and limited as to the best choices for their own academic and athletic future. If, instead, more sports development options were available, it would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition. This could initiate a revolution driven by the needs of the athlete, who would be able to decide what option is better for him or her, just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in a free-market economy. It would also allow colleges to pull back from the insanity of the ongoing facilities and personnel “arms race” we have under the current intercollegiate athletic system, at the expense of educational primacy.
Parker and Schröder are just two of the thousands of examples that demonstrate that both systems can produce elite athletes. The difference lies in the degree of direct connection to education, and how we define, at various levels, academic eligibility to compete in sports. In theory, the American system, with its combination of participating in sports while getting an education, sounds like a perfect match. Unfortunately, the academic component has been abused and often outright ignored at all levels of our education-based sports system virtually since its inception (Falla 1981; Ridpath 2002). In short, the goals of scholastic sports often do not mesh with the goals of academia, most notably when substandard academic performance might keep superstar athletes off the court and field. When those two worlds collide, it is often sports priorities that win out—but it does not have to be that way. There is room for both sets of priorities in a new world of American sports development. The current stress our education system is under from an ever-growing and increasingly expensive athletic-industrial complex cannot and does not need to go on. There are better ways to define sports development in America while preserving educational primacy.
VANISHING SPORTS AND PARTICIPATION OPPORTUNITIES
Both elite athletes and nonelite sports participants need more choices, because opportunities for both are deteriorating under the current model. For example, opportunities for mass participation in sports have been dwindling at many levels of our education system. Wrestling, men’s gymnastics, and swimming have been hit especially hard as revenue and energy are focused on the more commercially popular sports, which seem to be more valued from the youth level all the way to university campuses. A survey conducted by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association in 2014 found that 26 million children ages 6 to 17 played team sports, a 4 percent drop from 2009. Recognizing the somewhat disturbing trend of sports specialization by many athletes who are focused more and more on one sport year round, the total number of different sports played within the same age group had plunged by nearly 10 percent (Rosenwald 2015).
It is time for a dramatic change in how we do sports in America. Although some European clubs are pointing to issues such as financial problems that could threaten their survival, the American college model has many more acute issues and is drowning in scandals and debt, while the primary and secondary levels of education are being squeezed financially and are dropping opportunities for sports and physical education. It is imperative that all these systems be analyzed more closely to see if there might be a better way to maintain sports as an integral part of the culture without losing the benefits.
IS IT REALLY ABOUT EDUCATION?
The current athletic model in the United States is often justified because of the perception that it provides access to education and even an impetus to continue one’s education at a college or university. Social mobility through the combination of sports and education is often mentioned as a primary benefit for minorities and other disadvantaged groups. In other words, it can be argued somewhat successfully that athletics can allow potentially significant access to educational opportunity for some who may have not had that opportunity without participating in sports. The ultimate vehicle for social mobility is education, but while using athletics as a way to attain that educational promise sounds appealing on paper, it does not always provide the social mobility and brighter future that are promised. It is a truism that, first and foremost, individuals have to take personal responsibility for their own education. However, many athletes find their educational options limited and/or controlled in order to ensure their academic eligibility, with an emphasis on more time for training rather than access to a bona fide education. This becomes a trap: athletes know they have to be eligible to compete and that others may be counting on them, not just to win games but even to be a family’s potential lottery ticket out of poverty should they make it into the professional ranks—as unlikely as that is.11
These scenarios are damaging the academic primacy of our educational system. For example, it is easy to deduce that if a school’s major football star is needed to compete in a very important game, but he is not academically eligible under standards set by the governing organization (e.g., a state high school activities association or an intercollegiate athletics governing body such as the NCAA), things may be done to “game the system” to ensure that the star player is able to play, at the expense of educational integrity. Sadly, I can say that I did this myself during my time as an athletic administrator and coach at several NCAA Division I universities. I tried to rationalize any effort I made to keep an athlete eligible by saying that this young man or woman would go back to a very dark place, and that we were doing them a great favor by keeping them on the field or court. In reality, I was doing the school and fans a favor. I was not helping the athlete develop as a person nor was I doing anything to assist in his or her actual social mobility. I was only concerned about the here and now: we needed that player to give us a better chance to win. Now I realize the error of my ways, and it is a major motivation for writing this book.
The conflict between sports and academics is very real, and it is only getting worse. The NCAA’s vice president for enforcement, Jon Duncan, announced in early 2015 that the governing body was investigating twenty serious cases of academic fraud (Wolverton 2015). This came on the heels of a major scandal at a premier public institution, the University of North Carolina, where it was uncovered by the Raleigh News and Observer and some impressive reporting by investigative reporter Dan Kane that a high percentage of men’s basketball and football athletes were kept academically eligible through a series of bogus, almost nonexistent classes in its Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Other details showed direct knowledge and involvement of athletic department personnel, faculty, and staff in grade changes, plagiarism, and the covering up of the scandal for up to eighteen years.12 This is one of our public ivies and an institution which prided itself on doing things “the right way.” If North Carolina is doing this to keep its athletic machine afloat, it does make one wonder what others schools may or may not be doing to keep their athletes on the field.
Academic scandals and improprieties regarding athletic eligibility are not just the domain of intercollegiate athletics. Unfortunately, this has been happening not only at the commercialized level of NCAA Division I sports, but at the high school and youth sports levels. Middle and high schools are not immune to the desire to keep athletes on the field no matter what the cost, and scandals have damaged school-based sports in America for many years. A recent example is the private, football powerhouse Bellevue High School in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. It was alleged that the remarkable success of the school’s football program, considered one of the nation’s elite high school programs, having produced several NCAA Division I players, depended on players who weren’t actually Bellevue High students. As strange as that may sound, according to the Seattle Times it appears that up to seventeen of the athletes became eligible to play “by traveling to a Bellevue office park for classes at an obscure, 40-student private school: The Academic Institute, Inc.,” which many Bellevue faculty stated did not adhere to basic educational standards. The high tuition to this storefront school was often picked up by the coaching staff or wealthy boosters (Liebeskind and Baker 2015). This is just one of many examples of high school programs rivaling their college counterparts as to how far some institutions of learning will go in abandoning their educational mission to gain a few wins.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANGE
Father Theodore Hesburgh, the well-respected former president of the University of Notre Dame, summed it up very well when discussing what the United States is up against concerning its educationally based
