Sports and Play: Chapter 14: Sports in High School and College

It appears that the NCAA and universities do not want to fully inform athletes in sports that involve regular head trauma about current research findings; coaches may fear that it will confuse them and reduce their motivation to put their bodies and brains at risk for the sake of their team. In the meantime, the NCAA denies any responsibility for brain injuries due to head impact despite knowing about those injuries for decades (Grossman, 2018; Hruby, 2019). This is why it has no meaningful head injury policy other than telling athletic departments in Power Five conferences that they must submit and have approved a concussion safety protocol, even though there is nothing safe about concussions. The other 290 Division I athletic departments have also been told to file a protocol but there is no evidence that the protocol policy has been meaningfully enforced.

Knowing that the new policy might not free them of legal liability, the NCAA also created in 2017 and distributed to NCAA member institutions in 2019 a Concussion Safety Protocol Checklist to show that it is "an advocate for promoting and developing concussion safety management plans for each member school" (NCAA, 2019). Interestingly, the protocol contains information about when athletes can return to their sports after a concussion, but it lacks information about when they can return to classes and coursework after a concussion. Additionally, there is nothing in the protocol that deals with assessing its effectiveness or with the issue of athletes hiding symptoms of brain injuries so they can continue to play—a phenomenon that appears to be common (Davies & Bird, 2015).

Athletic programs in Divisions II and III schools are not impacted directly by Power Five spending patterns, but they often feel pressure to succeed because their achievements are used in their schools' institutional marketing and student recruitment strategies at a time when financial survival depends on student enrollment.

Many administrators and others believe that spending money on sports teams is the best way to market their schools. However, they base their belief on anecdotal information rather than systematic research. This is ironic at institutions created, in part, to do systematic research. But they march in lockstep to the tune played by their Division I role models.

Adherence to a sports development model often is driven by boosters and booster organizations that raise funds and provide other support to one or more teams in a school. However, individual boosters and booster organizations are seldom regulated by schools or school districts, and they exist primarily in wealthier areas, often giving unfair advantage to a single team in a school or an entire athletic program relative to programs in poor areas where resources are scarce and teams struggle to exist.

Many boosters who provide resources, sometimes out of their own pockets, feel they have a right to intervene in the process of evaluating and hiring coaches, and they generally focus on coaches' win-loss records rather than their teaching abilities and knowledge of adolescent development.

Gender inequities at the college level are grounded in similar social and cultural dynamics, but the inequities go deeper and are manifested in many realms, such as operating budgets, recruiting money, and coaches' salaries. These differences in NCAA Division I programs for 2018 are shown in Figure 14.1. Even though women were 54 percent of the student body, they constituted only 44 percent of the athletes. Additionally, they received 47 percent of the scholarship dollars, 32 percent of recruiting dollars, 30 percent of the compensation for head coaches, and half of the operating budgets that men's teams receive.

Many people justify these gender inequities by noting that men's teams generate more revenues than women's teams. Others say that a portion of the revenues claimed by men, including football, comes from student fees more than half of which are paid by female students. This means that most NCAA Division I universities have not achieved gender equity, and this also is true for Divisions II and III, NAIA schools, and schools in the National Christian College Athletic association, which has the largest gender disparity in the money allocated to men's and women's programs.

Studies in the United States consistently show that high school athletes as a group generally have higher grade point averages, more positive attitudes toward school, lower rates of absenteeism, more interest in attending college, more years of college completed, greater career success, and better health than students who don't play school-sponsored sports.2 These differences usually are modest, and it's difficult for researchers to separate the effects of sports participation from the effects of social class, family background, support from friends, identity issues, and other factors related to educational attitudes and achievement.

Membership on a school team is a valued status in most US schools, and for some students it seems to go hand in hand with positive educational experiences, reduced dropout rates, and increased identification with the school. However, research doesn't explain much about why sports participation affects students, and why it affects some differently from others.

A Baylor University scandal fits a similar pattern. It involved over 100 reports of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment between 2011 and 2016. Fifty-two rapes and gang rapes were allegedly committed by at least 19 members of the football team. Athletic department personnel took no action when reports were made to them. Although court cases are ongoing, players have been convicted and given prison sentences. The university president, athletic director, and head football coach were forced to resign for their failure to respond to the alleged crimes (although the coach received an $18 million severance package, despite violating NCAA and university rules, if not criminal laws. Baylor received a minor punishment from the NCAA.

Michigan State University officials also failed to respond to reports that athletic department doctor, Larry Nassar was sexually abusing and assaulting young women (as he also had done to hundreds of girls training with USA Gymnastics. To avoid individual lawsuits, MSU is paying $500 million to 332 alleged victims of Nassar's assaults, a record amount paid by any university in a sexual abuse/assault case. It was also fined $4.5 million by the US Department of Education, in part for its collective failure to respond to reports of abuse that began in the late-1990s and continued through 2015. The MSU president, athletic director, a provost, and a medical school dean all resigned in the face of allegations that they violated a law mandating that suspected abuse must be reported immediately to local police or child protective services. Nassar was sentenced to 175 years in prison. The MSU president faces criminal charges because she lied to police about her knowledge of complaints about Nassar.

For many years, student culture was studied simply in terms of the factors that high school students used to determine popularity. Research usually found that male students wished they could be remembered as "athletic stars" in high school, whereas female students wished to be remembered as "brilliant students" or "the most popular." Although these priorities have changed over the last two generations, the link between popularity and being an athlete has remained relatively strong for male students (Shakib et al., 2011). At the same time, the link between popularity and being an athlete has become stronger for female students, although other characteristics, such as physical appearance and social skills, are also important—more important than they are for young men.

Most high school students today are concerned with academic achievement and attending college; furthermore, their parents regularly emphasize these priorities. But students also are concerned with four other things: (1) social acceptance, (2) personal autonomy, (3) sexual identity, and (4) becoming an adult. They want to have friends they can depend on, control their lives, feel comfortable with their sexual identity, and be taken seriously as young adults.

Of course, there was loud opposition to the bill from NCAA officials, the commissioner of the PAC-12 Conference, and coaches and athletic directors at California's major universities. They painted pictures of disruption, chaos, and post-apocalyptic despair if the bill becomes law. But they have their work cut out for them because there are similar legislative efforts being made in a number of other states and in the US Congress.

My guess is that the US Supreme Court may have the last word on this. In the meantime, these changes are supported by many professional athletes, the National Labor Relations Board, the Steelworkers Union, The Drake Group, the National College Players Association, and the College Athletes Players Association (Bivens, 2017).

Parents pay participation fees, assist coaches with never-ending fund-raising events for teams, operate concession stands, and work behind the scenes to support their children who play or watch games. Coaches and school athletic program staff are paid, and they are part of a district and state structure consisting of people who are full-time sport management staff with offices and expense accounts. There also are people hired to do pre- and post-game cleanup of gyms, bleacher areas, and outdoor fields. Others are hired to groom and line the fields, repair damage to equipment and facilities, and set up bleachers and scoring tables. Referees are trained and hired, and the physical facilities of the entire school are managed to host up to three or four events per week smoothly and safely. Finally, local journalists and other newspeople come to and report on games as the only school activities worth covering in local news.

Now imagine if all this time, energy, and material resources were used to create curricula, engage in well-planned course projects, maintain classrooms and laboratories, train and pay teachers, reward students for academic accomplishments, present the school as a valuable learning site to the entire community, supervise student-generated intramurals and clubs sports, and guide teams of students in community service projects (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b). Would learning be defined as more central to students and in the overall organization of schools if these things replaced varsity sports? This is what occurs in many other post-industrial countries that are ranked far higher than the United States when it comes to student knowledge and test scores in math, reading, and world affairs.

Why would the NCAA, in their statements about the financial status of Division I schools, "hide" $5.85 billion from public view and lead people to think that 205 out of 230 (66 percent of Division I members) athletic departments lose money every year? When I analyze the data for 2017-18 (as presented by USA Today), I conclude that 111 Division I athletic programs in public colleges and universities report more total revenues than total expenses, 27 programs claim that they broke even for the year, and 92 say that they had more total expenses than total revenues. That means that 60 percent of all Division I athletic departments showed an operational profit for the year.

Of course, the NCAA would say that they are being honest when they report that only a few programs show a net profit, even if they do withhold data and do not say that they all private schools are excluded in their data. Others would say that the NCAA is not disclosing all relevant financial information about athletic programs (Ridpath, 2019). Critics suggest that NCAA claims of financial distress are used to justify one or more of the following factors that support their financial interests: 1. Their insistence that college sports are amateur activities, not commercial or professional activities—a point that they have made to defend themselves in dozens of lawsuits filed against them 2. Their nonprofit status that is approved by federal and state governments—which means that they don't pay taxes on income and wealthy donors can deduct their contributions to athletic departments on their tax returns 3. The use of student fees at a time when student debt is altering the lives of millions of students and their families to the point that it has become a national crisis (Hsu, 2019) 4. The use of state money allocated to the university at a time when academic departments face serious budget cuts that compromise educational quality 5. Their claims that athletic programs don't have enough money to pay compensation to athletes or allow athletes to make endorsement deals that would reduce the endorsements received by athletic departments

Senator Murphy also referred to a young man who played football at Oklahoma State University who used a different strategy to reduce his dual career conflict. He went to his academic advisors in the athletic department and they completed assignments for his courses. He explained that when he was assigned papers to write, "I would write them, and they would take them and just completely change everything about it ... I never really learned how to write a paper, but I [stayed eligible for football]" (Murphy, 2019b, p. 2).

Of course, these are not the only ways to manage dual-career conflict, but they have been common enough to prompt Senator Murphy's investigation of the long-assumed educational relevance of intercollegiate sports. In fact, as he reviewed reliable evidence collected by journalists and scholars, he concluded the following: Unfortunately, the NCAA and many of its member schools too often care more about the appearance of educating athletes than they do about actually educating them. That façade of educational opportunity manifests in too many former athletes left "worn, torn, and asking questions"... (Murphy, 2019b. p. 3).

Academic frauds have occurred regularly in college sports (AP, 2016; Murphy, 2019b; New, 2016; O'Donnell, 2016; Ridpath & Gurney, 2015; Tracy, 2014). But "the mother of all academic frauds" occurred at the University of North Carolina between 1993 and 2011 (Smith, undated; Smith & Willingham, 2015). During those 18 years, over 3,100 students, over half of whom were athletes, took at least 200 bogus courses for which they received high grades (usually As) for doing no work, handing in no assignments, and attending no class sessions. The courses were offered in an African American Studies program, and they were listed as being taught by the head and only faculty member in the program. Over many of those 18 years, the courses were created and listed by the secretary for the program. She was an ardent fan of UNC sports and often took a day off to recover when the football or basketball team lost a game. She listed the classes, received class rosters, and turned in grades for students. Athletes were advised to take the classes by a number of academic counselors who saw that high grades were common in them and would keep athletes eligible. After some people suspected fraud, it took the university about five years to begin its own investigation.

Over the course of the fraud, athletes remained eligible and the UNC basketball team won three national championships. Some coaches knew about the fake courses, generally referred to as "paper classes," but said nothing. A 3-year NCAA investigation concluded that there was no fraud because its rule left such determinations up to universities, and UNC at that time claimed that the courses were legitimate. The NCAA also concluded that there were no rule violations because the bogus courses were open to all students and not offered exclusively for athletes (Bauer-Wolf, 2017). These conclusions protected everyone connected with UNC sports, and the NCAA did not penalize UNC or the athletic department, even though athletes and teams benefitted from major academic fraud. Full public disclosure of the fraud did not occur until Mary Willingham, a learning specialist, who often found that athletes in revenue-producing sports had decent grades but needed help in learning how to read. With assistance, she did her own investigation and reported what she found (Ganim & Sayers, 2014; Murphy, 2019; Smith, undated; Smith and Willingham, 2015; Wiseman & Kane, 2019).

This is a challenging time for college sports, especially at the big-time level. They are facing more issues today than at any time in the past century. Scandals and rule violations, lawsuits related to player compensation, and distorted racial and ethnic priorities are discussed in this section.

Over the past decade there are too many scandals and major rule violations in NCAA athletic programs to list here (Dohrmann & Evans, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d, 2013e, 2013f; Fitzsimmons & Tracy, 2018; Harper & Donnor, 2017). However, recent cases fall into four categories: sexual abuse and assault, academic fraud, college admissions cheating, and bribery involving coaches, sponsors, and athletes. They involve criminal actions as well as violations of NCAA and university rules. Overall, they suggest that some universities have lost institutional control of athletic departments, and the NCAA has been largely ineffective in deterring and punishing corrupt and criminal actions in college sports.

A factor that has not been studied is the control that parents, teachers, and coaches have over the lives of athletes on school teams, especially when the athletes are "in season" and their daily activities, especially academic activities, are closely monitored by coaches and parents (Schultz, 2017). Homework checks, study halls, grade checks, class attendance, and even assessment of dress code conformity are standard procedures in the lives of athletes when their season is ongoing. Although this probably adds structure to daily schedules, its impact on learning, academic achievement, and general development is not known.

Overall, school sports have selection-in, filtering-out, and in-season control processes, each of which contributes to differences between athletes and other students even though these differences have nothing to do with the impact of sports participation itself on various aspects of development. To control for these processes and determine if and when playing sports produces unique, positive educational or developmental outcomes, researchers must collect data at regular intervals over multiple years from an entire sample of students so they can measure and track changes that are due to sports participation rather than other things.

Seventy-seven percent of all black male athletes played football or basketball—the only sports that produced revenues and the sports with the lowest graduation rates. This also means that, in some Division I PWIs, black male athletes consistently generate revenues that fund other sport teams consisting of mostly or all white players from families that have much higher incomes than the families from which the black payers come—which is an interesting form of "welfare for white athletes" that is seldom discussed. The same revenues also pay multi-million dollar salaries to a growing number of white coaches and salaries of a million dollars or more to white athletic directors, an increasing number of white assistant and strength coaches, and conference commissioners as well as NCAA executives. As sociology of sport scholar, Billie Hawkins (2010), has said for many years, this situation resembles a contemporary plantation system in which the labor of black workers makes their white bosses wealthy.

