should have intermurals and that's about it.
But in the meantime, that is no excuse not to fix some of the problems with the current system. I have a really hard time believing the UNC case is an isolated incident. I have no doubt that it is very widespread. The graduation rates of revenue-producing teams are appalling. There is absolutely no excuse for the NCAA not to tackle that. Same with the food issues- the rules should allow for players to be fed following away games mad do other travel scenarios, but it should also be allowing for their huge caloric needs to be met during regular practice days. Whether that means extended meal hours, access to extra snacks, etc, I can't believe that is allowed to happen.
I also am wondering about the rule about no separate atheletic dining halls. I went out a div 1 school in the early 00's, and my roommate was a trainer so she had the inside scoop. There was most definitely a special athletics dining hall and they had wayyyyyyy better food. Maybe they skated around the rule because all team-related people were allowed to eat there? The trainers and other student volunteers could eat with the athletes. They did have extended hours at that dining hall, too. And it was in the dorm that all the athletes lived in, near the athletic fields, so it was convenient for them.
This is a great response. I agree that while the coupling is ridiculous, the problems in the current system could stand to be fixed. Honestly, I don't see why schools big enough for NCAA sports don't have at least one 24-hr dining hall. Or why coaches can't make an effort to feed their players. Athletic performance, after all, isn't just about training, but also about the overall health and state of one's body. Which includes whether it's been fed enough lately.
The last article said that the NCAA rules said only 3 meals when not on the road and no removing the food from the hall.
That's idiotic. That is all.
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more than 2% of NCAA players go pro. For the others, it is a way to get scholarships or to beef up the resume.
Missed the point, I think, which is that the current system is deluding (many of) the student athletes into thinking that they are going to be one of the fewer than 2% who go pro.
Which is why most of my engineering peers get graded poorly in English classes. Professors don't like to hear that it is bullshit half the time. And most of the good explication they give is then ignored. There is such thing as good explication, but hardly anyone will listen to you if you call bs on someone else's bad explication.
Material for a different thread, but the point of a (good) work of fiction is simply to tell a story, not to encode all sorts of hidden meanings that can only be 'explicated' by English Lit profs and their acolytes. But I agree that if you find yourself in such a class, it's far more prudent to learn to mouth the hymns than to proclaim your heresy :-)
Typos do exist in the world.
Of course, and I likely make my fair share. But it was such a lovely opportunity for a bit of humorous snark :-)
Athletes are people.
And this is supposed to be a point in their favor? But so are - just for one instance - teens who spray-paint their tags on every available surface. Should I support that because the ones doing it are human?
Listing college sports on a resume and then discussing them in the interview works extremely well in your favor unless the person on the other end has a biased view of sports players.
Well, I suppose that depends on your opinion of just what constitutes bias. I'd say being part of the sports clique is the bias.
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I see a lot of mentions about how hard college sports are because you have to travel on weekends, & you have weird practice schedules, & it's really grueling, etc.
I was a student athlete & in addition to all those negative aspects, there were a ton of positives: free gear, free tutors specifically for athletes, a computer lab strictly for athletes, people to take notes when I missed lecture for out-of-town events, leniency from professors because I had an out-of-town event, nutrition counseling for athletes (I got free supplements because I was deficient in some stuff), access to a student-athlete meal plan (all-you-can-eat that didn't cost much more than regular price), a student athlete roommate, & first pick for registering for classes (I always got into my important pre-reqs unlike my friends, who had to rearrange everything because the math class they needed was full). I also had a decent coach who would let people go earlier if they had an early class & encouraged us to make school our first priority.
Maybe I just went to a super awesome school, but I kind of doubt that my state school is much different than any other.
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James, I was going to leave this alone...but...look what just happened to pop up in today's news!
http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/10787521/ncaa-legislative-council-approves-expanded-meal-allowance (http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/10787521/ncaa-legislative-council-approves-expanded-meal-allowance)
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James, I was going to leave this alone...but...look what just happened to pop up in today's news!
http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/10787521/ncaa-legislative-council-approves-expanded-meal-allowance (http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/10787521/ncaa-legislative-council-approves-expanded-meal-allowance)
Letting athletes eat enough is a very good move forward, although it still has to go through another round of approval.