English

For years, Division I athletes have been pouring their hearts out day after day, week after week, to protect the pride and tradition of their universities. With television contracts and shoe deals alone, the athletes are really bringing in the money and other forms of revenue. Sure, you can say that the typical athletes scholarship is enough to compensate, but are they? A true athlete plays the game simply because he loves it. When you’re at the Division I level of sports, it is more or less a business and it is their job to make money for the school. Also, these athletes give up many freedoms.

For a given number of hours per week, they give their blood, sweat, and tears just to play a sixty-minute game or run two times around a track. Take these factors and combine it with the athlete’s academic responsibilities, and it’s a lot to account for. When all is said and done, how much money does the athlete see? Well, aside from scholarships…zero. I mentioned earlier that intercollegiate athletics is more or less a business in itself. Let me break it down for you.

A business has different departments; the owner, the management, and your employees at the bottom rung making everything run smoothly. The owners of course have provided the money for the company, the managers run the company, and the laborers perform the work. I’ve never heard of a business that doesn’t pay its employees. And of course no one would work for them if such a thing did exist. Most people think that an athlete should just be thankful for the education he receives in exchange for a few hours of practice. But an enormous amount of cash is being circulated within that school, at the athlete’s expense, which that athlete will never lay eyes on.

Author and sports writer Steven Wulf says, “They are required to put in long hours of hard work for next to nothing, in hostile conditions, always under intense scrutiny of their bosses”. (Wulf) Of course this is a controversial topic, and there are obviously two sides to this argument: a side for and a side against the argument. “It is true that student-athletes aren’t your typical college students. They are unable to deposit that measly check most us work toward outside academic duties. Time and physical constraints do not allow these individuals living in a fish bowl to actively pursue a part-time job.