Overall, these data suggest that if African Americans excel in revenue-producing sports, PWIs with big-time sports programs will actively identify and recruit them, but the same universities do a poor job of recruiting African American students who don't excel at scoring touchdowns or making jump shots. There is no denying that a few African Americans benefit from athletic scholarships. But the problem is that universities have capitalized on the racist myth that blacks can use sports to improve their lives, while ignoring their responsibility to recruit black students and change the social climate on campus so that black students feel welcome, supported, and respected, even if they don't score touchdowns or 20 points a game. In the meantime, the number of African Americans attending college is dropping, and 99.9 percent of all college age African Americans do not have athletic scholarships, and most are unable to pay the costs of higher education.

Each of these measures is useful in certain ways, but each also has problems. First, the FGR counts all transfer students as "nongraduates" and includes part-time students in the general student body. This makes the graduation rate for athletes look better in comparison because they are full-time students with scholarships. Second, the GSR excludes athletes who leave the university in good academic standing and then includes them in the GSR of the program into which they transfer. But for every three athletes who leave a program when they are still academically eligible, only one transfers into another program. This means that about two-thirds of all transferring athletes (and about 16 percent of all athletes) are missing from the data. These athletes did not graduate, but the GSR formula counts them as if they did, thereby inflating the athlete graduation rate (Gurney et al., 2017; Murphy, 2019b). Third, neither the GSR nor APR involve comparisons with the rest of the student body, so there is no external baseline for comparing how athletes perform academically. These latter two measures treat athletes as a special academic category that is compared only to what athlete peers have done in the past.

Overall, these three measures of academic performance exaggerate academic success for athletes, teams, and athletic departments. For this reason, Richard Southall and his colleagues in the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI) at the University of South Carolina, developed the Adjusted Graduation Gap (AGG). It compares an adjusted FGR for the full-time students at a university with the FGR of athletes on Division I football, men's and women's basketball, softball, and baseball teams. As published in reports by the CSRI, the AGG data indicate that athletes generally have significantly lower graduation rates than the other students in their universities. Some of the most recent data available are presented in Table 2. As you can see, the AGG data make it possible to do comparisons by sport, conference, national team ranking, race, and gender.

Most high school sports programs are funded through school district appropriations that come from property taxes. Declared expenditures for these programs usually account for less than two percent of school operating budgets. When certain sports have large budgets, money also comes from gate receipts and booster club donations. In the face of recent budget shortfalls, many high schools have used various fund-raising strategies such as charging sport participation fees, fund-raising through booster clubs, and seeking corporate sponsorships. But each of these alternatives has a downside.

Participation fees privilege students from well-to-do families, discourage students from low-income families, and create socioeconomic divisions in the student body. But they are widely used and range from a low of $25 to a high of over $1000 for some sports that require big budgets to pay for equipment, travel, and facilities. Some families pay hundreds of dollars for their children to be on the rosters of school teams, which creates problems for coaches when parents who paid the fees make it known that they don't want their child sitting on the bench.

Most people in the United States don't question the existence of school-sponsored sports. However, budget cutbacks and highly publicized problems in some programs raise questions about the relationship between these sports, the development of young people, and the achievement of educational goals. Responses to these questions vary and almost always are based on strong emotions rather than good research evidence.

Program supporters claim that interscholastic sports promote the educational mission of schools and the development of young people. Critics claim that they interfere with that mission and distract students from learning and taking seriously their emerging responsibilities as citizens.

Do interscholastic sports affect the educational and developmental experiences of high school students? This question is difficult to answer. Education and development occur in connection with many activities and relationships. Even though interscholastic sports are important in most schools and the lives of many students, they constitute only one of many potentially influential experiences in the lives of young people.

Quantitative research on this issue has seldom been guided by social theories, and it generally consists of comparing the characteristics of athletes with the characteristics of other students. Qualitative research, often based on a critical approach and guided by combinations of cultural, interactionist, and structural theories, has focused on the connections between interscholastic sports, the culture and organization of high schools, and the everyday lives of students.

A related problem is that many black athletes feel isolated on campuses where there are few black students, faculty, and administrators (Bimper, 2015; Bruening et al., 2005; Carter-Francique, Dortch & Carter-Phiri, 2017; Comeaux and Fuentes, 2015; Griffith, Hurd & Hussain, 2019; Harper, 2006, 2018; Hattery, Kiss & Smith, 2018; Hawkins, 2010; Hawkins et al., 2015; Hawkins, Carter-Francique & Cooper, 2016; Maples et al, 2019; Martin et al., 2010; Singer and Carter-Francique, 2013; Smith, 2009; Torres, 2009). This isolation is intensified by many factors, including these:

Racial and athletic stereotypes make it difficult for black athletes to feel welcome on campus and develop relationships that support their academic success. Athletes must devote so much time to their sports that it is difficult for them to become involved in other spheres of campus life. The lack of a proportional number of black coaches, faculty, and support staff available in the university and the athletic department for black athletes in need of knowledgeable guidance and mentoring. Campus activities often fail to represent the interests and experiences of black students, who consequently often feel like outsiders. When campus life is unrelated to their experiences, black athletes may withdraw from activities that could connect them with other students. White students who lack experience in racially diverse groups may feel uncomfortable interacting with black students from backgrounds unlike their own. When white students think that black athletes are privileged due to the scholarships that they may have, it creates tension that undermines meaningful interaction.

This selection-in process is common; students who participate in official, school-sponsored activities tend to be different from other students. This difference is greatest in activities in which student self-selection is combined with eligibility requirements and formal tryouts in which teachers or coaches select students for participation. Additionally, this combination of self-selection, eligibility, and coach selection, is an extension of a long-term process that begins in youth sports. Over time, students with lower grades and poor disciplinary records decide they don't want to be involved in sports, or they aren't academically eligible to participate, or coaches see them as troublemakers and cut them during tryouts.

Research also shows that students who play varsity sports for three years during high school are different from those who are cut from or quit teams. Those who are cut or quit are more likely to come from less advantaged economic backgrounds, have lower cognitive abilities, lower self-esteem, and lower grade point averages than those who remain on teams (Child Trends, 2013; Pearson et al., 2009; Pot et al., 2014; Shifrer et al., 2013). Furthermore, athletes who receive failing grades are declared ineligible and become "nonathletes" and have their low grades included in the "nonathlete category" when researchers collect data and compare the grades of eligible athletes with the grades of nonathletes. This creates unreliable research results.

During the 1990s, it appears that many young women used this power to resist sexual relationships that they defined as inappropriate or exploitive, whereas young men used their power to gain sexual favors from young women. But these patterns identified in studies done twenty years ago could be different today or change in the future as the meanings given to being on school teams change and as there are shifts in students' ideas about sexual relationships.

Research also suggests that identifying oneself exclusively as an athlete in some US high schools connects a student with peers who are socially gregarious and more likely than other students to engage in risky actions such as heavy and binge drinking (Miller and Hoffman, 2009; Miller et al., 2005; Veliz et al., 2017). This issue needs more study, but it seems that playing on certain school teams provides students with more choices for aligning themselves with various cliques or social groups that have different priorities for what they like to do. The choices made by athletes probably influence how others identify them and where they fit into the overall social organization of the school. In some cases, this "positions" them with others who value academic work, whereas in other cases, it positions them so they focus on social activities with other who like to party even if it detracts from academic achievement.

Senator Murphy's conclusion was not a surprise to those of us familiar with studies of big-time intercollegiate sports over the past half-century. Research by sociologists Patricia and Peter Adler came to the same conclusion in the 1980s when expectations associated with sports training were less demanding than they are today. The Adlers didn't talk about dual-career conflict; rather, they focused on "role conflicts" between the athletic, academic, and social expectations in the lives of young men on a Division I basketball team. They used the concept of "role engulfment" to explain how the demands and rewards associated with being an athlete were so overwhelming and attractive that the young men were quickly "engulfed by it" to the exclusion of other roles (Adler & Adler, 1991). As this occurred, their athlete identity became so central to their sense of self that they had little time and energy to nurture their academic and other identities.

Research clearly shows that young people manage dual-career conflict in different ways depending on a combination of their personal resources and the support they receive from family, friends, teammates, teachers, coaches, mentors, and the school they attend. The availability of these resources and support systems vary depending on the socio-economic status of the young person's family, the quality of their educational background, their past experiences in school and sports; their gender, race, ethnicity; their academic and athletic abilities; and the cultures of their team and campus (Bernhard, 2014; Bimper, 2016, 2017; Cooper, 2019; Dorsch et al., 2016; Feezell, 2015; Fuller & Bailey, 2018; Fuller, Harrison & Bukstein, 2017; Harper, 2018; Kaye, Lowe & Dorsch, 2019; Oseguera et al., 2018; Parietti, Sutherland & Pastore, 2017; Ridpath & Tudor, 2018; Rubin & Moses, 2017; Smith & Willingham, 2015). The influence of these factors is discussed in the following sections of this chapter.

When people enter this debate, they often exaggerate the benefits or problems associated with interscholastic sports. Supporters emphasize glowing success stories, and critics emphasize shocking cases of excess and abuse.

Research suggests that the most accurate descriptions lie somewhere in between these extreme positions. Nonetheless, supporters and critics call our attention to the relationship between sports and education. This chapter focuses on what we know about that relationship.

The amount of money spent every year on intercollegiate sports varies from less than $100,000 at some small colleges to over $200 million at the University of Texas. There are 146 Division I universities with budgets over $100 million, not counting private universities that do not share budget data (Wolken, Berkowitz & DeMeyer, 2019). Large universities usually sponsor ten to eighteen varsity sports for men and a similar number for women, whereas small colleges may have only a few varsity sports and many club teams. The sociological implications of these differences are significant because they represent very different contexts for sports participation and the role of the athletic program in the culture and organization of campus life.

Schools with intercollegiate sports are generally affiliated with one of two national associations: the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). The NCAA is the largest and most powerful association, with close to 1200 member institutions, nearly 500,000 athletes, and revenues of well over $1 billion per year for the national headquarters. Member institutions are divided into five major categories, reflecting program size, level of competition, and the rules that govern sports programs. Division I includes (in 2018-2019) 354 schools with "big-time" programs. This division contains three subdivisions:4 The Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) consists of 130 universities that have big-time football teams; each institution is allotted eighty-five full scholarships for football players. The Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) consists of 126 universities that have football programs and are allotted only sixty-three scholarships that can be awarded to or split between no more than eighty-five students. The Non-Football (NF) subdivision consists of 98 universities that do not have football teams but have big-time basketball and/or other big-time sports.

For example, playing on a junior varsity team or being a mediocre player on a varsity fencing team often has different implications for the status and identity of a young man in comparison with being an all-state football or basketball player on a state-championship team—even if the fencer is on a team at a private school that has produced many college and Olympic champions in that sport.

Similarly, being a young woman ranked the number-one high school tennis player in the state would involve different status and identity implications from being a young woman who is a substitute on the junior varsity softball team.

Where are disability sports in high schools and colleges? For all practical purposes, they are invisible. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) has sanctioned fourteen "adapted sports", but fewer than one percent of high schools—less than 200 out of over 19,500 US high schools—have teams in any of these sports. More than 7.9 million students play on "standard" high school sport teams and about 15,500 students play on adapted sport teams (NFHS, 2019).6

Some athletes with a disability play on standard teams, but apart from them, there is only one varsity athlete in adapted sports for every 510 athletes on high school teams. Students with a disability are "off the radar" for most high school sports programs. Consequently, students miss opportunities to play with and watch their peers with various (dis)abilities compete and share sports experiences with them. This is a missed educational opportunity for all students.

NCAA Divisions II and III contain 319 and 449 schools, respectively. These schools have smaller programs and compete at less than a big-time level, although competition often is intense. Division II schools may award limited scholarships but rarely give a full scholarship to an athlete. Division III schools do not award athletic scholarships unless they sponsor one or more teams that compete at a Division I level. For example, Colorado College, a liberal arts school with about 2000 students has 16 varsity teams. Fourteen teams compete at the Division III level, and men's ice hockey and women's soccer compete at the Division I level.

Some colleges and universities choose to affiliate with the NAIA rather than the NCAA. The NAIA has about 250 member schools, an estimated 65,000 athletes, and annual revenues of about $8.5 million. NAIA schools can compete in 26 sports, 13 for men and 13 for women. Athletic scholarships are not common and seldom cover more than 25 percent of college costs Most member institutions are small private schools, many with religious affiliation, and their athletic programs have minimal budgets. The NAIA struggles to maintain members in the face of NCAA power and influence.

It is difficult to predict how quickly educators will respond to the Department of Education guidelines and take seriously the sport participation of students with disabilities. It could take decades for measureable progress to be made and at least a generation before participation opportunities for students with a disability are a taken-for-granted part of secondary and higher education.

Some high school administrators, athletic directors, and coaches think that educational quality is somehow linked to the development of a sports program that focuses on winning records and being ranked highly among schools in the state or nation. Their goal is to achieve excellence, but their definition of excellence is often modeled after big-time intercollegiate programs. This leads to the emergence of a sports culture in which participants are expected to represent their schools and communities by giving priority to their training, being dedicated to achieving excellence, and being willing to make sacrifices for the team. Winning becomes proof of excellence and losing indicates a need for more training, dedication, and sacrifice. It has also led to building $70 million football stadiums, hiring 11 coaches for football alone, and creating high school academies that accept athletes only and give priority to developing athletic skills (Gay, 2018; O'Brien, 2016; Reagan & Schwartzel, 2017; Riddle, 2019).

