Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2020
 

Spring 2020

Competition and Equity

In the discussion of race, class, and gender, we often approach the issues as if the principal drivers of the conversation were the values associated with equal opportunity that are part of the American dream, albeit as yet unfulfilled. For intercollegiate athletics and for sports in general, these issues have a different context. The primary concern of all intercollegiate athletics is winning. Consideration of equity and fairness for racial, ethnic, and gender balance in sports appear mostly through the lens of competitiveness.

In the case of race and class, the choice to recruit and play black student-athletes, or to recruit and play poor white athletes at elite white colleges, reflects a competitive decision about the opportunity to win. Coaches and boosters do not usually pursue more inclusive and equitable opportunities for all people when they seek out talent from a previously excluded group. Athletic recruitment pursues specific talents of particular prospective student-athletes whose social, ethnic, and economic characteristics might well make them, absent those talents, considerably less acceptable to major supporters of college sports. The pursuit of talent encourages people to make exceptions to normal discriminatory practices in order to acquire the athletic skills that enhance their team's opportunity to win.

In the case of gender, the opposition to expanding opportunities for women comes not as much from strong principles about appropriate gender roles but more from the fear that supporting equivalent women's sports will reduce the resources available to support winning men's programs. This is not an equity argument, but a winning argument, although only a winning argument for men.

However, once forced to support high quality women's sports, university athletic programs usually pursue winning in those programs with the same single mindedness and the same focus as they do for the men. The logic of sports is that once you are in the game, you really want to win. As a result, with the impetus of Title IX, women's programs began to seek talented recruits among previously excluded groups of black and poor women, among international students, and wherever else talent appeared.

Indeed, the recruitment of international students offers another example of the importance of acquiring talent to win. Although American universities have long accepted international students to enrich the cultural context and enhance the ability of domestic students to deal with a global marketplace, college recruiters now scour the international playing fields to identify talent that will improve their winning percentages. The challenge of international students takes various forms. In one context, we can recognize that when a recruited international student-athlete receives a scholarship it means there is one less scholarship for a US student-athlete since the number of athletic scholarships in each sport is fixed. In addition, it is often difficult to determine whether the academic preparation of an international student matches what we require of a domestic student when recruiting for athletic talent.

While we have reasonably clear, if sometimes difficult to enforce, rules about amateur status for student-athletes, young people in other countries may participate in sports venues that in the US might be considered professional. Nonetheless, he NCAA and its institutional representatives have worked on various ways of addressing these issues, albeit with less than total success. International student-athletes do not appear in all sports, of course. Fewer in football which is a uniquely American sport, more in soccer, tennis, and especially track and field, all of which are aggressively cultivated overseas.

Issues of race, class, and gender appear in other ways. We know that women's sports, given the opportunity and the resources, become as competitive and as driven by winning as their male counterparts. Women's basketball teams often choose to practice against men who are highly skilled if not at the level to qualify for their university's varsity team. These men enjoy the game and find the women highly competitive. The women gain experience competing against players whose skills, experience, and especially size and speed may exceed their own. The loss, of course, is experienced by the second team women who would otherwise have had an opportunity to improve their skills in practices with the first team.

Although women in sports such as tennis, golf, and skiing, have professional career opportunities, and women in track and field, swimming, and other sports have Olympic competition possibilities, the big money team sports like basketball only recently have begun to offer sufficient incentives to be career possibilities. The challenges and risks of seeking a professional career in sports affect women as well as men even if the potential rewards are not yet as great. Moreover, in many women's sports such as gymnastics and tennis, the professional career may need to begin well before college age, further reducing the attraction of college sports as professional preparation.

With the rise of considerable diversity in college athletics, many observers have focused on the stereotypes applied to the individuals of different race or gender participating in particular sports. The pervasiveness of various stereotypes about expected behavior or success appear through the analysis of media portrayals, the assignment of different racial types to specific roles within teams, or the language and characterization of black or female athletes in movies or television. Discussions of which students should be quarterbacks, linemen, or receivers, for example, will often display stereotypical expectations.

For both men and women, the competition to recruit the best players, and for the athletes the opportunity to be seen as being among the best players, dominates much of the activity of high school students with outstanding athletic talent, and even those in junior high and elementary school. A few examples of the recruiting process help give context to this conversation.

For all student-athletes, black or white, male or female, recruitment is about the institutions finding the great players and about the great players making themselves known to the institutions. This matchmaking however, disguises a difference in perspective in some cases. Coaches want players who can help the team win today while many student-athletes want to participate in winning programs to prepare for their sports career tomorrow.

The NCAA and its institutions, bound tightly to the continuing national conversation about race, class, and gender, provide an exceptional amount of data about the distribution of student-athletes as well as coaching and administrative professionals by race and gender. These data offer an opportunity to evaluate the causes of dramatic differences in the distribution of student-athletes by race within gender categories, by sport. When we compare these distributions to those of other countries where the same sports have high visibility, we can conclude that these distributions do not likely conform to any racial characteristics, but instead respond to the structures of opportunity, discrimination, and class, often in the United States as elsewhere, mediated by structures of racial discrimination and socioeconomic circumstance.

Throughout this complex topic, the key element of competition continues to provide the True North of intercollegiate athletics. While much rhetoric speaks to the highly controversial national agenda around race, class, and gender, the reflection of this argument within intercollegiate sports always intersects with the fundamental, permanent value of winning.

© 2020