Trends In Intercollegiate Sports

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

to participate in organized sports that enable them to have fun and develop and display physical skills. Meanwhile, athletes on existing teams are more concern about receiving fair reward for their labor. The possibilities for students to create futures in connection with these trends are many. Students on large campuses are like community citizens who can influence the use of local resources to support their sport interests, and more would prefer campus decisions to be democratically rather than by administrators, athletic directors, coaches, and boosters.
Some current trends in high school sports are increasing financial and public relations stakes associated with sports, parents and athletes viewing high school sports as a way to obtain college scholarships and admission into the college of their choice, struggles over gender equity, increasing elitism favoring skilled and highly specialized athletes, emphasis on playoffs, championships, state titles, and national rankings, and outsourcing certain sport teams to private clubs.

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

future.
Some current trends in youth sports are declining public programs due to budget constraints, increased privatization benefiting people who can pay club and facility fees, increasing de facto segregation of sports by socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, and decreasing availability of opportunities for children in low income families and communities. These trends mimic general trends in society.
As an ideology emphasizes individualism and a form of family values that expects every family to provide for itself, people with resources will create playgrounds on their own property and buy access to private sport programs and facilities for themselves and their children. They don’t need public parks or publicly funded programs and seldom vote to support them. As a result, public support for sport programs are disappearing and youth sports are becoming less accessible to people in middle-class, working-class, and low-income families. Resistance to this trend is currently weak, but there is a possibility that people will demand more accessible youth sports in the coming years.
Some of the current factors influencing trends today in sports are technology, telecommunications and electronic media, organization and rationalization, commercialism and consumption, and changing demographic composition of communities and societies. Technology is the application of scientific or other organized knowledge to solve problems, expand experiences, or alter the conditions of reality. It is used to make sports safer, detect and treat injuries more effectively, assess physical limits and potential, expand the experiences available in sports, train bodies to perform more efficiently, provide athletes more control of their bodies, increase the speeds at which bodies move, decrease the risks involved in sports, enhance the size and strength of bodies, alter bodies to match the demands of particular sports, identify rule infractions and enforce rules more accurately, measure and compare performances with precisions, and improve the durability and functionality of equipment. The major issue related to technology is when and how to use and regulate it. The governing bodies of sports try to regulate the technologies used by coaches, officials, trainers, and athletes, but the rapid expansion of new technologies makes this difficult. Assessing the full implications of particular technologies is not easy. Consistent behavior and sensible decisions about them are made only when we know what we want sports to be in the future.
Telecommunications and Electronic Media items such as a television, computers, the Internet, wireless phones, and other handheld devices are technologies with implications for sports. Television and the Internet, for instance, provide visual images and narratives that many people use to imagine future possibilities for sports; the same is true for video games. Some people even use electronic images to inform their choices about participation and formulate standards for assessing sport experience. Therefore, media producers worldwide have considerable power to create the future. For instance, imagine football is the only sport you’ve ever seen on television. You would have a seriously limited sense of what sports are and what they could be. A version of this occurs when media companies select for coverage only those sports that generate profits on commercial television. As a result, those are the sports that dominate popular discourse and influence what we envision for the future. If we realize this, we can seek images and narratives about sports that are not represented exclusively through commercial media.
Organization and Rationalization emphasize that all sports contain the element of play, but sports today focus so much on planning and producing that play has been pushed to the sidelines.

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

skills so we can expand the possibilities for new experiences is one thing, but spending years perfecting a specialized skill to conform to someone else’s idea of technical perfection is another. Once we feel this distinction in our own sport participation, we become more creative when thinking about the future.
Commercialism and Consumption emphasize that many people today are so deeply embedded in commercial culture that they think of themselves as customers instead of citizens. This changes the basis for evaluating self, others, and experiences. When commercial ideology pervades sports, play becomes secondary to playoffs and payoffs; games, athletes, and sports participation itself become commodities- things bought and sold for bottom-line purposes. Participation then revolves around the consumption of equipment, lessons, clothing, nutritional supplements, gym and club memberships, and other material things. Status is based on where you do sports, the equipment that you use, and the clothing that you wear- not the joy of playing. Many people are turned off by this approach, but unless they’ve experienced alternatives, it may be difficult to envision sports devoid of commercialism and consumption. This is why it’s important to have public spaces where people can play sports that don’t require fees, permits, or memberships. Creativity thrives in such spaces. In this sense, public policies at all levels of government can create or subvert possibilities for noncommercial sport futures.
Changing Demographics Composition of Communities and Societies emphasizes sports are social constructions, and some of the richest sport environments are those in which people have diverse cultural backgrounds and sport experiences. Even when people play the same sport, strategies and styles often vary with their cultural backgrounds. For example, Canadians created a secular and rationalized version of lacrosse that was different from the traditional, sacred game invented and played by Native Peoples in North America. People in the United States took the sport of rugby as played in England and adapted it to fit their preferences; the result was American football, a game that is relatively unique in the world. In 2004 the New York Mets hired a Latino general manager, signed notable Latino players, and developed a style of play that was fast, assertive, and spirited. This style is now part of a larger cultural shift in Major League Baseball, a shift that celebrates diversity by incorporating it into everything from on the field strategy to marketing the game to Latinos in the United States and Latin America. Although demographic diversity presents challenges, it also presents possibilities for creating new forms and versions of sports. As a result, people from certain ethnic minorities will play only a few sports, whereas those in the dominant population will have diverse opportunities to play sports and develop skills.