Without asking these critical questions, schools end up spending much more to support athletes than regular students (Marklein, 2013). To question these spending patterns in the United States is to invite widespread criticism grounded in highly charged emotions, defensiveness, and personal attacks. The criticism consists mostly of statements about "what sports meant to me" and "what sports mean to my kids." But these responses actually support the relevance of the question, because they clearly show how important sports have become in schools, and how people take this for granted without asking serious questions about their educational relevance.

Spending so much on sports would be viewed as strange by students from countries with highly rated educational systems, where they learn about teamwork, how to handle failure and success, how to work hard and complete projects, how to be resilient when learning is difficult in their classes, and through projects that they do with classmates (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b). This is not to say that young people from these countries do not play sports. They do, and sports are important to many of them. But for them, sports are community-based and do not dominate the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of their schools (Ridpath, 2018).

People who focus on sports development often give lip service to keeping sports in proper perspective but fail to acknowledge that emphasizing sports in the school marginalizes many students with no interest in power and performance sports. In their zeal to create and maintain excellence on the field of play, administrators may overlook the educational needs of all students in the school.

Sports development today goes hand in hand with informal requirements that athletes specialize in a single sport year-round, even though this may limit their overall social and educational development. This approach turns off students who want to play sports but don't want to make them the center of their lives. At the same time, other students become so dedicated to sports that they see education as secondary in their lives at school.

As this occurs around the United States, schools with top teams in football and boys' and girls' basketball seek national ranking and play games out of state as they face off with the other high-budget teams across the country. Some people have suggested that there should be regional or even a national conference for these teams so they could play each other every year and sell broadcast rights to games. Inequality in high school programs has led officials in some states to reassign teams to different conferences and realign levels of competition to reduce the number of lopsided and embarrassing scores as well as injuries in contact sports. Private prep schools with well-funded and highly professionalized sports programs have become so dominant across all sports in some regions that other schools refuse to play them. At the same time, schools in low-income areas don't have the resources to maintain their sports programs with proper facilities, equipment, and coaching.

Sports program inequality is gradually becoming a castelike system that reproduces itself year after year. Adding to this trend is the fact that the best high school athletes are increasingly coming out of youth sports club programs in which participation costs are so high that they exclude well over half the young people in most regions of the country. This means that young people from relatively wealthy families have best opportunities to develop their skills, attend high schools with high profile sports programs, and then receive the majority of athletic scholarships in college—scholarships that, for some of them, have more status value than financial value, because they have enough money to pay college expenses.

Sports are usually among the most important activities sponsored by high schools, and being on a school team can bring students prestige among peers, formal rewards in the school, and recognition from teachers, administrators, and people in the local community. Athletes, especially boys in high-profile sports, often are accorded recognition that enhances their popularity in student culture. Pep rallies, homecomings, and other sports events are major social occasions on school calendars.

Students often enjoy these events because they provide opportunities for social interaction outside the classroom. Parents favor them because they're associated with the school and the students are controlled by school authorities; therefore, they will allow their children to attend games and matches even when they forbid them from going other places. The popularity of school sports has led sociologists to ask questions about their impact on students' values, attitudes, actions, and experiences.

The fact that much of the evidence collected by the FBI was never disclosed has led investigative journalists to suggest that many Division I basketball programs are involved in similar schemes. The FBI analysis of the undisclosed evidence continues but there is no guarantee that it will be made public or used to file charges. In the meantime, no head coaches or top executives at Adidas were fired with the exception of Rick Pitino, the head coach at Louisville, but his termination was also tied to other incidents, including an affair with the wife of his team's equipment manager, paying her to have an abortion, and overseeing a basketball program in which assistant coaches supplied strippers and prostitutes to impress high school recruits and retain current players (Sokolov, 2018).

The NCAA has insisted for years that college sports are amateur activities and that college athletes are first and foremost students. This position has been the basis for its legal defense in dozens of major court cases in which the organization has been sued by athletes for not allowing them to have the same rights as other students, for not protecting their health, and for not allowing them to have a meaningful voice in determining the conditions of their sport participation. But this defense is becoming more difficult because Division I sports programs are highly commercialized and "professional-like" when it comes to revenues, the price of tickets to big-time college football and men's basketball games, sponsorship deals with major shoe and apparel companies, billion-dollar media rights contracts, and multimillion-dollar salaries for coaches, conference commissioners, and athletic directors (Branch, 2019). Additionally, college athletes in big-time programs now have regular access to information that has increased their awareness of issues that impact them negatively.

As a form of physical activity and exercise, sports can be important in educational terms. However, this depends on how they are organized, the context in which they are played, and the meanings given to them. Unfortunately, when it comes to most high school and college sports we have ignored these conditional factors and used the great sport myth to assume that all sports are essentially educational and that playing sports always involves positive and valuable learning experiences.

The belief in the great sport myth has prevented educators, including coaches, from having critical discussions about what they want to happen in school-sponsored sports, how they can use teaching and learning theory (pedagogy) to make those things happen, and how they can determine if they've been successful. As a result, they have created a specialized form of elite, competitive sports in US schools without having systematically collected evidence or developed sound educational theory to justify their decision or guide its implementation.

Public high schools and colleges have different budget issues because of how they are funded, although private high schools and colleges face similar issues.

The financial stakes associated with big-time intercollegiate sports puts about 250 universities in a budget category of their own.

In the face of potential and real legal challenges to the NCAA concept of amateurism, officials in the organization regularly change its definition to fit their interests and the changing conditions of college sports. For example, when the NCAA appointed a committee in 2019 to examine the issue of athletes having the freedom—as all other students have—to benefit from the use of their names, images, and likenesses, they had this to say:

The group will not consider any concepts that could be construed as payment for participation in college sports. ...[It]will study modifications of current rules, policies and practices [and]focus on solutions that tie any changes to education ... and maintain the clear demarcation between professional and college sports; and further align student-athletes with the general student body (Wolkin, 2019).

These trends appear to be turning high school sports into pre-professional programs with excessive costs, well connected and demanding coaches, and opportunities that only economically privileged families can afford—and they do so willingly because they don't want to compete for scholarships with students from poor and working-class families (Farrey, 2017; Thompson, 2019). This may be one of the reasons why participation in high school sports decreased for the first time in three decades during the 2018-19 academic year, even though the number of students in high schools increased (Thompson, 2019). The high cost, high pressure programs eliminate potential participants whose families cannot afford them and those who are not willing to dedicate their high schools years to playing on professionalized teams.

The inequality in college sports programs is most visible and has the greatest impact in Division I of the NCAA. The absolute dollar differences in Division I budgets are staggering. For example, the the total expenses for the top five spending universities in Division I are greater than the total expenses for the 77 lowest spending universities in the same division. For all practical purposes the athletic programs in the universities that belong to the Power Five conferences exist in a totally different world than the programs in the other Division I universities. They basically operate quasi-professional programs and have organizational autonomy enabling them to make rules that fit their unique circumstances. The NCAA refers to this new approach as "reform," but it has further increased inequality in Division I without reducing dual-career conflict for the young people in their programs or meaningfully reducing the power that their coaches have over their lives.

As research continues to show that repetitive subconcussive head trauma can cause temporary or permanent brain damage that could affect learning, test scores, grades, college admissions, future job prospects, and general health and well-being, lawsuits will be filed. Defendants in those lawsuits are high schools, coaches, athletic directors and principals, district and state athletic directors, and boards of education. Regardless of the possible legal outcomes, the mere threat of personal and school liability has caused insurance companies to rewrite policies in which damages due to head injuries in collision sports are not covered. As one insurance executive stated, "if you're [sponsoring] football, hockey or soccer, the insurance business doesn't want you" (in Fainaru & Fainaru-Wada, 2019). At the same time, executives from sports organizations claim that organized sports, especially those in educational institutions, cannot exist unless they have insurance protecting schools and coaches from liability for head injuries. This means that dealing with head trauma among athletes is no longer a choice. To avoid assertive actions puts schools, school districts, and state high school activities associations on the line as well as the careers and family assets of personnel associated with sports.

The issue of concussions and other serious injuries plays out in a slightly different way at the college level. Nearly all athletes in college have reached the age of (informed) legal consent. But this means that the NCAA, universities, athletic departments, and teams have the responsibility to fully inform athletes of the risks they agree to take in their sport. For many years, these parties have been slow to respond and grossly negligent. Universities have not provided in-depth education sessions to inform athletes of the risks they face in certain sport situations, despite having concussion and brain trauma experts on their faculties and in their medical schools, and despite claiming that college sports are important educational experiences (Tjong et al., 2017).

Foley noted that sports were socially important because they presented students with a vocabulary they could use to identify values and interpret their everyday experiences. For example, most sports came with a vocabulary that extolled individualism, competition, and "natural" differences related to sex, skin color, ethnicity, and social class. As students learned and used this vocabulary, they perpetuated the culture and social organization of their school and town. In the process, traditional ideologies related to gender, race, and class continued to influence social relations in the town's culture, even though some people questioned and revised those ideologies and redefined their importance in their lives.

The point of Foley's study and other research on socialization as a community process is that the most important social consequences of high school sports are not their impact on grades and popularity but their impact on the overall culture of the school and community as well as young people's ideas about social life and social relations. Examples of this are highlighted in the PBS Frontline documentary "Football High"

In contrast, people, including educators, in the United States, uncritically assume that sports are so crucial in the organization of schools that no one even thinks of discussing this issue or what US education might be like if sports were community-based rather than school-sponsored activities (Ridpath, 2018). It seems that, the great sport myth is so widely accepted that it undermines critical thinking about the ways that school spirit might be more effectively generated and organized around something other than sport events in which most people are spectators (Ripley, 2013a, 2013b).

The spirit associated with high-profile intercollegiate sports is exciting for some students, but only a small proportion of the student body attends even highly publicized games. Either the students aren't interested or the athletic department limits student tickets so they can sell seats at a higher price to other fans, even when student fees subsidize athletic departments and teams.

As the NCAA has increased eligibility standards, coaches have faced a difficult choice. Either they can recruit only the athletes that meet the academic entrance requirements of their university or they can recruit the best athletes, even if they are poorly prepared for college. If they choose the second alternative—the choice that nearly all coaches make—academic support programs become a key part of big-time athletic departments. The financial stakes associated with winning are so high that they must provide academic support that maintains the eligibility of athletes, regardless of academic preparation or the athletes' interest in academic success.

The stated role of people working in an athletic department's academic support program is to facilitate the academic development and success of athletes. But the fact that the program is administered by and located in the athletic department raises questions about their goals. These questions are asked every time it is reported that academic support staff wrote papers and did other assignments for athletes, or even found people to take tests for the athletes (Benedict & Keteyian, 2013; Dohrmann and Evans, 2013c; Smith and Willingham, 2015). The regularity of academic fraud occurring in academic support programs has led David Ridpath, an expert on intercollegiate sports, to say that, "It makes no sense to have an academic support unit controlled by athletics" (in Kelderman, 2018). He adds that these programs should be organized and controlled by an academic unit and by faculty and staff that report directly to the top academic officer on campus. When the programs exist in athletic departments, there are too many vested interests and pressures to make sure that athletes are eligible no matter how it is done.

Research published over the past half century presents mixed and confusing findings about the effects of playing school sports. This is because most researchers assume that playing on a school team has the same meaning in all contexts for all athletes in all sports and therefore must have the same consequences. But this is not true. Meanings vary widely depending on three factors:

The status given to athletes and sports in various school and community contexts The identities that young people develop or fail to develop because they play sports The ways that young people integrate sports and an athlete identity into their lives

This outcome is so incompatible with the goals of higher education and the stated goals of intercollegiate sports that Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut initiated an investigation of college athletics in which he examined, among other things, "how programs fail to provide a full education to their student-athletes ..." (Murphy, 2019a, p. 13). During Senator Murphy's investigation, he referred to the experiences of a young man who played football as a student at Kansas State University. The young man had planned to be a veterinarian, but meeting the expectations of his coach reduced the time and energy he had for his academic career. To manage this dual-career conflict, he redefined his academic plans, changed his major, and took less demanding courses to stay eligible and do what his coach and teammates expected. After he graduated, he had this to say:

The whole time ... I felt stuck - stuck in football, stuck in my major. Now I look back and say, 'well what did I really go to college for?' Crap classes you won't use the rest of your life? I was majoring in football (Murphy, 2019b, p. 2).

The relationship between sports and school budgets at the college level is complex. Intercollegiate sports at small colleges are relatively low-budget activities funded through student fees and money from the general fund and the college president's office. The 2018-19 budgets at 130 NCAA FBS universities range from about 4.2 million (Coppin State) million to over $2.2 billion at the University of Texas, Austin. However, accounting systems vary from one university to the next, making it difficult to compare revenues and expenses from one sports program to the next. For example, some departments may "hide" profits to maintain their nonprofit status for tax purposes or to rise more money, and others may "hide" losses to avoid criticisms that sports teams are too costly to maintain.

There are at least 1700 intercollegiate sport programs in the United States, excluding nearly 450 junior and community college teams. As of 2019, the NCAA accounted for 1122 of those programs. Financial information for Division I is presented in Table 14.3. According to the NCAA's interpretation of that information, fewer than 25 of the athletic programs in Division I generate more money than they spend, although I count 28 in the USA Today presentation of NCAA data.5 This is close to being true, but it is a deceptive conclusion because it is based only on the information in columns B, C, and the top dollar amount in each of the cells in column F. Therefore, if you take only generated revenues and subtract total expenses for each subdivision, the result is a net deficit in each case. For example, the net deficit for the FBS is -$1.13 billion, and the total net deficit for all three subdivisions is -$2.53 billion.

Whether or not esports fit our preferred definition of sports, they are embraced by an increasing number of school administrators, teachers, and students as valuable student recruiting tools, unique learning experiences, and engaging and challenging activities. Overall, high school and college esports is a hot topic today. They are covered in mainstream media stories and have recently become a topic for articles in professional and scholarly journals.

