The Term Student-Athlete Has Been Misunderstoid

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Wyatt Collins
Ms. Chambers
Rough Draft
Student-Athlete
I believe that the term student-athlete has been misunderstood for many years. The term student-athlete is defined as a student who is fully enrolled into school and fully involved in an athletic sport. Such as, football, baseball, basketball, softball, etc. Anything that is an organized extra-curricular activity is considered to be an athletic sport. The word pretty much explains itself student-athlete, student comes first and athlete comes second. Self-explanatory right? But is that really how the university and coaches look at it.
At division 1 programs the bigger athletic programs such as, football, basketball, and baseball bring the college millions of dollars a year based on …show more content…

Therefore, the athletic programs are going to bring in the best athletes that they can find no matter how good or bad their grades are. For example, if the coach is looking at two players and the one player has a 2.5 GPA and his athletic ability is way above average, and the other player has a 3.0 GPA but his athletic ability is below the other prospect the coach is looking at the coach is going to pick the more athletic player. He has a high enough GPA to be eligible to play but does not spend nowhere near the amount of time on his schooling as he does in becoming a better player. In a recent report there was 3,100 student-athletes at the University of North Carolina whose athletic coaches encouraged them to take fake classes to make fake grades so they could pass their classes and participate in the athletic competitions. The “University staff so called paper classes and the artificially inflated grades they handed out as the key to …show more content…

Student-athletes who attend larger schools consider themselves more of athletes than students and spend more time working on their athletic ability rather than their schooling and maintaining good grades with a high GPA. Taking that into consideration, if an athlete chooses their school based on athletics, then I would have to believe that the student-athlete would most likely spend twice as much time on their athletics instead of their academics. That is the complete opposite of what the word means and what it is about. A student-athlete is a student first and athlete second therefore he/she should be concerned with making good grades so they can stay eligible to participate in their sport. It also says that a student-athletes test scores and GPA is significantly lower than just a regular student. In the offseason football players practice anywhere between 40-60 hours a week, that is just physical practice on the field that is not counting workouts and watching game film. That is more hours than some full time jobs. In addition to, the student-athlete is still required to maintain a 2.0 GPA. For example, I am a student-athlete who attends a small Christian college. We do not take our athletics nowhere near as serious as bigger colleges do. But we are still required to maintain good grades, while having practices, work

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