Intercollegiate Athletics

What you need to Know and what you need to Do to be recruited. College athletics is a jungle and this presentation is a guide to teach you what you need to know and do as a high school athlete to be find a college athletics program to recruit you.

Successful implementation of a sport nutrition program requires an understanding of the athletic culture, physiological milestones, and life stressors faced by college athletes – there may be no better individual who encompasses such a breadth of understanding of the athletes’ culture as the coach due to the coach often functioning as an educator, counselor, and administrator of team-related programs. Unfortunately, there are few resources that exist to promote nutritional well-being among college athletes. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to briefly review literature which presents evidence of the need for improved nutritional services for college athletes and further describe some nutritional risks that affect individuals across a variety of athletic teams. Finally, recommendations for coordinating a successful nutritional program are made for coaches to consider.

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts the historic and contemporary relationships between colleges, athletics, and white middle-class communities that ensure white suburban youth are advantaged in special athletic admissions. Suburban youth start ahead in college admissions because athletic merit—the competencies desired by university recruiters—requires access to vast familial, communal, and economic resources, all of which are concentrated in their neighborhoods. Their advantages increase as youth, parents, and coaches strategically invest in and engineer novel opportunities to maintain their race and class status. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their racial and economic advantages through admission to elite universities.

Throughout history, intercollegiate athletics largely remained accessible to White men.  Title-IX, the 1972 amendment to the Civil Rights Act, granted women access to education including school-sponsored sports programs. Hailed as one of the most successful pieces of equity-based legislation, Title-IX also permits separate but equal opportunities.  Through segregation schools promote ideologies of social difference like "natural" notions of race and gender, leading to broader inequity.  Intuitively, scholars conclude that desegregating sports will improve social, economic, and political conditions for women.  Yet absent from reform discussions are empirical narratives from athletes, those living within the segregated institution. Further, scholars tend to outline the raced  or gendered nature of intercollegiate athletics,  but intersectional research remains scarce. Therefore, the theoretical and policy solutions are unhinged from how women of various social positions experience school sports.
Centering women student-athletes' voices, this chapter maps the existing hurdles facing women, particularly in college sports, regardless of men's presence. Using intersectionality,  I examine what athletes "learn" in school-sponsored athletic settings. The women's narratives offer both support for and against gender desegregation in high-level intercollegiate athletics. The athletes belong to two different gendered spaces: a semi-gender-desegregated team (track & field) and a gender-segregated team (rowing). The findings on gender-integration remain ambivalent. The fundamental nature of sports as a masculine institution run by and for men has yet to be eroded regardless of gender configuration within athletics.  Patriarchy permeated all teams by sexualizing women athletes, by promoting men's superiority, and by giving men more resources. Women athletes accepted their lesser status within the institution and became "grateful" for the chance to participate. But, with an intersectional perspective I also found there is no homogenous gender-based athletic experience; rather race, class, and sexuality influence the gender reproduction. Further, in both settings, women athletes challenged patriarchy hinting segregation can still contest dominant power structures. Thus, reformers must consider what current liberatory strategies may be lost through integration.
The chapter begins with an overview of Title-IX and the various approaches to studying gender and athletics. It then reviews the study's methodology and key findings, which outline how gender is maintained and contested within athletics. It concludes with suggestions for additional research and policy implications.

This study uses Bourdieusian (1977, 1978, 2011) approaches to reproduction to position athletic bureaucracies as legitimating institutions that convert capital. I examine how the cultural production of amateurism in U.S. college sports facilitates class reproduction by enabling a direct conversion between accrued economic, social, and physical capitals for cultural capital. I use 47 life-history interviews with college athletes to explore how college sport bureaucracies enable capital conversion by differentially regulating potential participants based upon their class background. The interviews revealed three areas of recruiting with disparate regulations: sports camps, recruiting agents, and unofficial visits. Reproduction is achieved and the class structure is maintained as middle- and upper-middle-class athletes utilize these areas of disparate regulations to translate their economic, physical, and social capital to cultural capital through college admission via athletics.

Creating racially just campuses requires dismantling the cultural imperialism of Whiteness—how
Whiteness becomes the norm to which all else is measured, compared, and excluded. Little is
known about how Whiteness shapes the most prevalent athletic cultures: non-revenue teams. Using
critical Whiteness studies and life-history interviews with 47 rowers and track and field college
athletes, I propose three components of athletic cultures: isolation, compliance, and competition.
Athletes learn these elements are neutral and necessary for athletics; however, they normalize
White persons’ overrepresentation in sport, require loyalty to one (White) cultural form, and
position social outcomes as individually and fairly won.

