COLUMN: The plight of student-athletes

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by Ben Glassman

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If the Bearcats' center and power forward had been convicted of assault and disorderly conduct, respectively, the basketball season would have been shot. Now all that remained was for Long to raise his grades and to complete an intervention program so that his domestic violence charge would be dropped and his drug trafficking parole would not be violated.

But my second reaction was more serious. What was going on here? These two people are attending the University of Cincinnati free of charge in order, ostensibly, to receive an education. Isn't that the primary aim of a university?

In some ways, this case, which I have taken completely out of any mitigating context, crystallized a lot of what is wrong with college athletics. It was very hard for me at that moment to defend the status of Long and Fortson as student-athletes.

Student-athlete problems at Rice?

And it is the concept of the student-athlete that has perplexed me for some time now. The well-argued but clearly defensive letter written by a student-athlete to the Thresher several weeks ago (Sept. 29) indicates that even at Rice there is some tension concerning the issue.

Nothing demonstrated this more subtly than the quick suggestion of Head Volleyball Coach Henry Chen when I interviewed him: "Is there a problem with student-athletes here? Because I think that if students have a problem with them, we need to have an open forum to discuss it."

Last year, I was caught off-guard while interviewing triple jumper Ivory Angello at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. When I asked him about "the Rice experience," he thought for a moment but then responded, `Athletically, I've prospered at Rice, but academically, I've suffered.'

These loosely related incidents prompted me to undertake an investigation of what it means to be a student-athlete in Division I-A athletics. But the task has proven impossible. Nevertheless, I'll share what I've found.

What is a student-athlete?

What exactly is a student-athlete in Division I-A? Undoubtedly, the answer is different for every institution. The term refers simply to someone who is enrolled at a college or university and plays a varsity NCAA sport for that school. Frequently, this person attends the school on athletic scholarship in return for playing the sport.

The student-athlete has a dual commitment to academics and athletics because one is inextricably linked to the other. There is absolutely no question that student-athletes are at their schools to play a sport.

This doesn't mean that they can't compete academically, but the reason they're attending a certain school for free is to play a sport.

Coach Chen made the following analogy: "They have different time commitments. Architects spend a lot of time in studio; so just as there are student-architects and student-musicians, student-athletes must devote a lot of time to sports."

His point is well-taken concerning the rigors of the role, but the analogy doesn't fully hold. Student-architects study architecture, student-musicians study music, so student-athletes therefore study ... sports?

No. The student-athlete is another phenomenon entirely.

Why have student-athletes?

The theoretical justifications for student-athletes at different schools are as diverse as the schools themselves. At some schools, fundamentally, the ends justify the means. That is, sports generate such good for the school (publicity, revenue, etc.) that whatever means are necessary for these sports are worthwhile. At Cincinnati, for example, applications have risen significantly since the Bearcats reached the Final Four.

Other reasons are different. The mission of Rice, for example, essentially mandates Division I athletics because it compels Rice to excel at the highest level of all its endeavors.

And once a school is committed to Division I athletics, scholarship athletes are a question of practicality. As junior basketball player Jarvis Kelley-Sanni has pointed out, "Without scholarships, you could not field a team that could compete with other I-A schools."

So with the student-athlete's definition unclear from a distance, it would perhaps be instructive to try to understand the experience of a student-athlete.

Student-athlete experience

The recurring plea of every athlete and coach whom I interviewed was for non-athletes to recognize the tremendous time commitment and physical sacrifice athletes must undergo.

"People wonder sometimes why an athlete might not do as well in class," Angello said.

"But not only do you not have as much time to study because you're always practicing, but then you come home, completely exhausted, and then you have to start studying."

That's the intent of Chen's analogy above. And that view was echoed by Head Basketball Coach Willis Wilson, Athletics Academic Coordinator Julie Griswold and many athletes and non-athletes around the Rice campus.

At Rice, one's ability to perform academically is a legitimate concern, since, as Griswold says, "Students don't come to Rice to `play ball.'"

But academic expectations clearly vary across the I-A spectrum. Note the difference in attitude with which University of Kentucky Assistant Basketball Coach (and former player) Winston Bennett approaches the question of the student-athlete's need to balance academics and athletics:

"Academics play a major role in any student's life; we stress that. One problem is that often our players love basketball so much, they overlook academics, and we try to stress that basketball could always be ended tomorrow, by an injury or something, whereas academics will last a lifetime ...

"Punctuality is important. We want our players to be on time for practice and attend their classes ... I think we strike a fairly successful balance between academics and athletics here at Kentucky. I don't know what our graduation rate is, but it must be pretty high."

In some ways the balance between athletics and academics at any school is a mirror of that school.