There are many sociological questions to be asked about esports, but sociologists have been slow to ask them, and this is also true for the sociology of sport. In this chapter, one of our concerns is whether sports will merge with existing sports programs or enter secondary and higher education in other ways. So far, it appears that they are fully embraced by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). This organization has formed a partnership with Play VS, an online gaming platform provider, to coordinate esports competitions in high schools across the United States. This involves a process of introducing students to competitive gaming and making it clear that team members must meet the same eligibility rules used in traditional high school sports. Administrators, teachers, and coaches learn that esports participants are to be treated the same as traditional athletes in school announcements, convocations, and awards ceremonies. During the first esports season in 2019, five states held championships, and other states were ready to join them in 2020

For nearly four decades the NCAA has tried to improve the academic experiences and graduation rates of college athletes. At the same time, research indicates that there has been a growing separation between the culture of intercollegiate sports and the general university culture (Cooper, 2019; Gurney, 2018; Gurney, Lopiano & Zimblist, 2017; Hawkins, 2010; Lawrence et al., 2007; Murphy, 2019b; Nixon, 2014; Ridpath, 2018; Smith and Willingham, 2015). This separation is fueled by historical, commercial, and political factors that currently shape the culture of college sports (Nixon, 2014). These factors are so powerful that a group of college professors formed The Drake Group (TDG, https://www.thedrakegroup.org/), the goal of which is to reform intercollegiate sports and defend academic integrity in higher education. TDG recently lobbied the US Congress, and asked it to investigate the nonprofit status of college sports teams that are organized to make money. When Congress formed an investigative committee, the NCAA lobbied Congress and highlighted academic success stories in college sports and the committee pulled back its investigation. TDG continues to be active and makes the case that the educational mission of universities will not be fully realized until college sports are monitored by an independent agency committed to higher education.

There is no shortage of recommendations to reform intercollegiate sports, but the power of commercial interests in the current system leads many of us who have studied college sports to be skeptical about the possibility of meaningful change. Others remain hopeful that the NCAA can make changes that enable all athletes to successfully manage dual-career conflict. My sense is that the vested interests in the current organization and financial payoffs generated by big-time intercollegiate sports are so great that meaningful changes will not occur until a crisis disrupts the system and forces people to save it by completely reorganizing it.

Although it's important to study the educational relevance of all college sports programs, most research focuses on Division I universities, mostly those in the FBS subdivision.

Therefore, this chapter, based on the literature in the sociology of sport and other disciplines, provides a limited view of intercollegiate sports. This is important to remember when we discuss issues and problems because they vary widely from one division to the next.

Overall, research in the sociology of sport indicates that the effects of playing school sports depend on the contexts in which sports are played, the organization of sports programs and teams, and the social characteristics of athletes (Crissey and Honea, 2006; Fox et al., 2010; Hartmann, 2008; Hartmann and Massoglia, 2007; Hartmann et al., 2012; Overman, 2018; Pearson et al., 2009).

Therefore, when young, white women from upper-middle-class families play lacrosse in a small, private, elite prep school where grades are all-important, the effects of participation are likely to be different from the effects that occur when young ethnic minority men from working-class families play football in a large public school where they have opportunities to be noticed in positive ways and to connect with adult mentors that are missing in the lives of their peers

Claims made in arguments for and against interscholastic sports: Claims Against

They distract students from academic activities and distort values in school culture. They perpetuate dependence, conformity, and a power and performance orientation that is no longer useful in society. They turn most students into passive spectators and cause too many serious injuries to athletes. They create a superficial, transitory spirit unrelated to educational goals. They deprive educational programs of resources, facilities, staff, and community support. They create pressure on athletes and support a hierarchical status system in which athletes are unfairly privileged over other students.

Claims made in arguments for and against interscholastic sports: Claims For

They involve students in school activities and increase interest in academic activities. They build self-esteem, responsibility, achievement orientation, and teamwork skills required for occupational success today. They foster fitness and stimulate interest in physical activities among students. They generate unity and identification with the school that maintains it as a viable organization. They promote parental, alumni, community, and government support for school programs. They give students opportunities to develop and display skills in activities valued in society and to be recognized for their competence.

When dual careers are studied by European scholars, it is not assumed that being an athlete is a valued educational experience or that a college education is enhanced by playing a sport. If there are complementary connections between these careers, it is because young people have created ways to make their sports participation educationally relevant or make their university courses relevant to their sports participation (Stambulovaa & Wylleman, 2019). The challenge in Europe is to create support systems that will work across more than 30 countries most of which have different approaches to higher education and sports training.

This approach to higher education and sports sounds strange to most people in the United States. This is because Americans have created a narrative in which sports participation is assumed to be inherently educational, and education is assumed to be enriched by sports participation. This narrative is uncritically accepted to the point that universities collectively spend billions of millions of dollars to maintain athletic departments that involve a small proportion of students in sports without doing independent research that identifies if or what and when athletes learn as they participate in their sports. Coaches may identify team goals in locker room talks and booster club speeches, but there are no attempts to determine if athletes really learn discipline, teamwork, leadership, integrity, confidence, time management skills, fair play and other lessons that coaches say they instill in athletes. There is no curriculum committee to assess the pedagogy that coaches use to achieve the stated learning outcomes of playing a sport or how those outcomes fit with the educational mission of higher education. Despite billions of dollars spent annually and the emphasis that Americans put on intercollegiate sports, there is no independent research that regularly evaluates what athletes learn as they participate, how their participation complements their academic lives, or how the lessons learned might be applied apart from their sports.

NCAA claims of financial distress ring hollow when Division I athletic departments have increased spending by 48 percent from 2011-2017. The argument made by coaches and athletic directors is that they must spend more money to win games if they want to increase their revenues, but economists say that they probably have it backwards: the athletic programs that win games increase their revenues and then increase their spending (Schroetenboer, Berkowitz & Schnaars, 2018). Apart from economic logic, FBS athletic programs have increased their spending at a time when many academic programs have been forced to reduce or hold constant their spending. Athletic department spending over the past decade was partly related to increased revenue from increasingly lucrative media rights contracts. But nearly all that media money went to the 65 schools in the Power Five conferences because media companies were hungry to televise their football and basketball games. In turn, the Power Five schools spent all that money in the hope that it would keep their teams competitive and nationally ranked. At the same time, other schools in the FBS and FCS subdivisions tried to keep up with the Power Five programs by spending themselves into debt and then asking for more subsidies from students and taxpayers.

This expensive arms race between athletics programs does not appear to be winding down to a sustainable level. In fact, new media rights contracts have pushed up revenues for Power Five schools to record levels. Table 14.4 shows that the 14 universities in the Big Ten each receives $51 million per year from media rights deals negotiated by the conference. With a less lucrative contract as of 2019, is the Atlantic Coast Conference; each of its 15 schools only receives $28 million annually, which is more than the total expenses at 117 of 230 Division I public colleges and universities.

High school budget issues have become increasingly contentious with the rising expectations of parents and athletes seeking athletic programs that match the individualized attention they've received in private club programs. As more students come out of club programs, they are focused on obtaining a college scholarship, and they expect to have high school coaches, trainers, equipment, and facilities that will help them achieve this goal, even if it is unrealistic.

This issue is not going away, even though budget crises are forcing some schools to drop all sports. The result is emerging inequality with public schools in upper-middle-class areas and private schools with students from wealthy families funding elaborate sports programs and facilities while schools in low-income areas struggle to maintain a few teams using outdated and rundown facilities and equipment.

Does varsity sports participation affect the educational and developmental experiences of college athletes?3

This question cannot be answered unless we understand that college sports are very diverse. If we assume that all programs are like the ones we see or read about in the media, we are bound to have distorted views of athletes, coaches, and intercollegiate sports.

Because football drives this revenue, these universities have dramatically increased what they spend to recruit football players (Estes, 2019; Gaines & Nudelman, 2017). Most Power Five schools have ignored their recruiting budgets and now spend two to four times more than they have in the recent past. For example, the University of Georgia spent $581, 531 for recruiting in 2013, but increased that amount to more than $7 million for the three-years, 2016-2018. In 2018 alone, they spent $2.63 million, with Alabama and Tennessee close behind. Vince Dooley, the former head football coach and athletic director at Georgia, was not surprised. He noted that to be competitive with the best you must recruit the best, and that means that there should be "No limit" to what they spend (Estes, 2019).

This way of thinking about college sports impacts many of the other Division I schools, because they also feel pressure to stay competitive, even though the realistic coaches and athletic directors know that they cannot match the Power Five schools when it comes to funding sports or winning on the playing field. For example, there are 11 universities in the Mountain West Conference, considered to be at the top of the second tier of conferences in Division I. Not one of those universities reports that they had more revenues than expenses in 2017-18. In fact, their net deficit is so high that they collectively received $238 million in subsidies from student fees plus state and university funds. That's an average subsidy of $21.6 million per university as they try to keep up with the Power Five schools that they compete with each year. In the meantime, many students, taxpayers, and a few state legislators with the courage to speak up are saying that this approach is unsustainable. Of course, the universities in the Mountain West Conference put pressure on universities in other second-tier conferences in trickle-down fashion.

The challenge of managing dual careers has not escaped the attention of the NCAA. Even though athletes nearly always manage to stay academically eligible when they are needed on the playing field, there have been highly publicized cases of individuals, teams, and entire athletic departments in which the academic careers of athletes had not been taken seriously or managed by athletic department staff so that athletes remained eligible despite doing little academic work (Benedict & Keteyian, 2013; Dohrmann & Evans, 2013c; Gurney, Lopiano & Zimbalist, 2017; Murphy, 2019b; O'Donnell, 2016; Smith & Willingham, 2015; Tracy, 2014). Over the years, these cases have damaged the reputations of the NCAA and major universities that otherwise were seen as being academically strong.

To avoid bad publicity and maintain athletic teams that generate significant revenues for athletic departments, the NCAA has periodically raised academic eligibility requirements. The assumption underlying this strategy was that it would encourage high school athletes to take education more seriously and encourage coaches to recruit athletes with stronger academic potential. The overall goal was to raise the grades and graduation rates of athletes to match those for the student body as a whole.

This sounds like a reasonable approach, and there were improvements in grades and graduation rates—a point that has been emphasized repeatedly by the NCAA (Hosick, 2018). However, a meaningful academic comparison of athletes and the rest of the student body is difficult to do because there are wide variations in the demands of academic courses, in the grading criteria used by faculty in different departments, and in graduation requirements in different colleges (engineering, business, arts and sciences) and departments. For example, research shows that athletes in certain sports are overrepresented in certain majors and courses—a phenomenon known as clustering. It occurs when athletes lack academic confidence and seek support from teammates in the same courses or major, when black athletes find a department where faculty members are aware of racial issues and treat them with respect, and when athletes register—often with guidance from athletic department staff—in classes involving little work or taught by faculty members known to give athletes high grades for little work.

Today, the NCAA publishes three academic assessment indicators. One is the Federal Graduation Rate (FGR) that is calculated by the US Department of Education. It is based on the percentage of first-time, full-time, first-year students who graduate within 6 years of entering a 4-year institution. A second indicator, created by the NCAA, is the Graduation Success Rate (GSR). It reports the percentage of scholarship athletes who earn a college degree on each team in the athletic department. The third indicator is the Academic Progress Rate (APR) that is calculated by giving each scholarship athlete on a team one point for remaining in school and another point for remaining academically eligible. The total points for each team are divided by the number of points possible on that team and then multiplied times 1,000 to arrive at the team APR.

A fourth issue is how to create and maintain sports programs that support the educational mission of the school and the academic focus of teachers and students. Finally, both high schools and colleges continue to face the issues of gender inequities and the meaningful provision of sport participation opportunities for students with disabilities.

Viewed collectively, these five issues are bringing high school and college sports programs to a crossroads. The people running these programs face serious decisions on matters that can no longer be pushed aside and ignored. Dealing with these issues requires systemic strategies matched to individual schools and athletic departments, regardless of the competitive level at which their teams play. However, these issues are not just matters for sports. They have implications for the quality of education in the United States. Sports have become such a central component of US schools that strategies for dealing with them have implications far beyond the playing field and the lives of individual students.

A Fad or the Future of Interschool Sports

What do scholars say about esports? Here are a few paraphrases based on my review of dozens of articles: Esports are not sports, and they never will be (Parry, 2018). Esports are not sports, but they could become sports (Hallmann & Giel, 2018). It doesn't matter if esports are sports, but they are part of a sportification process in society (Heere, 2018). Esports may or may not be sports, but if we don't study them, we will miss out on an important social phenomenon (Cunningham et al., 2018). And here is what a 20-year-old semi-professional gamer says: Who cares if esport players are athletes or if esports are sports—they're fun, and competitors succeed based on their mental and physical abilities (Brian, personal conversation, 2019).

These assumptions about sports participation are especially problematic when we consider the power of sports in US culture. Once sports are integrated into the culture and structure of schools, there is a tendency for them to dominate the public profile of the school; capture the attention of students, teachers, staff, and administrators; and take on a purpose and importance of their own—a purpose that is connected with winning records, championship trophies in the entrance of the school, public relations, entertainment, and media coverage (Ripley, 2013a). Overall, sports become both the symbolic and the real representation of the school itself.

When this occurs, sports are likely to collide with and overshadow the academic mission of the school (Nixon, 2014). Then people say that we have to have sports because they are the reason many of our students come to school every day. Or we need to have them because they are the only activities that "bring us together as a school community." Or we need them because they are the "front porch" of the university. And these statements are accepted without asking why our schools are so bad that students attend classes only because they must do so to play sports, or without asking what other ways we might come together as a community, or create ways to make Nobel Prize winners and cutting-edge knowledge the front porch of the university.