U.S. college sports are prime cultural sites of racist and sexist ideological production (Coakley, 2011; 2015; Eitzen, 2016; Lawrence, Harrison, & Bukstein, 2016; Musto, Cooky, & Messner, 2017). Much of the research into the ideological production in college athletics centres media coverage of two men’s commercialized sports (American football and basketball) as the producers of ideologies and one subject (fans) as the consumers of ideologies. Less is known about how ideologies are produced, circulated, and ultimately reproduced amongst college athletes. To address this gap, I use Althusser’s (1971) approach to ideology to analyse 47 interviews with Olympic (or non-commercialized) college athletes. Findings position college sport as an ISA with at least three mechanisms—time, behaviour, and language—that hail participants to dominant racist and sexist ideologies rooted in ‘biological’ difference. Findings also explore how college athletes’ struggle through the interpellation process and question how their own bodies are constructed by dominant ideologies.

Research into racism and college sports largely explores how universities profit off the undercompensated labor of predominately Black men in Division I football and basketball. This research frames
college sports as an institution that dehumanizes, marginalizes, and exploits athletes of color (Beamon, 2014; Eitzen, 2016; Hawkins, 2010; Sack & Staurowsky, 1998). Yet to truly understand the bounds of systemic racism in college sports, studies must also interrogate how white people are elevated, centered, and rewarded at the expense of people of color. Drawing upon critical whiteness studies (Cabrera, 2012;
DiAngelo, 2011; Leonardo, 2009), I analyzed 47 college athlete narratives and identified 3 interrelated themes—racial segregation, racial innocence, and racial protection—within higher education that protect whiteness. Findings outline how colleges recruit white athletes from predominately white communities who, as a result of their segregated environments, adopted underdeveloped notions of race and racism. Rather than reeducating athletes upon arrival, institutions further racial segregation, innocence, and protection. Ultimately, these processes have allowed white athletes to dodge their role in racism and avoid racial justice responsibilities.

Background/Context: School-sponsored sports programs are seen in both the public and policy spheres as meritocratic mobility institutions. In the U.S. context, athletic participation can yield access to college via sports performance. Meritocratic mobility would be achieved as individuals use their athletic ability and effort to enter universities and in turn improve their social standing. Yet few existing studies empirically examine the extent to which interscholastic athletic participation yields mobility. As a result, little is known about how individuals access colleges via athletics. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study's purpose was to understand how individuals began a path to college via sports. In doing so, it asks: what larger social forces influence how youth become top-level college athletes? It draws upon social reproduction theory-how publicly funded educational entities ensure the maintenance rather than the reduction of class inequality-to determine whether youth sports participation facilitates mobility. Research Design: This qualitative study examined the athletic and academic trajectories of 47 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I student-athletes from one university classified as Research-1, Tier-1, and as a member of a power-five athletic conference. Data include semistructured life history interviews, an original database, and institutional reports. Population: Participants were recruited from four teams to investigate the athletic selection process: men's and women's track & field and rowing. The teams offered multiple comparisons in macro-and micro-social processes. Rowing draws from White and elite communities, because it requires tremendous resources to participate. Conversely, track & field requires fewer resources and draws more participants from marginalized communities. Findings: Research reveals a sports-track-to-college pipeline and a correspondence between White middle-class communities and greater access to elite universities via athletics. Access to the sports-track-to-college pipeline is co-constructed through interactions at the individual, familial, and institutional levels. Five reproductive mechanisms are discussed-community access, bureaucracies, social access, knowledge, and enacted knowledge-all of which emerged as greater determiners for college athletic recruiting than individual athletic merit. Conclusions: Recommendations offer policy and programmatic changes at the high school, college, and NCAA levels that make athletic recruiting more transparent and systematic to lessen the reproductive effects.

NCAA Division III athletics are often viewed as one of the few remaining amateur sport endeavors (Simon, 2010). Although not immune from criticism, these institutions are primarily touted as an integrated educational and athletic experience for student-athletes and campus communities (Brand, 2006). However, in recent years, scholars (e.g., Sparvero & Warner, 2013) have begun to question whether the foundational purpose and Division III philosophy has given way to a more commercialized, financially driven model on display in big-time Division I athletics. Noting this, the primary purpose of this study is to use institutional theory as an explanatory for the effect that institutional factors (e.g., student population, academic prestige) and athletic factors (e.g., expenditures on sport) have on athletic success at NCAA Division III institutions. In order to accomplish this task, the NACDA Learfield Directors’ Cup standings were implemented as a measure of broad-based contemporary athl...

