Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2017
 

Spring 2017

Monday 4pm  and online

The Culture of Winning and the Amateur Athlete

Sports, and especially college sports, reflect the society that finds them so important. Through college sports, Americans often symbolize a wide range of values and virtues, expectations and frustrations. Sports provides an outlet for aggression, trains leaders, builds character, displays the American spirit, offers an opportunity to promote religion, enhances an essential commitment to competition, and glorifies the American obsession with winning.

Because intercollegiate athletics means all or even most of these things to someone at some time, it carries a heavy cultural burden and reflects many things about America. The media play a large and continuing role in the development of the sports mystique and the reinforcement of the values that adhere to sports. Yet, whatever the other values and symbols, sports are about the competition that produces winning, whether in the college or the professional variety. Although the other values articulated in sports rhetoric soften the clarity of this message of winning by introducing a variety of sub-themes involving the personal best, the old college try, the moral victory, no observer of college sports has any doubt that the activity is and always has been about winning.  

The culture of winning reflects a set of American values complicated in the case of intercollegiate sports by the cult of amateurism. In professional sports, winning is the absolute clear objective, and the players, teams, and fans all know that they participate in a professional competition where the owners of the team pay the players to win, and the compensation of the players reflects their contribution to winning.

In college sports, however, the cult of amateurism and the dual character of amateur competitive athlete and college student complicates this fundamental simplicity of sports. College sports are defined as amateur contests whose players come from a restricted subset of the population of athletically talented individuals. We define this subset as regular students seeking academic degrees. This is the idealized premise of college sports competition.

If the players were drawn at random from among American college students and therefore were truly amateur, the quality of the athletic performance would not be as good as it could be. Beginning very early in the twentieth century, colleges, in the endless pursuit of winning, identified a select pool of more or less college age individuals with special athletic skills and then recruited student-athletes from this pool to complete on their teams. The best college teams recruited these specially selected students and financed them for their athletic abilities.

While one might hope these students would have a capability and interest in achieving a reasonable level of academic accomplishment, the primary criteria for selecting student-athletes measured athletic not academic ability. This pool of college student-athletes constitute a special category of student, and the definition of amateur has become a term of art, designed to distinguish between the paid athlete in the professional leagues and the specially selected and rewarded amateur college student-athlete.

The principal difference between professional and student athlete involves the level and type of compensation and an absolute limit on the length of an athletic career. An amateur college athlete has come to mean an individual of college age, paid apprenticeship level compensation to compete for up to a maximum fixed time on behalf of the institution. One of the benefits provided amateur student-athletes, in lieu of additional compensation, is the opportunity to acquire a college education. Another is the opportunity to enhance their athletic sports skills and display them to a wider public. This public demonstration of athletic skill enhances some student-athletes future value in the commercial athletic marketplace after leaving college.

The definition of amateurism and the concept of the student-athlete are core distinguishing features of college sports. Although the development and enforcement of rules related to eligibility and the definition of amateur are fascinating and complex, the intensity of this conversation requires some comment.

College sports are branded entertainment products that colleges and universities (under the authority of the franchise granted by the NCAA) provide to local and national audiences. Clear brand differentiation is an essential component of maintaining market share for these products. Professional sports competitions, in almost all cases, are better entertainment in the sense that the athletes are of consistently higher quality with more experience, and the presentation of the contests usually demonstrates somewhat higher production and entertainment values. College sports as an enterprise nonetheless maintains its popularity by creating a special and quite specific product that touches a number American values that allows it to compete for audiences against the more explicit and higher quality professional model.

Americans value the collegiate experience and college has become the clearest ritual of youth entrance into middle-class adulthood and the most recognized process for transition into a wide range of professional occupations. Many people believe that college is a method for creating a leadership class and for supporting national aspirations for international preeminence. Part of the tradition of organized youth sports, captured in the American collegiate variety, sees the experience as teaching values and practices that contribute to leadership in war and industry. For example, we send young men to play football to learn strategy, teamwork, and the management of controlled violence within specific rule-bound contexts. These games, with their competition, their struggle for championships, and their extreme physical requirements, teach strength of character, the value of hard work, training, and sacrifice, the recognition that individual achievement may need to be subordinated to the good of the group, and similar values of group behavior (at least for team sports).