The missions of, for example, Rice and the University of Houston, Stanford University and the University of Arizona are quite different, and one ought not to expect an athlete to focus as strongly on academics at an institution which, overall, values scholarship less than another might. Yet all these schools, for various reasons, want to compete on the highest athletic plane.

The Rice student-athlete?

In many ways, Rice is blessed with an exemplary program. Athletes here try hard and succeed fairly well in both aspects of their commitment to Rice.

"This is a very realistic school; we don't put our athletes on pedestals," Chen said.

This is not the situation everywhere. Kelley-Sanni transferred from Arizona, which recently made a Final Four appearance.

"In Tuscon," he said, "Wildcat sports are everything. People leave season tickets to their relatives in their wills. As an athlete, you were constantly watched. If you did something good, people would report that, but if you did something wrong, it would be on the front page the next day.

"Athletes have much less contact with non-athletes there ... and there's no question that some people had different, quote-unquote, `rules,' for athletes."

"Not only are our athletes not on pedestals," an anonymous student said. "At Rice, they're more likely to be made fun of because most of the teams suck."

One must pause to wonder how much Rice's successful balancing act is a function of its inability to contend nationally in athletics. Student-athletes recognize that their Rice education is likely to serve them better than their sport, career-wise.

How then to explain Archie Myers? He transferred from Rice this past year because he realized that with Bobby Crawford incoming, his playing time would be limited.

So, even though this indicated the likely limits of his basketball potential, he transferred to a school whose academic standards were clearly lower than Rice's.

"Archie thought he was a player," one basketball player explained, "and he couldn't see it any differently."

Baseball is one of the few sports in which Rice can compete with the very best, and it is on this team that one can most easily find a student-athlete who prioritizes athletics greatly over academics. For several years in a row now, at least one freshman baseball player, when asked by other students about his prospective major, has responded, "Baseball."

Student-athlete tensions

This is one reason for the tension that exists even at Rice. Exclaimed one anonymous student, "Look -- they get in to play a sport, they go here for free, live here for free and eat for free ... I don't understand why we don't do it [student-athletics] like the Ivy League [which doesn't give athletic scholarships]."

That frequently-raised suggestion is a bit accessory, considering the aforementioned justification of our current system's necessity with respect to Rice's mission, but even so, the idealized state of athletics in the Ivies is just that -- idealized.

A student at a particular Ivy assured me that it's common knowledge that a certain number of athletes at his school receive full financial-aid scholarships in order to attend and play a sport.

Another reason might be even simpler. Junior track team member Dan Brooks said, "I think there's animosity between students and student-athletes at Rice, but I don't get it as much as most athletes do."

When asked why, Brooks said, "Because I'm not as big and intimidating as they are."

Student-athlete benefits

Athletes are more visible at Rice than at virtually every other school both because of Rice's small size and the college system. This is a benefit, according to Griswold.

"You can go to games and cheer for the teams because you actually know the players," she said.

That ties in to another aspect of the student-athlete. His or her status, especially for people who are recognizable through success, television or simply size, is different than that of the ordinary student.

"Student-athletes enrich college campuses," Wilson said. "I took my status as an athlete for granted until my senior year when I realized that being an athlete really meant a lot to my roommate and his family."

As one anonymous male freshman remarked, "When you're at a party talking to a girl and Jarvis [Kelley-Sanni] walks by and says, `Hey, what's up?' you just feel like the shit."

And one former athlete's first response (at least partially in jest) to my question of what it meant to be a student-athlete was, "What does it mean? To have women."

Benefits at other schools

If this status exists even at Rice, how much more so does it exist at the University of North Carolina, the University of California-Los Angeles or the University of Kansas?

Kelley-Sanni's above remarks about life at Arizona hint at the answer. It's no coincidence that I could call up Wilson and receive an interview, but one of Arkansas Head Coach Nolan Richardson's secretaries required me to set up an interview through their sports information office.

"Student-athletes in general are taken far too much for granted," said Wilson. "Not only do some people not recognize the grueling nature of their dual commitment, but "people tend to judge them by a particular point in time rather than where they are and where they're going. Every athlete here has a particular set of circumstances to put him or her where they are now."

Why be a student-athlete?

Considering all of this, one might wonder why anyone would want to subject himself to student-athletics.

"There are two reasons," Wilson said. "The first is competition, and the second is that people really believe that it makes you better."

It seems that each question one asks about student-athletes in Division I-A leads to either a questionable answer, an answer and another question or both.

This column has only just scratched the surface of some of the issues involved. Countless other aspects of and perspectives on and by the student-athlete remain to be examined.

Is the student-athlete in Division I a problem? I don't know. But his or her role is one of the most complicated in both academia and athletics.

This item appeared in the Sports section of the December 1, 1995 issue.

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