This article explores how ideology limits college sport reform efforts. Centering 47 collegiate athlete life-history interviews I examine how the neoliberal university (Giroux 2014, 2015, 2016) promotes the ideology of individualism. Findings describe how the resulting individualistic subjectivity (Althusser 1971) prevents consciousness raising, democratic participation, and broad-based collective action. Individualism led participants to internalize school/sport conflict and alter their behavior rather than to externalize conflict and alter the institution. By individualizing conflict, higher education remained insulated from meaningful change. Findings demonstrate why future reform platforms must encompass broad institutional change alongside an ideological critique to temper the reproduction of an incompatible educational and athletic system.

Intercollegiate athletics has changed from a culture of recreation, camaraderie, and entertainment to one of the biggest business enterprises in the United States. Although many more athletes now have a chance to compete at the intercollegiate level, the sports world has experienced a drastic increase in commercial intervention. This commercialization has allowed for the expeditious growth of the “college athletics arms race” and the decline of the academic prestige in many of the big sports schools.

The school’s overall financial budget is majorly affected; however this problem affects many within the academic institution including the student-athletes, students, faculty, and fans. This literature review will examine the impact that commercialization and sponsorship of sports have had on intercollegiate athletics, along with its subsequent impact on the academic quality of the university infrastructure.
Keywords: intercollegiate, commercialization, sponsorship, arms race, academic quality

The creation of the Big Ten Network, a television and broadband endeavor devoted to the 11 Universities that comprise the Big Ten Conference, sent a ripple throughout higher education. This study traces a brief history of collegiate broadcasting, with particular focus on the pivotal role played by the Big Ten Conference. An examination of the marketplace opportunities that existed as the idea was constructed gives the reader insight as to the complexities that college presidents and conference commissioners' face when negotiating with television and cable networks. Instead of receiving broadcast rights fees for the televising of selected football and basketball games, the Presidents in the Conference decided to start their own broadcast venture. While many assume this project was just about money and sports, through a series of interviews with the key individuals involved, and a review of memorandums and meeting minutes, there is more to the story. The Network became a means to deliver the message about the values and brand of the Big Ten Conference. No longer satisfied with having the broadcast networks "control the message" about their schools, the new channel addresses some of the social issues that impact today's campuses. The Network decided not to permit any alcohol or gambling commercials, and decided that by 2010, 50% of all programming would be devoted to women's sports. Throughout the process, it was evident that the Presidents had numerous opportunities to change direction and seek more money, yet decided that their values were more important. The Network also presents the opportunity to showcase the student athletes, the faculty and with 660 hours per year devoted to campus wide programming, the wider range of life on a Big Ten campus. This study provides a roadmap for college commissioners and presidents seeking to use the explosion of digital television and new media technology to promote and enhance their campus identity. The study concludes with recommendations for the senior leadership teams as to how to redirect some of the substantial dollars that the Network will generate to uses that resonate with the land grant mission of many of the campuses.
Subject Area
Mass communications,Higher education,Recreation
Recommended Citation
Karen Weaver, "The launch of the Big Ten Network: How 11 universities created their own television network and changed the college sports landscape" (January 1, 2009). Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI3354331.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3354331

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the coaching philosophy of a highly successful men's United States National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) division II cross country coach and determine to what extent his stated philosophy and actual coaching methods were humanistic. For the past 13 seasons , the participant coach's men's cross country team has finished either first or second at the NCAA division II national championships. In-depth semistructured qualitative interviews of the participant coach and three of his athletes were conducted in addition to eight overt naturalistic training session observations. All data were triangulated to generate themes to determine if the stated coaching philosophy and actual methods were congruent with the humanistic philosophy. The findings indicated that the coach was for the most part humanistic in regards to individualization, but was not humanistic in relation to open communication and collaborative decision-making with athletes, or a process-orientated definition of success. Implications of these findings include what may be the most effective coaching philosophy for men's NCAA division II cross country running through examining a highly successful coach in the discipline.