In other words, no matter what the committee recommends or what the NCAA decides, it will be consistent with its definition of amateurism as NCAA officials determine it to be. The history of this strategy is clear (Wolkin, 2019). When football players resisted giving up their holiday and semester break to play in what were meaningless postseason bowl games, the NCAA approved giving the players gifts worth hundreds of dollars to quiet their objections; and they also explained that these gifts were not payments for participation. When a legal decision in a court case determined that athletes could be compensated for education-related expenses not covered by their scholarships, NCAA officials allowed universities to pay the "full cost of attendance." But they insisted that this was not a payment for participation in sports. The same thing occurred when a basketball player in the Final Four of the Division I basketball tournament explained that there were times when he and his teammates went hungry at night because NCAA rules prevented universities from feeding them beyond three times a day, despite their intense calorie-burning workouts. The NCAA changed this rule but insisted that this had nothing to do with payment for participation. This also was the case when NCAA officials decided that the families of athletes playing in bowl games and the Final Four tournament could be "reimbursed" for the travel expenses for attending the games. Most recently, after athletes were allowed to enter the NBA draft and return to their universities if they were not drafted or not satisfied with potential contract offers, the NCAA changed its longstanding rule that athletes were not allowed to seek the advice of agents without giving up their eligibility and scholarships. This meant that athletes could have agents to help them negotiate million-dollar deals, but remain amateurs (Waldron, 2019).

With this history, whatever is decided about athletes using their names, images, and likenesses for their benefit, the NCAA will insist that it is consistent with its definition of amateurism because it does not involve "payment for participation" (Wolkin, 2019). The NCAA has made such payments for athletes a line in the sand for the organization. Officials at the NCAA and at Division I universities say that going beyond this line will destroy college sports. However, other so-called amateur sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, have gone beyond that line and discovered that they can survive and even thrive. But crossing the line is a bit different for the NCAA because payment for participation would turn at least some athletes into university employees, an outcome that would create more work for coaches and athletic departments and deprive them of their total control over athletes' lives. This is because they would have to follow state and federal laws that protect the rights of workers, and athletes would be able to form unions through which they could negotiate the conditions of their employment.

The sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape scandals

are among the most serious of recent cases. All of them involve long-term criminal activity by athletes, coaches, team doctors, athletic directors, and university administrators and staff. For example, a retired assistant football coach at Penn State used his affiliation with the football program to lure boys into relationships and sexually abuse them. When an assistant coach saw him sodomizing a boy in a football shower, he reported it to head football coach, Joe Paterno, rather than to local police or state child protection authorities. Paterno, who had suspected that his former coach sexually abused children, was in no rush to report it to Penn State officials. When he did, they took no action. After a former victim came forward, an official state investigation led to a conviction of the former coach on 45 counts of child abuse and child sexual abuse. The Penn State president, athletic director, director of campus security, head football coach, and the assistant coach were all fired for covering-up the actions of the former coach. For them, protecting the football program was a higher priority than following state law and protecting children from a sexual predator.

Most sociology of sport research on black players has focused on black men, so we know little about the experiences of black women who play sports in predominantly white institutions. Black women athletes face the dual challenges of complex racial and gender dynamics on campus and in the athletic department (Bernhard, 2014; Bruening, 2005; Bruening et al., 2005; Carter-Francique, 2014; Carter and Hawkins, 2011; Carter-Francique et al., 2011; Carter-Francique, Dortch & Carter-Phiri, 2017; Gabay, 2013; Hawkins, Carter-Francique & Cooper, 2016; Hughes, 2015; Milner & Braddock, 2016; Theune, 2016, 2019). They see few women of color in positions of power and authority in their schools and athletic departments, and this intensifies feelings of marginalization and powerlessness in both spheres.

A key issue for many black women is that Title IX has primarily benefited white women (Milner & Braddock, 2016; Theune, 2016, 2019). For example, 72 percent of all black women with athletic scholarships in Division I, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), are members of basketball or track and field teams.7 At the same time, black women receive less than 5 percent of the scholarships in all other women's sports. This is because most athletic departments in PWIs have attempted to meet Title IX equity requirements by adding sports such as rowing, golf, rifle, field hockey, lacrosse, ice hockey, fencing, skiing, beach volleyball, and water polo—all of which are played almost exclusively by white women from upper-middle-class families. In 2018, only 395 black women played on any of these teams, and many of those were the only black woman on their team in PWIs (teams in HBCUs are included in this total). As a result, it has intensified the feelings of isolation and powerlessness experienced by black female athletes, and by black female students.

It is unrealistic to suggest that schools drop sports programs, although budget cuts are forcing some to do so. But it is not unrealistic to suggest that educators ask critical questions and take seriously the research that explains how and when sports alter the cultures and organization of their schools. Then they can make a decision to keep, change, or abandon sports programs. A good place to start is to ask what they would think about a higher education system where the highest-paid person in major universities is either a football or men's basketball coach, the most revered people on campus are football and male basketball players, and the university spends 6-12 times more money per capita to support athletes than to support students who are not athletes (Desrochers, 2012; HEP, 2018).

A program in which students in the United States play the same sports across multiple generations ignores educational theory and fails to recognize the changing and diverse sport interests that exist in a culture that prizes individuality and innovation. For example, when high schools emphasize the same few power and performance sports for over a century, they discourage participation by some boys and many girls who prefer sports emphasizing pleasure and participation—sports that may not have existed 40 to 100 years ago. Progress that has been made toward achieving gender equity is due to adding new sports, and further progress toward equity requires additional changes that take into account racial and ethnic diversity as well as the new interests of girls and women. Sports played by their grandparents may not be what interests them.

To understand this issue, imagine that you are an academic tutor making $35,000 a year in the athletic department at a university where the football team generates about $40 million per year. The coaches, including the nationally respected, highly paid and powerful football coach, are basically your bosses. With 3 days left in the summer semester, the football coach comes to you and says that the eligibility of an All-American running back is in jeopardy because he has not handed in a 20-page paper in a sociology class. The coach grips your shoulder firmly and says that if the running back is ineligible he will give you a bad evaluation that will jeopardize your job and your career in higher education. Additionally, if the running back does not play, it could prevent them from qualifying for a bowl appearance that would bring $35 million to the athletic department and increase the prospect of the athlete being drafted into the NFL. The athlete has never written a full paper and is busy with practice during the day and game film reviews during evenings. Under these circumstances, would you write the paper for the athlete to turn in to his sociology professor and receive the grade that will maintain his eligibility? If you answer "yes," you are not alone. Such decisions have resulted in cases of academic fraud at major universities with excellent academic reputations (Branch, 2011; Gurney, Lopiano & Zimbalist, 2017; Kelderman, 2018; Murphy, 2019b; New, 2016; Ridpath, Gurney & Snyder, 2015).

Academic support programs are seldom studied by independent researchers (Rubin & Moses, 2017; Steinberg et al., 2018). In part, this is because coaches and athletic directors do not want outsiders "snooping" around their programs and talking with staff and athletes about things that might make the athletic department and certain teams look bad. This is unfortunate because some support programs have 30-year histories and there is much to learn from experienced tutors and from athletes whose academic careers benefitted from the guidance and support they received. University presidents and academic administrators don't interfere with the programs because the coaches and athletic directors often have much higher salaries and are more widely known than anyone on campus, including the university president. Additionally, presidents use high-profile sports as public relations and fund-raising tools regardless of the grades or graduation rates of athletes. Similarly, the media companies that pay billions of dollars to televise college football games, and the corporations that sponsor teams and buy commercial time on telecasts care little about the academic careers of athletes as long as their teams generate the hype that sustains their profits. Nor are the owners of local businesses concerned about athlete graduation rates as long as spectators fill the town for every home game weekend and spend a lot of money.

Another bribery scandal involving coaches, sponsors, and athletes was uncovered by the FBI in 2017. The investigation identified representatives of Adidas who paid money to heavily recruited high school basketball players and their families if they promised to attend an Adidas-sponsored university such as Louisville, Kansas, or North Carolina State. Once the athletes accepted scholarships and attended an Adidas university, assistant coaches were paid money to steer the players to a particular sports agent if and when they entered the NBA draft. Everyone involved defined this as a win-win-win situation. Athletes received money for their labor in a revenue-generating basketball program, Adidas sold more shoes due to the publicity of having top players and college teams outfitted in their products, the basketball teams won games and usually qualified for the NCAA postseason tournament, assistant coaches received bonus money, and a pair of sports agents were in line to represent players likely to sign NBA contracts.

According to public information about the investigation, the universities involved were Arizona, Auburn, Creighton, Louisville, Miami, Oklahoma State, South Carolina, Southern California, and Texas Christian. Additional evidence of payments implicated Alabama, Clemson, Kansas, Kentucky, Lousiana State, Maryland, Michigan State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, San Diego State, Seton Hall, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wichita State, and Xavier. Money changed hands in many directions and in different amounts in one-time and multiple payments. When the investigation identified who was involved, players were declared ineligible, some assistant coaches were fired and a few were charged with crimes. Two Adidas employees were also charged along with two sports agents. On being questioned by the FBI, one of the agents admitted the following: We were definitely paying players ... Everyone was paying players. ... They are the only people in college basketball who can't get paid. The idea that it's an amateur world is not real (in Powell, 2019)

When researchers at the University of Chicago used data collected over 4 years from two large samples of high school students, they found that athletes at schools located in low-income areas were more likely to be identified as good students than were athletes playing at schools located in upper-middle-income and wealthy areas (Guest and Schneider, 2003).

Additionally, having an athlete identity was positively associated with grades in schools located in lower-income areas but negatively associated with grades in wealthier areas where taking sports too seriously was possibly seen as interfering with preparing for college and careers. Therefore, the academic implications of being an interscholastic athlete depends on the different meanings given to playing sports and having an athlete identity in different social class contexts in American society (Hwang et al., 2016; Morris, 2015; Shakib et al., 2011; Shifrer et al., 2013, 2015; Wann et al., 2015).

Managing dual-career conflict is also influenced by the fact that grades are seen only by students, but athletic performances are public—possibly seen by millions of others. They are often presented and recounted in media coverage, recorded on film, assessed by multiple coaches and teammates, used to determine whether scholarships can be renewed, and possibly assessed by scouts for professional teams. They also evoke cheers and jeers from spectators and determine whether people perceive an athlete in positive or negative terms. In revenue-producing sports, especially Division I football and basketball, the performances of athletes have significant financial consequences for coaches, universities, and local businesses that depend on spectators coming to town for sports events, and media companies that have bought the rights to broadcast games.

Additionally, the stakes associated with academic and athletic performances are different. Millions of dollars can be on the line when an athlete makes a jump shot during the NCAA men's basketball tournament or throws a touchdown pass to win a conference championship and guarantee a bowl appearance. From the perspective of an 18-23-year-old who has excelled in sports and has been known in terms of their sports identity through most of their formative years, giving priority to athletic expectations over academic expectations is common, even though graduation is important to nearly all of them.

Foley's research in Texas is thirty years old. The reason I include it here is that it is one of the very few studies that even mention the impact of high school sports on the students who don't play on teams. This raises issues that have not been studied. For example, how do school sports impact those who try our for teams but do not make them or those who make a team one year and are cut the next? When sports are at the center of high school culture, how does this impact students who don't play sports and feel out of place when sports are seen as important by teachers and administrators?

Additionally, we don't know how sports participation impacts students who play on community-based club teams or in sports that are not school sponsored. Do these forms of participation impact grades, identification with the school, social integration into student culture, popularity among students, educational aspirations, and college attendance? These questions become increasingly important as more adolescent athletes play sports on elite travel teams or do sports such as motocross, mountain biking, skateboarding, BMX, climbing, snowboarding, shooting, martial arts, and other sports that are not connected with school. Is the impact of participation for these young people the same as it is for students who play on school teams? At this point, we don't know.

But these three columns tell only part of the story. Athletic departments also receive subsidies from student fees and money that comes from the state or general university funds. These are listed in columns D and E. When these subsidies are added to the generated revenues (column B), each subdivision shows an operating profit—the bottom number (in italics) in column F. For example, the operating profit for the FBS is $1.43 billion, and for all three subdivisions, it is $2.85 billion. The important thing about the operating profits is that the athletic departments keep nearly all of this money. They don't return student fees to students or state money to taxpayers, although they may return a small amount of what they receive from university funds. This is important because instead of having a net deficit, universities in Division I actually have an operating profit. In fact, the difference between the two amounts is $5.38 billion.

Additionally, when the NCAA speaks about Division I finances, they exclude all private colleges and universities which constitute 34 percent of Division I members. Of those universities, including Baylor, Boston College, Brigham Young, Duke, Miami, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Rice, Southern California, Southern Methodist, Stanford, Syracuse, Texas Christian, Tulane, Tulsa, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, the eight Ivy League universities, and others, there are probably a few that have revenues exceeding expenses.

Feelings of social isolation are especially intense when most students have grown up in racially segregated neighborhoods with different levels of economic privilege, attended largely segregated K-12 schools with different levels of educational resources, and have little in-depth knowledge of race relations in the United States or in PWIs. This creates racial tensions that call for sensitive and effective interventions coordinated by campus administrators, professional staff, faculty, and student leaders, but such interventions rarely occur. Instead, athletic departments intervene and put athletes in their own dorm wings, create special academic support programs for them, and provide athlete centers where they eat and hang out with other athletes that share sport-related goals regardless of race. However, this strategy does nothing to improve race relations on campus and little to eliminate the isolation felt by black athletes.

After in-depth analyses of the racial dynamics in Power Five conferences in the NCAA, Shaun Harper, a professor in the schools of education and business at the University of Southern California and founder of the USC Race and Equity Center, has concluded the following: Perhaps nowhere in higher education is the disenfranchisement of black male students more insidious than in college athletics (Harper, 2006, 2018).

