Free Writing – Sports & Undergraduate Education

Sports have been something that I’ve loved since I was very young. I played soccer and baseball all through my youth and into high school, while also collecting thousands of baseball, basketball, football, soccer, and even hockey cards along the way. There was a time when I could literally tell you the main statistics of just about every player that was currently playing professional sports. Thus was my interest in the sporting world. Now that I’m in college and looking to make a career out of sports reporting I find myself reflecting beyond the playing field into the deeper aspects of the sports I’ve enjoyed since I was a child. One thing that is particularly interesting to me is the high level of influence that sports figures wield in our society. Even, and maybe especially, on college campuses, the balance of power does not lay where one would normally suspect. It is not so gradually becoming a stark reality at many major universities that the person with the most influence is not the college’s president, but rather the head football coach. The coaches are paid much more than any administrator on campus (including the president) and the marketing and financial implications of the football program are too large for anyone to ignore. Many colleges bend over backwards to do anything that will help them compete athletically with their rival schools, while the focus on academics is being left somewhere in the background. You just don’t see any million-dollar teachers out there, even though they have a much larger influence on a much broader group of people than any football coach ever will. It will be interesting to see how the education aspect of college fairs in the future in its competition with athletics.