College coaches are not at-will employees; they promise to perform exclusively for the school for a period of years in exchange for an exorbitant guaranteed salary for the duration of that period.5 The problem is that these contracts are a one-way street from an enforcement standpoint. The schools continue to reward coaches with contract extensions and salary raises after one winning season, and schools remain liable for the coach’s guaranteed salary for the remainder of the term when they terminate him without cause; the schools also, however, let coaches walk away at will and go work for, and be solicited by, their competitors with impunity.6 To be certain, this is not representative of free market competition, but rather unfair competition. The purpose of this paper is not to criticize how much money coaches make, but to encourage our public academic institutions, which owe a moral and ethical duty to their student bodies, their student-athletes and society at large, to exercise fiscal responsibility and restraint by simply deterring their coaches from breaching their contractual obligations and their competitors from interfering with contractual relations. This paper analyzes the economics of college coaches’ contracts and uses it as justification and support for universities to look closer at their legal options, rights and remedies.

"Operation Varsity Blues" (OVB) indicted coaches and administrators from eight universities for accepting bribes in exchange for admitting fraudulent athletes. As part of the conspiracy parents paid university officials to admit students with little-to-no sport experience as college athletes. Court filings in the case contrasted OVB to the legal process of athletic recruitment and admission in which universities set different criteria to admit those with athletic talent (Smith, 2019a). This conceptual article cautions against such a contrast. Using Harris' (1993) whiteness as property, Bourdieu's (2011) capital exchange theory, and findings from my research into athletic recruitment and admission, I examine how OVB closely resembles current athletic admissions practices that provide a legal pathway to college that privileges white, elite communities.

Pulling data from a year-long case study into a Division II men’s basketball team, this article suggests how threshold concepts as currently conceptualized and implemented in first-year composition pedagogy and curriculum could more directly consider unique forms of literacies student-athletes bring into the classroom.

This multisite case study explored the perceptions of athletic department members of the important factors of organizational cultures in athletic departments at small Christian institutions in the Midwestern United States. The study comprised of site visits to three small Christian institutions in the Midwestern United States. At each site, six individuals associated with the athletic department were interviewed; other data sources included observation, examination of institutional websites, social media, and artifacts. The findings identified common important factors of the athletic department organizational cultures and were organized around the elements of athletic department culture elements described by Schroeder (2010). The themes within institutional culture were organizational structure, common values, and standing in the gap. The important factors of the external environment included the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, denominational environment, and the climate of higher education. The themes within the internal athletic department environment include common values, clear expectations, and community. The leadership and power element revealed no additional subthemes that were conceptually different than themes within other elements. These themes are described for each institution. The dissertation concludes with evidence-based recommendations for the development of athletic department cultures at small Christian institutions in the Midwestern United States. The proposed solution provides seven recommendations that are based upon creating an understanding of institutional and athletic department cultures and developing an integrated structure with clear expectations and alignment of values that align with the mission of each unique university.

Objective. The relationship between academic achievement, especially grade point average (GPA), and college athletics is often focused on "big-time" (National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I (NCAA DI)) colleges. This study examines athletic and academic identity correlates with student-athlete (SA) GPA for not only DI but also DII and DIII SAs, separately by sex. Methods. The GPAs of over 19,000 SAs across divisions are analyzed using OLS with covariates including athletic and academic indicators. The analysis pools SAs, separates by division, and separates by division and sex. Additional analyses were conducted for the revenue-producing sports. Results. SAs' GPA is directly influenced by their athletic versus academic identity, the athletic context including the coach's influence, and the seriousness with which they view academics. Cross-equation joint testing found no statistical differences in athletic or academic identity across division and sex. Conclusions. Two beliefs are widely presumed: that DI SAs' focus on athletics more than SAs in the "less competitive" divisions leads them to worse academic outcomes, and that the athletic identity of male SAs has a greater impact on academic performance than female SAs. Our results provide no evidence for either presumption. The relationship between collegiate athletics and academic achievement has been a source of persistent discussion for years. Throughout most of this research, however, the focus has been on the high-profile (revenue-producing) sports of football and basketball in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I (DI). Published research focusing on academics and athletics across the other two divisions-by themselves and in comparison to DI-as well as comparisons with the non-revenue-producing sports is very underdeveloped. In addition to this line of work, but also very much related, is the relationship between gender and academic performance. Much of the academic literature regarding women in collegiate sports tends to focus on issues germane to Title IX (Anderson, Cheslock, and Ehrenberg, 2006), as well as specific issues such as self-esteem, disordered eating (Johnson et al., 2004), and gender role orientation (Harrison and Lynch, 2005). Missing from this line of work is a consideration of more academic and sport-related factors that may influence academic performance.