Colleges and universities have done little to nothing to provide sports for people with a disability. Only a dozen universities have recognized programs, and they are funded through student services rather than athletic departments. The programs are at the universities of Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Central Oklahoma, Oregon, Edinboro (Pennsylvania), Penn State, Rutgers, Texas at Arlington, and Wisconsin at Whitewater. The sports offered include men's and women's wheelchair basketball, track and road racing, tennis, golf, rowing, and wheelchair rugby (Gerber, 2015).

Although some Paralympians train in these programs, it is difficult to schedule games and meets with other university teams due to the distance between schools and the expenses associated with travel. At a few of these universities participation occurs totally in-house in the form of training and intramural competitions. Despite recommendations and guidelines provided by the US Department of Education, few people in higher education have done anything beyond mentioning disability sports in passing conversations. The existence of the Paralympics has not had an impact on program development, even though it would make sense for universities to sponsor Paralympic sports just as they sponsor Olympic sports in their athletic departments. As it is now, college students with a disability must seek opportunities to play sports outside the university, even though they pay student fees and should have access to the same opportunities that other students have.

High school and college sports affect more than just athletes. In this section, we look at the influence of these programs on high schools and colleges as organizations. In particular, we examine school spirit and budgets.

Anyone who has attended a well-staged student pep rally or watched the student cheering section at a well-attended high school or college game realizes that sports can generate impressive displays of energy and spirit. This doesn't happen with all sport teams, nor does it happen in all schools. Teams in low-profile sports usually play games with few, if any, student spectators. Teams with long histories of losing records seldom create a spirited response among more than a few students. Many students don't care about school teams and resent the attention given to teams and athletes. But there are regular occasions when sports are sites at which students and others associated with a school come together and express spirited feelings about their teams and schools. These provide the scenes covered in the media and talked about by some people as they reminisce about their time in high school and college.

Early in the twentieth century, educators included physical education and sports in US schools because they believed that learning should encompass body and mind. Physical activities and sports, they thought, could be organized to teach important lessons. But the widespread acceptance of the great sport myth and the related belief that "sports build character" led to the assumption that playing sports automatically transformed young people in positive ways, no matter how the sports were organized. There was no need for research to identify what participants learned or how to teach things beyond tactics and techniques. Individual testimonials about "sport making me what I am today" fueled the mythology that sports were like an automatic car wash: those who enter them will be cleansed, dried, and sent off with a shiny new look.

As a result, there are no "learning evaluations" at the end of seasons, coaches aren't held accountable as teachers, and there is an amazing lack of systematically collected evidence documenting the dynamics of teaching and learning in various sports played by over seven million high school students every year. The downside of this lack of knowledge is that we can't prove what young people learn in sports or when and why they learn certain things, either positive or negative. Nor can we rate the effectiveness of various coaching strategies for teaching what we want young people to learn in sports. And what is it that we want young people to learn? If we knew these things, we could present evidence to school boards when they make funding decisions. Too many people simply assume and say the same things: sport teaches discipline, teamwork, and the value of hard work. But they provide only anecdotal evidence about themselves or someone they know. What we need is systematic research identifying the conditions under which school teams provide worthwhile educational experiences for students (Overman, 2018).

The cost of programs at both high school and college levels has been increasing at a rate that far exceeds inflation and funding increases for academic programs. With growing pressure to contain costs, most sports programs today face serious budget questions. Money is tight across all of education, and those who administer sports programs cannot assume that such increased spending is sustainable.

As academic and athletic programs deal with funding issues, both have sought funding from outside sources including individual donors and corporate sponsors. High schools in areas that draw students from relatively wealthy families have been able to sustain and even increase spending as other schools face grim or desperate circumstances. In some schools, programs have been trimmed to teams in just a few sports, and in others the entire sports program has been dropped. But across all programs there is growing inequality in funding for sports, even among schools that compete at the same level.

Efforts to reduce inequality in the United States always run into massive resistance regardless of the context. The resistance to cost-containment policies and strategies to create more parity and possibilities for exciting competition between universities in any of the three NCAA divisions is deeply ingrained in US culture. As a result, program inequality will continue to shape the sports landscape in higher education.

As the stakes associated with sports participation have increased, there have been corresponding increases in the expectations and goals of parents and athletes. Young people today have been raised in a culture emphasizing self-improvement, growth, and achievement, and in no sphere of society is this emphasis stronger than it is in sports. At the high school level, a growing number of athletes seek opportunities to develop the skills and visibility that maximize their chances to receive a college athletic scholarship. They also believe that year-round involvement in a single sport is essential to achieving this goal, and they seek schools and coaches that fit their expectations.

Of course, there will be challenges along the way (Baker & Holden, 2018). Female students and their male allies may need support to develop new games that bring more females of all ages into competitive gaming. To patent a game that becomes popular would generate more revenues than a football team! Drug testing may be necessary to curb the use of cognitive enhancers by competitors. Time limits on training may be necessary to facilitate successful management of dual careers by esports team members who may also need guidance from physiologists and kinesiologists to avoid carpel tunnel syndrome and related problems. Nutrition and physical training will also be important for serious gamers. There may also be a need to discourage match-fixing if and when the stakes associated with betting on competitions become significant.

At this point, there are enough students in high schools and colleges interested in creating a future in which esports are integrated into secondary and higher education. If they succeed, they will alter the meaning and organization of sports in education. What do you think?

Each number in Table 14.2 represents the percentage point difference between the graduation rate for athletes compared to the graduation rate for their peers in the student bodies of their universities. For example, all the male basketball players on teams in the 10 major conferences in Division I during the 2017-018 season had a graduation rate that was 33 percentage points below the graduation rate for the student body in their universities. The rate for black male players was 35 percentage points below the student body rate, and the rate for white players was 27 percentage points below the student body rate. The athlete graduation rates that were closest to the rate for their student bodies were for white football players in the Power 5 and Group of 5 conferences; their rates were only 2 percentage points lower than rates for their respective student bodies. Overall, the CSRI data over the past decade indicate the following:

Athletes graduate at significantly lower rates than other full-time students. Female athletes graduate at lower rates than other full-time students, but at higher rates than male athletes. Athletes on top-ranked teams generally graduate at lower rates than other athletes in their sports.

As noted in the previous sections, big-time revenue-generating intercollegiate sports programs are characterized by chronic problems, low graduation rates, and hypocrisy when it comes to education. However, there are programs that do not have big-time programs, and there are teams in nonrevenue-producing sports that are organized so athletes can successfully manage their academic and athletic careers. Additionally, the athletes in these programs and on these teams are usually similar to the rest of the student body in terms of academic preparation and they are seldom distracted by the dream of having professional sports careers.

Athletes on teams in which there is strong support for academic success may train hard and define athletic success as important, but most of them take education seriously and try to maintain a realistic balance between academic and athletic commitments. The athletes who do this most effectively are those with the following: (1) past experiences that consistently reaffirm the importance of education; (2) social networks that support academic identities and facilitate academic success; (3) perceived access to career opportunities following graduation; and (4) social relationships and experiences that expand confidence and skills apart from sports.

A highly publicized college admissions scandal with connection to college sports involved payments by wealthy parents to have their children admitted to elite universities. In one part of this scheme, the former coach who orchestrated this cheating process knew that many coaches needed money or were under pressure from their athletic departments to raise money for their teams. He also knew that the applications of designated recruited athletes were regularly admitted to universities even when their academic qualifications did not meet minimum requirements. When a parent paid him he would fabricate an application in which their child was fraudulently presented as a highly recruited athlete in a particular sport, usually a low-profile sport in which coaches could give up one of their scholarships without it hurting team quality (Stripling, 2019). Then he would pay a coach in that sport at the desired university to request that the applicant receive a special admission reserved for talented athletes.

Because coaches have been approved to bypass the normal admissions process for these "special athlete admits," they became his accomplices. In this way, underqualified children of wealthy parents were admitted to the University of Texas, Yale, the University of Southern California, UCLA, Stanford, Wake Forest, Georgetown and the University of San Diego, among others. FBI investigations of this scheme exposed the lack of oversight related to special admissions for recruited athletes (Anderson & Syrluga, 2019; Hiltzik, 2019). Although formal criminal charges were filed in a number of cases, investigators estimated that hundreds of bogus "athletes" were admitted through this bribery scheme. An ongoing NCAA investigation will determine if penalties will be imposed on athletic departments, coaches, or athletic department personnel. However, the NCAA is notorious for allowing athletic programs to escape serious consequences even when there have been major rule violations.

Proponents of varsity sports say that displays of school spirit at sport events strengthen student identification with schools and create solidarity among students. In making this case, a high school principal in Texas says, "Look, we don't get 10,000 people showing up to watch a math teacher solve X" (McCallum, 2003, p. 42). Critics say that the spirit created by sports is temporary, superficial, and unlikely to inspire positive actions apart from being a sports booster.

Being a part of any group or organization is more enjoyable when people have opportunities to collectively express their feelings. However, considerable resources in the form of time, energy, and money are devoted to producing this outcome in connection with sports. High school students prepare for games by making signs, planning social events in connection with games, and showing support for players. Cheerleaders practice and attend games. Athletes practice, play, and travel 10 to 20 hours a week, think about games, and view their "athlete" status as central to who they are in the school. Teachers attend games, mix with and "police" student spectators, serve as score and time keepers, and perform other game-related duties. Administrators devote time and energy to making sure the games, athletes, and students represent their schools in positive ways.

Attending football games enabled students and townspeople to reaffirm their ideas about "natural differences" between men and women. Young men who did not hit hard, physically intimidate opponents, or play with pain were described with non-masculine terms. Additionally, a player's willingness to sacrifice his body for the team was taken as a sign of commitment, character, and manhood. At the same time, women who didn't stand by and support their men were seen as gender nonconformists.

Bissinger also noted that high school sports were closely linked with a long history of racism in Odessa, and that football was organized and played in ways that reaffirmed traditional racial ideology among whites and produced racial resentment among African Americans. Ideas about race and certain aspects of racial dynamics have changed since 1988 when many whites in the Odessa area referred to blacks with the n-word and blamed people of color for most of the town's social and economic problems. White people are not as likely today to say that black athletes succeed on the football field because of their "natural physical abilities" or that white athletes succeed due to character, discipline, and intelligence but some of these racial stereotypes appear in new forms today.

Sports programs do more than simply affect the status structures of high schools. When Pulitzer Prize-winning author H. G. Bissinger wrote the book Friday Night Lights about a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, he observed that football "stood at the very core of what the town was about. ... It had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with how people felt about themselves"

Bissinger noted that football in Odessa and across the United States was important because it celebrated a male cult of toughness and sacrifice and a female cult of nurturance and servitude. Team losses were blamed on coaches who weren't tough enough and players who weren't disciplined and aggressive. Women stayed on the sidelines and faithfully tried to support and please the men who battled on behalf of the school and town.

It is difficult to predict all the consequences of such a change, but they would be significant. After paying athletes, there might not be enough money left to pay coaches the obscene salaries that some of them make as employees in tax-exempt nonprofit organizations (Johnson, 2018). Additionally, they would be subject to criminal charges if they had workouts in which athletes are pushed to the point of death or needing hospital treatment, as occurred recently at the Universities of Maryland, Oregon, Nebraska, and Iowa as coaches disregarded the health and safety of athletes to assert their power over them. The football coach at Maryland demanded the continuation of physically punishing drills even as one player crawled on the ground and was assisted by a teammate in an effort to complete the drill. As a result, the athlete died while obeying his coach (Hruby, 2018b; Jenkins, 2018; Maese & Stubbs, 2018).

Cases like this, as well as athletes being deprived of rights enjoyed by other students, have led elected officials at the state and federal levels to introduce laws giving college athletes the right to form unions and the right to profit from making endorsement deals, giving speeches, or running their own sport camps in the summer. For example, Nancy Skinner (who attended lectures by sociologist and human rights activist, Harry Edwards, when she was a student at Cal-Berkeley), as a new member of the California State Senate, introduced a bill allowing college athletes in California to receive payments for using their names, images, and likenesses to make marketing and endorsement deals if they had the chance, or to use their personal abilities and reputations to be paid if, for example, a water polo player or a swimmer offered lessons in their sport during the summer. Skinner's Fair Pay to Play Act (Senate Bill 206) was passed by a vote of 72-0 in September 2019 with support from liberal, moderate, and conservative senators. Gavin Newsom, the California governor, signed the bill into law which will take effect on January 1, 2023 (Murphy, 2019).

The other major reason for persistent gender inequities is that athletic programs remain grounded in a culture based on the values and experiences of men. This will not change until more women are hired as coaches of both women's and men's teams and as athletic directors. But the chance of this happening in the near future is remote for at least three reasons. First, most people working in school sports programs today are not familiar with the full meaning of gender equity as it is described in Title IX law, and certainly don't know how to implement the law (Staurowsky and Weight, 2011). Second, when football is the centerpiece of sports at the school and conference levels, women are not likely to be hired in top leadership positions because it is widely believed that they cannot effectively work with a football coach and team (Schull et al., 2013). Third, when women coaches or lower-level administrators raise questions about gender inequities, they are usually defined as troublemakers and marginalized in the athletic department or in the coaching job market (Fagan and Cyphers, 2012).

Changing the organization and culture of sport programs is a formidable task, and it is nearly impossible when those in charge see no reason to change or see change as a threat to their status and power. However, in the case of programs described and funded as "educational," there's no justification for paying women any less than men or defining women as unqualified for leadership jobs because some people believe that they cannot understand football or work effectively with powerful and highly paid football coaches. Even gender equity training programs are largely ineffective in changing athletic department cultures that have been created by and for men, and controlled by men.

