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AMERICAN SPORTS DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION

Few issues in sports have captivated Americans as much as intercollegiate and interscholastic athletics. The passion, the pomp and circumstance, the rivalries, and the unique American flavor of it all make them a significant part of the social fabric. I begin with the development of college sports in the United States because they provided the main impetus to those sports manifesting themselves at the primary and secondary levels of education.

College and other educationally based sports in the United States, while hugely popular and embedded in the cultural framework of the nation, have been the subject of significant concern and empirical inquiry for over a hundred years. Millions of fans attend games between athletes who are advertised as students first and athletes second. These “student-athletes,” as they are commonly referred to, provide fans with entertainment and possess the ability to bring communities together, while ostensibly gaining valuable life experience and access or potential access to a college education, with a financial package to help pay for it. Proponents of college sports, and to a lesser extent high school sports, point to other potential benefits that sound promising, but may not in reality be consistent residual effects of having athletics on campus. This includes such often-cited positive attributes as increasing a school’s visibility on a national level, which can lead to enhanced fund-raising, marketing opportunities, and applications for enrollment. In addition, sports participation is touted as a vehicle to provide educational opportunities for athletes to develop leadership, teamwork, and other beneficial social skills (Dosh 2013; Litan, Orszag, and Orszag 2003; Miracle and Rees 1994). Some critics have argued, with or without empirical research, that coaches and sports administrators will often denigrate academics and overemphasize the importance of sports to an institution, while gaining power to influence the academic primacy and moral compass of the institution (Splitt 2003).