Trends In Intercollegiate Sports

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Some current trends in Intercollegiate Sports are escalating expenses for big-time spectator sports, struggles over gender equity, athletes in revenue producing sports seeking rights to profit from their skills, students seeking more opportunities to play school sponsored sports, and faculty resisting the use of university resources to subsidize big time sports. Knowing about and understanding these trends are important for students, administrators, and legislators making decisions about the use of student fees and campus sport facilities. As an athletic department budget increases faster than academic budget, faculty is becoming more concerned about these decisions and how they affect higher education, and students increasingly want opportunities …show more content…

As the stakes become greater with an emphasis winning championships, debates about the meaning, purpose, and organization of high school sports become more contentious. Historically, boosters who covet state titles and want high school sports to resemble big time college sports have dominated these debates, but many students, parents, teachers, and local citizens have different visions of what school sports should be in the …show more content…

Fun at organized, purpose-driven sports is associated with achieving goals rather than physical expression and joy. The process is now secondary to the product, and the journey is secondary to the destination. People in postindustrial societies live with the legacy of industrialization. They emphasize organization according to rational principles based, whenever possible, on systematic research. Being organized and making plans to accomplish goals is so important that spontaneity, expression, creativity, and joy- the element of play- are given low priority or may even be considered frivolous by event planners, coaches, and spectators. Snowboarder Terje Haakonsen decided against performing in the Olympics because he didn’t want to endorse a form of sport in which organization and rationalization had subverted play. Haakonsen believe that fun and effort merge together in sports when they are done in terms set by participants. This merger collapse when sports are done for judges using criteria that ignore the subjective experience of participation. When creating sports, these are important things to remember because there is a tendency in postindustrial cultures to organize all physical activities for the purposes of rationally assessing skills and performances. Working to improve physical

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