One of the things that we do know about college athletes in big-time sports programs today is that many of them have a difficult time managing their dual careers in ways that meet both academic and athletic expectations. Academic expectations and workloads for students have remained much the same over the past half-century, and it is the responsibility of students to allocate their time and energy to meet them. But expectations related to college sports participation have increased dramatically, even in sports that do not generate much revenue. The commitments of time and energy demanded of college athletes today are much greater than they were for past generations. Required commitments are no longer limited to a season. They exist throughout the year, often including summers. There is pre-season, in-season, and post-season training, and each is done with coaches aware of who meets the unstated requirements of team membership and scholarship renewal. Athletes' time, energy expenditures, and physical condition are monitored with new technologies by an increasing number of assistant coaches (Jones & Denison, 2018; Denison, Mills & Konoval, 2017; Hatteberg, 2018). The control that coaches have over athletes' lives is much more comprehensive than it has ever been, and they exercise that control as much as possible because they are expected to create and maintain teams that achieve excellence and enhance the school's public reputation.

Coaches have much more control over their athletes' lives than college teachers have control over students' lives. When students don't meet academic expectations, it's their problem; their teachers' careers are not jeopardized. But when athletes don't meet expectations, it's the coach's problem, and the coach's career depends on solving it. For young people managing their dual careers, this usually sets the stage for dual-career conflict, because there is not enough time in the day to meet both academic and athletic expectations. If they slack off and fail to meet athletic expectations, their coach has the power to change or end their careers in sports and, in many cases, to end their scholarships. If they slack off and fail to meet academic expectations, they can accept lower grades, register for classes with fewer expectations, change majors, seek assistance from academic support programs, cheat on assignments and tests, and simply meet the minimum requirements for athletic eligibility. This is not an easy choice, but there is more room for negotiation related to academic expectations than for athletic expectations. Under these conditions, priority is often given to meeting the latter.

At this point, there are few systematic studies of high school esports and esports participants. We know little about how teams and team members they are integrated into student culture or how participation impacts educational experiences. From what I can tell, the teachers involved in sponsoring esports programs have tried to make them educationally relevant so that students experience them as more than a form of solitary entertainment.

College esports are neither as unified nor as universally supported as high school programs. Teams have been formed and scholarships are available for a limited number of gamers, but most teams are organized by students with assistance from faculty, student services, or a kindred spirit from the athletic department. Many varsity teams, as opposed to club and recreational teams, are sponsored by smaller colleges that belong to the NAIA or Division III of the NCAA. They see esports as a tool for recruiting students and engaging those who aren't interested in traditional sports.

Relying on booster club support also creates problems because most community boosters want to fund boys' football or basketball teams rather than the athletic program as a whole, and many parent booster clubs focus only on the sports that their children play. This practice intensifies existing gender inequities and has led to Title IX lawsuits, none of which have been decided in favor of boosters who ignore girls' teams. Additionally, some boosters feel that they have the right to give advice to coaches and players, intervene in team decision making, and influence the process of hiring coaches and athletic directors. Community boosters often focus on win-loss records so they can tout their influence when they interact with friends and business associates; for them, educational issues may take a back seat to building a team that will win a state championship and boost their personal status.

Corporate sponsorships connect the future of high school sports to the advertising budgets and revenue streams of businesses. This means that schools can be left empty-handed when advertising budgets are cut or sponsorships are not paying off enough to satisfy company owners, stockholders, or top executives. Other problems occur when the interests of corporate sponsors don't match the educational goals of high schools. For example, promoting candy, soft drinks, and fast-food consumption with ads and logos on gym walls, scoreboards, and team buses contradicts health and nutrition principles taught in high school courses. This subverts education and makes students cynical about the meaningfulness of their curriculum. Additionally, certain corporations want to "brand" students as young as possible so they sponsor sports in the hope of turning students into loyal consumers.

The NCAA has toyed with the idea of esports, but it is unlikely to formally embrace them (Baker & Holden, 2018; Pizzo, Jones & Funk, 2019). The rights to games played in leagues and tournaments are owned by third parties which means that the NCAA would have to share control which is not part of its DNA. Some students who play on esports teams also win prize money and earn money through YouTube and Twitch streaming which the NCAA could not tolerate given its current definition of amateurism. The majority of gamers are males and that would create for the NCAA a bigger Title IX gender equity dilemma than it already has with 85-member football teams. Finally, it is unlikely that the emerging trajectory of esports could be bent to fit the highly regulated and archaic structure of the NCAA. Would gamers accept a 460-page NCAA rule book?

Despite being a poor fit with the NCAA, collegiate esports are generally described with a sport-oriented narrative to elicit popular and institutional support (Pizzo, Jones & Funk, 2019). This strategy—to put it in terms used in this book—is used to take advantage of the great sport myth so that people will come to see esports as essentially pure and good and believe that those who participate in them share in that purity and goodness. But building support on the basis of a myth is risky. Therefore, it may be wise to forget the NCAA and its governance model and practices, and create a student-oriented structure and culture that links esports explicitly and directly with academic priorities and post-graduate opportunities along with an emphasis on fun, identification with the school, interaction within and between teams, and horizontal relationships with coaches and faculty advisors.

Christian colleges and Bible schools also have sports programs. About 90 of these are affiliated with the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), although some have dual membership in the NCCAA and either the NAIA or NCAA Division III. The National Junior College Athletic Association consists of about 525 junior and community colleges. Some of its 60,000 athletes receive scholarships, nearly all of which cover only partial expenses. Finally, there are hundreds of additional colleges that have intercollegiate sports programs without being affiliated with any of these organizations. We know little about them because there are no governing bodies that collect and publish data from them.

Even though the vast majority of intercollegiate sports are not big-time, people use what they see and read in the media to make conclusions about all college sports. But this is a mistake because most sports at most schools do not resemble the sports covered by the mainstream media. For example, the 130 FBS universities dominate media coverage, but make up only 11 percent of the 4-year schools that have sports programs. However, FBS universities have the largest athletic departments, the biggest budgets, the highest profile teams in football and basketball, and they award more athletic scholarships than other colleges and universities.

Budget and program inequality among high schools is related primarily to the residential distribution of wealth across neighborhoods, towns, and even regions of the country. At the college level it is related to the distribution of media rights revenues, gate receipts, and fund raising connections. As a result, a relatively small percentage of programs enjoy the resources needed to build state-of-the-art facilities, attract skilled athletes, and pay qualified coaches and staff. At the same time other programs struggle to meet expenses and they cut corners that sometimes raise safety issues for athletes.

Exacerbating this inequality at the high school level is the emergence of private schools that have the resources to field excellent teams across a number of different sports (Johnson, Tracy & Pierce, 2015). These schools can recruit students without being limited by the geographical restrictions that exist for public schools, so they can pick the best athletes and offer tuition assistance or even full scholarships. If they also have an attractive academic program, students from wealthy families will bypass the public school in their area and attend a private school with a well-funded athletic department and highly skilled athletes.

The games of big-time sports teams often are major social occasions that inspire displays of spirit on many university campuses, but research suggests that this spirit has little to do with the educational mission of the university or creating general social integration on a campus (Clopton, 2008, 2009, 2011; Clopton and Finch, 2010; Pappano, 2012). It does create regular occasions for a segment of students, more often white males than women or ethnic minority students, to party, binge drink, avoid the library, and study less, especially when their team is successful and winning games regularly (Clotfelder, 2011; Higgins et al., 2007; Lindo et al., 2012).

Finally, we know that sports can generate impressive displays of school-related spirit in local communities. In fact, games played by teenagers, who often are perceived as "problems" in shopping areas and neighborhoods, become the main source of local entertainment in many towns and smaller cities in the United States. Does this lead to support for the schools and their educational programs, or does it focus attention more on sports rather than the academic performance of students?

Bissinger's book fails to deal with many aspects of high school life, but a study by anthropologist Doug Foley (1990) provides a more complete description and analysis of the place of sports in a high school and the town in which it exists. Foley studied an entire small Texas town but paid special attention to the ways that people incorporated the local high school football team and its games into the overall social life of the school and the community. He also studied the social and academic activities of a wide range of students, including those who ignored or avoided sports.

Foley's findings revealed that student culture in the high school "was varied, changing, and inherently full of contradictions" (1990a, p. 100). Football and other sports provided important social occasions and defused the anxiety associated with tests and overcontrolling teachers, but sports were only one part of the lives of the students. Athletes used their sport-based status as a basis for "identity performances" with other students and certain adults, but for most students, identity was grounded more deeply in gender, social class, and ethnicity than sports participation.

Identifying the influence of playing high school sports in a person's adult life is much more difficult than identifying the changes that occur during late adolescence. The meanings people give to their own sports participation change over time and vary with a wide range of social and cultural factors related to gender, race and ethnicity, and social class.

For example, when we hear that many CEOs of large corporations played sports in high school, it tells us nothing about the role of sports participation in the long, complex process of becoming a CEO. The occupational experiences of top CEOs, most of whom are white men, are strongly related to their family backgrounds and social networks, and cannot be separated from the gender, ethnic, and class relations that exist in the United States. This does not mean that these men didn't work hard or that playing sports was unrelated to their development, but the importance of sports participation cannot be understood apart from many other factors that are clearly related to becoming a CEO.

Research also indicates that the meanings given to playing interscholastic sports vary by gender and have changed since the late 1960s (Fox et al., 2010; Miller et al., 2005; Miller and Hoffman, 2009; Pearson et al., 2009; Shifrer et al., 2013, 2015; Troutman and Dufur, 2007).

For example, young women on school teams have had lower rates of sexual activity (that is, fewer sex partners, lower frequency of intercourse, and later initiation of sexual activity) than their female peers who didn't play sports. However, young men on school teams had higher rates of sexual activity than other young men in the schools (Miller et al., 1998, 1999). This difference persists because playing on school teams enhances the social status of young people and gives them more power to regulate sexual activity on their own terms (Kreager and Staff, 2009).

Because males and females in North America are still treated and evaluated differently, adolescents use different strategies for seeking acceptance, autonomy, sexual identity, and recognition. For young men, sports provide opportunities to demonstrate the physical and emotional toughness that is traditionally associated with masculinity, and successfully claiming a masculine identity is assumed to bring acceptance, autonomy, and recognition as an adult.

For young women, sports are not used so much to claim a feminine identity that brings acceptance, autonomy, and recognition as an adult, but playing sports is used to achieve and express the personal power that enables young women to achieve these things. My hypothesis is that young women in high school are less likely than their male peers to view sports as a self-identification focal point in their lives and more likely to view sports as part of a larger project of achievement that involves academic, social, and other personal accomplishments. If this is the case, the visibility and status gained by high school athletes have different implications for young men than for young women in high school student culture and beyond.

The most logical explanation for differences between athletes on school teams and other students is that school-sponsored sports attract young people who have good grades and self-confidence, and are socially popular in school. Most researchers don't have information about the pre-participation characteristics of athletes because they collect data at one point in time and simply compare students who play on sport teams with students who don't. These studies are limited because they don't show that playing school sports changes young people in ways that would not have occurred otherwise.

Fourteen- to 18-year-olds grow and develop in many ways whether they play school sports or do other things. This is an important point, because young people who play on varsity teams are more likely than other students to come from economically privileged backgrounds and have above-average cognitive abilities, self-esteem, and past academic performance records, including grades and test scores (Child Trends, 2013; Hartmann et al., 2012; Morris, 2015; Shakib et al., 2011; Shifrer et al., 2013). Therefore, students who try out for, make, and stay on school teams are different from other students before they play high school sports.

Like most organizations that have power and resources, the NCAA is notoriously bad at self-policing and self-reform. Vested interests supporting the status quo are so strong that they limit the extent to which it investigates and punishes member institutions. After all, those institutions are the NCAA, and they are unwilling to make changes that might compromise their power and resources. This is why few members, especially influential members, are severely punished for actions that violate rules and why reforms come only when widespread public pressure or more powerful organizations force it to make changes.

From the examples in this section, it is clear that independent investigations are needed in cases that involve serious rule violations or criminal actions. However, pervasive public support for college sports and the universities that sponsor them, along with widespread sports-think grounded in the great sport myth, make it difficult to find independent investigators willing to critically assess the current organization and the everyday operations of sports programs. When people have strong attachments to universities and are fervent fans of college teams and college sports generally, they are hesitant to make decisions or recommendations that change what they love, even if the NCAA and big-time athletic programs engage in actions that are contrary to the mission of higher education and the values it professes.

Racial inequities have long characterized historically white institutions of higher education. Expecting black athletes or all athletes of color to take on the challenge of resisting and changing their organizations and cultures is to be blind to the history and meaning of race in the United States. In fact, for young black men and women to attend those universities is in many ways an act of resistance in itself (Reddick, 2018). For those who are athletes, the challenge is to successfully manage their dual careers. Their academic careers are a high priority because only about two percent of them will have opportunities to play professional sports at a level that provides decent financial rewards for a few years.

From the perspective of PWIs, it is both naïve and unfair to recruit black or other ethnic minority athletes to campuses where they have little social support and feel that students and faculty don't know much about their history, heritage, experiences, and challenges faced on campus and the surrounding community. If universities effectively included racial and cultural diversity within all spheres of campus life, recruiting black athletes would not indicate a distorted set of campus priorities. When universities present to the world images of physically talented black athletes and intellectually talented white scientists, racism is perpetuated, whether intentionally or not, and the quality of education is compromised.

Students who do not measure up to their bigger, faster, taller, and stronger classmates require alternatives to or modifications of traditional power and performance sports. Although sports like football and basketball receive much attention and many resources, there could be teams in Ultimate (Frisbee), disc golf, racquetball, flag football, in-line skating, orienteering, slacklining, wall climbing, mountain biking, BMX, water tube polo, roller hockey, skateboarding, and other sports for which there is enough local interest to field teams. With guidance, the students themselves could at least partially administer and coach these teams and coordinate exhibitions or meets and games with teams from other schools. Does there really have to be an official state champion for a sport to be educational?