However, within these notions lies the additional understanding that we teach these values to an endless succession of student classes, partially new every year, and completely renewed within a span of four or five years. This creates a never ending sequence of sports-improved individuals who leave college and go on to be captains of industry, finance, professions, and politics. This encourages us to see the players, the athletes, as transitional in their collegiate roles, not permanent college players. They need to be viewed as non-professional, at least insofar as their collegiate athletic performance is concerned, so we can put the players in the same category as the regular students, all in a stage of learning and preparing for whatever life will bring after college.

If the audiences for college sports see the athletes as paid performers, compensated in open market bidding, the distinction between the college game and the professional game might fade, and without careful management, college ball would look like minor league ball (a product of very modest value). As long as audiences see the college game as something distinct, a non-professional contest among teams formed of students resident at each college, competing for the glory of their Alma Mater, and without immediate personal financial benefit from winning or losing, then we have a product we can differentiate from the professional game. 

Within this frame, we can understand better the tremendous effort to establish the exact definition of amateur or non-professional athletic status on one side and the exact characteristics of student status on the other for the individuals who compete for a collegiate team. At its simplest definition, an amateur is someone who plays the sport for the experience, for the enjoyment, and for the satisfaction of the game, and receives no direct compensation for their sports effort and skills. While in theory this is clear, in practice, the definition requires almost infinite specification.

The essential feature of amateur status for college sports has been that the student who plays the game cannot receive any direct payment for athletic activity related to the sport other than regular student financial aid provided by the institution on a basis that does not compensate the student beyond the cost of attending college,  covers the direct costs of participating in the sport, and pays the same stipend to all student-athletes within a specific sport no matter how talented or successful they are. 

If a student is paid beyond this limit to play, say in a summer league, then the student is thought to be a professional, and loses amateur status. Even if the student receives a fee for appearing at an event as a celebrity student-athlete (not competing but just appearing), then the student has been considered a professional receiving compensation based on collegiate athletic talent and performance. This is a simplified and partial description of the status of student amateur athlete.

The other critical element in the definition specifies the status of student. Student means that the individual is enrolled in the college or university as a regular student and conforms to the academic rules of the institution as would any student. When we combine student-athlete, we have the core concept around which the institutions and their governing organizations have built their rules over many years of careful, often controversial, and continuing calibration.

The extensive sections in the NCAA manuals demonstrate how difficult and important these items are. The manual states these two principles simply, although the rules that follow indicate how challenging it is to implement the principles in practice.

2.9 THE PRINCIPLE OF AMATEURISM Student-athletes shall be amateurs in an intercollegiate sport, and their participation should be motivated primarily by education and by the physical, mental and social benefits to be derived. Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.
2.5 THE PRINCIPLE OF SOUND ACADEMIC STANDARDS Intercollegiate athletics programs shall be maintained as a vital component of the educational program, and student-athletes shall be an integral part of the student body. The admission, academic standing and academic progress of student-athletes shall be consistent with the policies and standards adopted by the institution for the student body in general.

The challenge of defending amateurism within an essentially commercial entertainment product like college sports prompts periodic efforts to revisit the definition of "amateur." One manifestation of this concern constantly occupies the NCAA as it protects its amateur definition for its franchisees goes by the name Pay-for-Play. This notion proposes that student-athletes, since they are performing in what looks like a commercial entertainment product, should be paid a salary for their work that compensates them in some form relative to the revenue earned by the franchise. Such a notion is a direct assault on one of the core values of college sports and not surprisingly, earns a strong response from college and university people concerned about the integrity of the intercollegiate sports franchise.

Nonetheless, as the current season for football gets underway, it appears that the NCAA definition of "amateur" will likely require substantial redefinition if it does not disappear completely. The highly publicized lawsuits over compensation for the use of celebrity student-athlete images, the effort to unionize student-athletes as university employees, and the constant concern over the wide spread between the substantial compensation for celebrity coaches and athletic administrators and the maintenance compensation for celebrity players create pressure for change. In the settlement of one lawsuit, current players will receive compensation for the use of their images in commercial video games. In other lawsuits, the status of the student-athlete as an amateur will be seriously challenged under the premise that students who play sports should be free to receive compensation in the marketplace for their value to their teams. 

There are many variations, on these themes, and much discussion of mechanisms to resolve this challenge, but what seems clear is that the notion of amateur for student-athletes is now mostly obsolete. Whether the new system that emerges can continue to support real student-athletes, especially those who become short-term celebrities by virtue of their athletic performance, remains to be seen.

© 2017