Why College Sports Deserve to Survive

I t is a time of beginnings across this great country. In winter, a new year starts. Spring renews nature’s cycle of life. But those who heed the academic calendar’s rhythms know the nervous yet exciting aura of potentiality a new school year brings, and understand that the transition from summer to fall might be the most powerful kickoff of them all. Not least because it means actual kickoffs: the return of sports, throughout all grade levels.

Yet in this time of beginnings, there also lingers a nagging sense of ending. No, it’s not that some nefarious legion of Tim Walzes is threatening once again to suspend sports for grade- and high-school students. It is, rather, that college sports — in which so many invest so much (figuratively and literally), by which so many remain attuned to the academic year and attached to institutions they might otherwise not much care for — have only just begun to experience changes that may render them unrecognizable, or perhaps end them completely, at least as we have known them. Should this happen, it would be a shame, for reasons I can personally attest.

The changes in college athletics have come hard and fast. Wondering in May, “Why Do We Even Have College Sports Anymore?,” Christian Schneider summarized them well: a Supreme Court ruling allowing athletes to profit off their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL); a “transfer portal” allowing penalty-free movement of student athletes from school to school; and now a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) settlement allowing schools to pay athletes directly. These changes bring college sports closer than ever to full professionalization. Further growing pains are likely on their way.

Some change was probably inevitable. The amount of money involved — at least for the biggest schools and the most prestigious programs — was simply too great. And the amount of time required of the most committed athletes often put a strain on “amateur” status that no amount of ice baths, ibuprofen, and visits to the trainer could fully heal were it a physical stressor. Not that many colleges didn’t try, often embarrassing themselves in the process. Just look at UNC’s fraudulent scheme that saw athletes take fake classes to remain athletically eligible.

It’s possible to argue against college sports for other reasons. Some might argue their all-consuming tendency distracts from higher education’s much more important academic mission. Over half a century ago, conservative luminary Russell Kirk left an academic post at Michigan State University in part because he thought its administrators believed that “mere aggrandizement in enrollments and buildings and course catalogs and football victories is the chief end of universities.”

But the naysayers are wrong. A visit to any of the best college-football towns or stadiums on gameday suffices to disprove them. Here, one will see an entire municipality geared toward a single purpose; or an entire arena (that, in some places, can swell to the population size of one of the biggest cities in the state on gameday) suffused with raucous energy. The institutional attachment and localized pride college sports inculcate help explain why, in 43 states, the highest-paid public employee is a college-sports coach. There’s a good chance that’s what the state would vote for — unless that coach is presiding over a losing season. It sure beats spending taxpayer money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Then there are the athletes themselves. Sure, not all of them meet the NCAA’s professed student-athlete ideal; the “rocks for jocks” stereotype exists for a reason. But even a Kirkian ought to admit that they strengthen community, variety, and “things established by immemorial usage.” They also provide a model for the physical potential of the human body at places where too many either neglect that potential or devote it to all-nighters, alcohol binges, and other unseemly shenanigans that the young frame can withstand. And they remind us, as Plato did, that a full education is not just intellectual but also physical. In short: Jocks rock.

I say this as a jock myself. For decades, football and basketball have gotten most of the attention in college sports. This remains true as college sports undergo great changes. But to focus on them in making a case for university athletics has been something of an admission against interest for me. As a middling distance runner for a Division II liberal-arts college, I did not miss out on immense financial gain by having been a student before the age of NIL. Nor did my contests ever attract city-sized crowds.

But I was a student-athlete all the same. With teammates by my side, at a formative time in my life, I suffered and sweated; I experienced disappointment and triumph; and I imposed on myself the discipline necessary to balance my athletic endeavors with my other responsibilities. It would be hard to convey further the true value of these experiences to those who did not share them with me, or were not fortunate enough to have their own college-sports careers. Those who did understand “the easy fond intimacy” of it all intuitively. They will understand without elaboration why, for example, the baseball players of now-closed Birmingham-Southern College took one last long bus ride together after their last championship game.

My own experience is bound up in my case for college sports. Hence the prospect of their end, or their mutation beyond recognition, fills me with a wistfulness that this fall’s being a decade since my last cross-country season cannot fully explain. Schneider describes the end of college sports in this way: “Soon, your teams will be populated with paid mercenaries who share none of your late-night escapades on the quad but make a little bit of money playing minor-league football.”

His case has an undeniable logic. And mine has an unavoidable idiosyncrasy, and irrationality. Even in my student-athlete heyday, I found it almost incredible that a group of adults would transport us sometimes hundreds of miles away, watch us run around on a grassy field (if we were lucky) or in 400-meter circles (if we weren’t), feed us, then return us to campus. It’s easy to caricature other sports, even the most popular ones, similarly. Our mere presence at an institution of higher education — itself a gift — did not entitle us to any of this.

It was a tremendous privilege, one whose esteem has only risen in my mind as it has receded in in time. While it was my fortune to do so, I sought to demonstrate, through my own commitment to excellence, my gratitude toward my team, my coaches, my school, and all those who made my pursuit possible. The act of cultivating my highest potential as an individual was inseparable from conceiving of myself as part of something greater. I aspired to virtues that reason does not fully capture.

These are the virtues college sports inculcate. Our civilization depends on them. Which is why I persist in hoping that this admittedly irrational system does not come to an end — not just so that non-athletes may continue to enjoy it, but so that future generations may have journeys like my own. Every journey has to start somewhere. And fall is a great time for beginnings.