Girls' sports in high schools continue to lack the support that boys' sports enjoy. This problem has a history that goes far beyond high school, but the result, as illustrated in is that over a million more boys than girls play high school sports—nearly 1.13 million more in 2019.

Concussions and the possibility of incurring short-term or permanent brain damage while playing school sports, especially football, is a hot-button issue for high school and college sports. It is also an anxiety-provoking liability issue for coaches, athletic directors, and school administrators. With football being the most popular and heavily promoted sport in high schools and colleges and a cash cow for a crucial segment of Division I universities, the fact that half of all reported concussions in organized school sports occur in football raises this anxiety level even further.

High school administrators know that the vast majority of athletes on school teams are under the age of informed legal consent, and that the school has a special responsibility to protect them while they are under their supervision. If studies continue to show that sport-related concussions or repetitive sub-concussive head trauma can cause death, permanent brain injuries, or an inability to meet academic expectations, they must find ways to drastically reduce head trauma during practices and games or eliminate football and other sports to protect the well-being of young people. Some teams now limit practice hours spent doing full contact drills and scrimmages, but they have increased the number of games that football teams play in a season, including playoffs (Brady and Barnett, 2015). Many coaches now teach tackling moves that limit head involvement, but these moves are difficult to make given the speed of real game action. New concussion diagnosis and treatment protocols are mandated in high school sports, but these only reduce the likelihood of playing with a head injury rather than preventing head injuries. High tech helmets are touted by football leagues at all levels as a way to protect athletes, but no helmet stops a brain from moving inside the skull when the head is hit or rotated with force; the helmet can reduce skull fractures but not brain cell damage (Connolly, 2019).

Despite their popularity, interscholastic sports face many uncertainties today. Some issues causing that uncertainty are similar for high schools and colleges, whereas others are unique to each level. In this section, we focus first on the similar issues and then deal with issues unique to each level of participation including esports

High school and college sport programs both face issues related to cost containment and growing budget inequality between programs in schools at the same level of competition. The second issue is the changing orientations and rising expectations of parents and athletes, who now make their own sport-related goals a high priority when searching for a school and a sports program. A third issue facing both high school and college programs is how to minimize concussions, repetitive head trauma, and other serious injuries that could significantly reduce participation in certain sports and bring about major changes in athletic departments and the sports they sponsor.

The emergence of today's organized sports is closely linked with schools in England and North America. However, the United States is the only nation in the world where it is taken for granted that high schools and colleges sponsor and fund interschool varsity sports programs. In most countries, organized sports for school-aged young people are sponsored by community-based athletic clubs funded by members or through a combination of public and private sources.

High schools and universities outside the United States may have teams, but they are not solely dependent on individual schools or school systems (Brown, 2015; Pot et al., 2014; Ridpath, 2018). Additionally, their meaning and purpose are unlike the meanings given to school teams in the United States, they often are organized and managed by students, and they are not integral to the culture and social organization of the schools. Interscholastic sports are an accepted and important part of US high schools and colleges, but when they dominate the cultures and public profiles of schools, many people become concerned about their role in education.

Research is needed on this issue. People assume that support for teams translates into support for schools, but we don't know how or under what conditions this occurs. For example, people regularly watch, talk about, and cheer for high school and university sports teams at the same time that they vote down bond issues to fund local schools, or they vote for state legislators who cut billions of dollars from state university budgets.

How and under what conditions do those cheering fans support funding for the high schools and universities that sponsor the teams they follow? We know little about this, although many people uncritically assume that spirit generated by sports is always good for education.

Coaches in programs that actively support academic success may schedule practices and games that do not interfere with coursework. Athletes may miss games and meets to study for or take tests, write papers, or give presentations. Team members may discuss academic issues and support one another's academic careers. In other words, there are programs and teams that neither subvert the academic mission of higher education nor undermine the academic careers of athletes. Usually they're found in NCAA Division III, some NAIA and many small Christian college programs, but they also exist in some low-profile, non-revenue-producing Division I and II sports and in many women's sports at all levels of competition.

However, teams at many of these schools are increasingly organized to emphasize "excellence," which means recording many more wins than losses at most schools. This pressures coaches to produce winning teams and championships to keep their jobs, and coaches put pressure on athletes to give priority to their sport. When this occurs, it is difficult for young people to balance their academic and athletic careers, even if they had a good academic record in high school. This may explain why the NCAA reported that of the 200 Division III schools providing graduation rates in their 2017 reports the overall rate for athletes was 68 percent, whereas football players and African American athletes had graduation rates of 51 and 46 percent, respectively (Burnsed, 2018). We can't meaningfully interpret these rates without having comparable rates for the rest of the student bodies at these schools, but it appears that even Division III athletes may struggle with dual-career conflict.

Dealing with this situation is a goal for some of the few black female faculty and athletic department members working at PWIs. For example, when Akilah Carter-Francique, the 2018-2019 President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, was a facuty member at Texas A&M University, she created the Sista to SistaTM leadership development program to provide black female athletes a "safe cultural space" on campus. The program fosters social connections built around an awareness of the dynamics of power on campus and in the athletic department, and around an affirmation of self-definition and self-valuation grounded in the history of black women's culture. From that vantage point, the women formulate strategies for representing their interests in a context where their voices have long been silenced (Carter-Francique, Dortch & Carter-Phiri, 2017).

However, the structure and cultures of PWIs and Division I athletic departments where most of the coaches and athletic directors are white men, make it risky to express their voices. Speaking truth to power from a marginalized position nearly always evokes pushback and negative consequences that can affect academic and athletic careers. Additionally, to do this and successfully manage dual careers at the same time is nearly impossible. For this reason, it is best for them to work through organizations that have enough power and leverage to effectively represent their interests. But those organizations are scarce and usually have other priorities. In fact, this is one of the reasons that some of these women attend or transfer to HBCUs. These institutions have far fewer resources than Division I PWIs, but they have an abundance of safe cultural spaces in which to prepare for the future.

When people take it upon themselves to ask critical questions about school-sponsored sports, conduct investigations, and identify problems that can be solved only by changing sports, they are generally ignored or they become targets of widespread scorn and personal attacks on their character and careers. This provides college (and high school) sports programs with a shield that is difficult to penetrate, even when the facts indicate that the shield should be laid to rest.

In 2018, black students made up about 10 percent of the total student body at Division I universities, and the vast majority of them were students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Figure 14.2 shows that at the same time, black men and women were 21 percent of the athletes, 48 percent of football players, 56 percent of the men's and 47 percent of the women's basketball players. For example, at the University of Florida in 2016, black men comprised 2.2 percent of all undergraduate students, but comprised 78 percent of the men's basketball and football teams (Harper, 2018).

CSRI data suggest that athletes experience more dual-career conflict than other students or handle it in a less balanced manner. The same pattern exists for male athletes relative to female athletes, black athletes compared with white athletes, and athletes playing on teams that are top-ranked nationally and in more elite conferences compared with athletes playing on lower-ranked teams in less elite conferences. None of these patterns is surprising, but it would be helpful if we had other studies that helped us understand why they exist and what causes them to vary the way they do.

In addition to the NCAA, people working in Division I athletic departments are aware of dual-career conflict among their athletes. They also know that as the financial stakes associated with winning have become intense' coaches are under pressure to recruit the best athletes even if their academic record and preparation are well below what they are for the rest of the student body (Rubin & Moses, 2017). Plus, most coaches know that top high school athletes have often focused more on their athletic than their academic careers.

Locating academic support programs in the athletic department, physically and administratively, is consistent with the growing social and academic isolation of athletes at universities with big-time athletic programs. Mixing with the rest of the student body, according to coaches and many athletes on high profile teams, is a distraction (Rubin & Moses, 2017). This is why opulent and expensive "athlete centers" are built to house academic support programs and other attractions that keep the athletes focused on their sport while they are under the watchful eyes of athletic department staff—much like a well-equipped detention center (Hatteberg, 2018) or a 21st-century plantation (Hawkins, 2010). Athletes generally see these centers as a refuge, a place where they can hang out together without dealing with people and issues that take time away from their athletic careers. But taking advantage of this refuge intensifies the process of role engulfment and undermines the development of relationships and identities that are not grounded in sports.

In some cases, this feels familiar to young men who were recruited as 14-year-olds into private, athletic-centric prep schools where they were used to build nationally ranked high school teams. Sport management and educational leadership expert, Joseph Cooper (2019) refers to this form of "flesh peddling" as central to the miseducation of black athletes in particular. As this occurs, these young men are immersed in a seductive system of sports-related encouragement and rewards that benefits others as it sidetracks holistic development among young people who play sports on high profile teams.

Gender-related participation inequities in high school and college are due primarily to the size of football teams and the increasing costs associated with fielding football teams. About 25 universities in the Power Five conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and Southeastern) have football and men's basketball teams that generate enough revenues to subsidize the budgets for all men's and women's sports, but as the expenses for football and men's basketball increase, student fees along with state and university money are used to cover athletic department expenses.

In terms of gender equity, the supporters of intercollegiate football face a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, they say that football is an educational activity and that they should not have to pay taxes on their increasing revenues or treat players as employees. On the other hand, when gender equity is discussed, they claim that college football is a business affected by objective market forces out of their control and that it should not be treated as an educational activity. This is why Title IX remains controversial—it exposes the contradictions of big-time sports programs and turns most college football supporters into flip-floppers and hypocrites. Achieving gender equity will continue to be difficult because football programs are expensive and they usually spend much more money than they generate, even in about 40 of the 65 universities in the Power Five conferences.

As of late-2019, only one concussion lawsuit against the NCAA had been settled. It was filed in 2011 by a number of former NCAA athletes and settled in 2014 with the NCAA admitting no liability and paying no damages to an individual, but agreeing to establish a $70 million fund to pay for exams so the plaintiffs could be examined to see if they had neurological ailments that needed treatment for which the NCAA assumed no responsibility. They also agreed to provide $5 million for research on concussions (not on repetitive head hits). But then it took the NCAA three years to create a simple protocol and another two years to distribute it to NCAA member institutions. Overall, the settlement for the 2011 brain injury lawsuit was so ambiguous and unhelpful that former athletes have filed more than 100 additional lawsuits as of 2019, and most of them seek personal damages (Hruby, 2019). These lawsuits may be unified in a class action suit or they may be strung out one at a time for many years, which is the hope of lawyers for the NCAA. But sooner or later, the law of probabilities will catch up with the NCAA and lead to a settlement that forces institutions of higher education from sponsoring sports in which some students damage their brains.

In the meantime, research shows that before 2016 there was not one news article that could be found in which any college president talked about the issue of brain injuries in any university-sponsored sport or expressed concern about the damage that repetitive head hits may cause for athletes in any college sport (Igsvoog, 2015). This is certainly not due to chance. It appears that reporters from major media companies avoid the question because the financial success of their companies and the existence of their jobs depend on boosting the popularity of college football through uncritical and supportive coverage. At the same time, university presidents know that any statement of concern that comes out of their mouths will be used against the NCAA and university defendants in a court case. This is strange given that researchers in the medical schools and brain science departments at the presidents'universities are doing research on brain injuries among athletes and publishing findings that raise serious questions about the safety of playing any sport in which the head is forcefully hit hundreds of times each year (Frederick, 2019). It appears that the presidents are stuck between supporting the use of science to protect the health and well-being of athletes on their schools' teams versus supporting the football teams that provide universities with revenues and media publicity. So far, every president has opted for football over the health and well-being of athletes.

Colleges and universities can join the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), a nonprofit organization focused on "developing the structure and tools needed to advance collegiate esports in the varsity space".Using an approach similar to the NFHS approach, NACE provides assistance in developing varsity programs and teams with guidelines for eligibility and a focus on graduation. It also sponsors competitions and awards scholarships. It's like the NCAA of esports without bureaucratic and control-oriented baggage. Collegiate esports leagues and tournaments are provided primarily by two other organizations: Tespa is a network of students, competitors, and club leaders that emphasizes students first, inclusion, and creating opportunities on and off campuses.

It has partnerships with ESPN, Twitch, and other platforms that also provide media support. The Collegiate Starleague (CSL) is another gaming league for teams from accredited colleges and universities in North America

When a local public school does not meet their expectations, parents and athletes seek other schools if they have a choice. If not allowed to switch public schools, they might seek a private school or even move into another area where there is a public school program that offers what they want. In either case, they expect to receive personal attention and coaching. Another alternative that is becoming increasingly popular in soccer, volleyball, lacrosse, and a few other sports is to remain on a high-profile club team that plays year-round and regularly goes to state, regional, and national tournaments scouted by college coaches. But these clubs are expensive, often costing $10,000 or more per year depending on travel and tournament expenses.

It is difficult to say how these changing orientations and rising expectations play out at the college level. Certainly there are more prima donna athletes focused on their personal goals. This results in more athletes switching schools to find the attention and opportunities they expect. Recently, it has also led to multiple lawsuits filed against the NCAA by parents seeking damages for the wrongful death of a child due to the negligence of a coach; athletes seeking damages for head injuries (over 200 separate lawsuits as of late-2019); injuries suffered during "extreme workouts;" the freedom to profit from the use of their own time (giving a "paid" speech, for example), names, images, and likenesses for commercial purposes; increased benefits from the revenues they generate through their athletic labor; more freedom to seek medical attention and insurance that covers treatments after graduation for injuries suffered while playing for a school team; more time to focus on meeting academic expectations; and more freedom to transfer and play immediately for another university, among other things.

College athlete

is a term unique to higher education in the United States. Athletes in other countries may attend college, and college students may train and compete in a sport, but they are not identified as college athletes. They don't play on school-sponsored teams nor do the schools claim them as their athletes. For this reason, the young people who train and compete in a sport and attend college say that they have "dual careers," one as an athlete and the other as a student. Managing these dual careers is such a challenge that the European Union sponsors research on how young people handle it and what support they need to succeed as students and athletes