This chapter demonstrates how the tutorial program within the Athletic Study Center at the University of California at Berkeley developed an assessment platform to improve several facets of their support services: 1) tutor performance 2) tutor training 3) student performance and 4) overall program effectiveness. In this case-study, evaluation began with little direction or theoretical grounding. While the intention remained consistent-improve program outcomes-the method to achieve this goal changed dramatically over time. The evaluation became increasingly more sophisticated, as did the program. This evolution was achieved through campus partnerships between university staff, graduate students, faculty members, and evaluation specialists. This chapter is a positive lesson in how partnerships across units, combined with opportunities for professional development, have the potential to improve both staff and student outcomes.

Under the federally mandated Title IX, NCAA athletic departments are directed to offer balanced promotional and informational coverage between men's and women's sports. This study examines how gender is represented in photographs on the Instagram accounts of prominent NCAA athletic departments. Findings indicate mixed results: female athletes, when showcased, receive similar promotional efforts to their male peers; their athleticism is highlighted; and fan engagement metrics are as high as male sports. However, female athletic achievements are overwhelmingly underrepresented, suggesting equality is still deficient.

The NCAA is at a crossroads with student-athlete compensation. Over the past few decades, the NCAA and its partners have faced lawsuits from several different angles with essentially one consistent argument: Student-athletes deserve to be compensated for what they provide to colleges and universities. In two such lawsuits-Dawson v. NCAA and Livers v. NCAA-the plaintiffs have attempted a new strategy: arguing that revenue sport student-athletes are employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"). These cases have gained some traction, and the distinctive protections granted to employees under the FLSA present unique challenges worth exploring. This Article analyzes the potential results of a plaintiff victory in a FLSA case on the landscape of collegiate sports. To that end, this Article explores the unique benefits and challenges the FLSA presents, and how in-tercollegiate sports would be shifted by a plaintiff victory on this front.

This article highlights programmatic and pedagogical challenges of tutoring student-athlete writers based on my experience in a Division I athletics writing center. Pulling from interviews with athletics department personnel—including the director of athletics—and textual analysis of policy documents, the author offers how stakeholders at various levels perceive and enact student-athlete writing tutoring. Tutoring practices resulted from the NCAA’s Principle 2.5 found in the NCAA manual for Division I Athletics. Fearful of breaking this principle, the athletics writing center handcuffed itself to unproductive methods of working with student-athlete writers. Yet the center productively jettisoned these methods through forming intra-institutional alliances with campus WPAs, particularly campus-wide writing center administrators. I offer the importance of using the collective capacity of those invested in writing to improve writing-related services for student-athletes, while still adhering to an NCAA academic principle. At the close, I offer four implications for writing center administrators, staff, and tutors working with student-athlete writers.

This Essay addresses the difficulty of proving the financial harm that results when a head coach departs a college or university during the contract term and the institution thereby abruptly loses a valuable asset—a successful and stable athletic program. Due to the unique and specialized nature of head coaches' services and the industry in which they work, ordinary measures for assessing damages based on substitute performance and transaction costs are insufficient. This Essay offers a theory of measuring a university's damages within the construct of a lost-income-producing-asset valuation, using a methodology based on liquidated damages amounts in comparable coaches' contracts.

Concussions have reached epidemic levels. There is cure for concussions. Measures taken to reduce concussions have not been effective. The majority of research is focused on concussion causation and concussion management after the fact. The research continues but the number of concussions in athletics increases each year.
No methodical approach to producing a specific protocol to strengthen the head and neck muscles exists and no systematic study of increase in neck musculature attributed to such a protocol is documented. Thus, this study will produce a standardized methodology for the reduction of concussive and subconcussive forces, laying the foundation for further research in this area.
The research participants were healthy male and female college students, age range 18-24. There were 30 participants. Of the 30 subjects used for this study, 18 participants were randomly assigned to the experimental group and 12 participants in the control group. The participants followed a protocol consisting of 13 movements designed to sequentially train the musculature of the head, neck and upper back. The duration of the study was 8 weeks.
The strength increases were significant in the active participant group. The hypertrophy of the head and neck muscles was equally as significant and even more impressive in the male group. The females exhibited minimal muscle hypertrophy Every active participant experienced strength increases during the eight week study; likewise each active male participant exhibited neck circumference increases. The control group experienced negligible strength or hypertrophy increases.

Dominant cultural narratives position college sports as engines of racial integration and upward mobility. Previous studies examined the chances for low-income men of color becoming athletes in two sports: men's football and basketball. While highly visible, these athletes represent the minority of participants. The majority of college athletes are White and middle class. In this conceptual article, I apply Cheryl Harris' whiteness as property framework to identify the institutional conditions that prevent college sports from functioning as integrative and mobility engines and instead protect Whites' privileged access to higher education via sport.