College Sports on the Brink of Disaster

College Sports on the Brink of Disaster PDF Author: John LeBar
Publisher: Sports Publishing
ISBN: 9781683584483
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America's much-beloved games of college basketball and football are being threatened. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff and lavish comforts for fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be justified; and yet, American society has allowed this intractable problem to fester for more than half a century. Lured by the glitter of untold riches, naive young players enroll year after year in colleges and universities expecting the ultimate reward of a highly paid career as a pro. Only a minuscule few will advance that far; even fewer will reap significant financial rewards. Instead of educating them, colleges and universities force them into full-time athletic jobs in which their labor is shamelessly exploited. Small wonder that outraged critics demand compensation for the players, but these same critics only present vague answers when asked how such a radical change would work. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster, first published as Marching Toward Madness and now newly updated, cites twenty-one reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, among them the prospect that the player talent pool will be concentrated to even fewer rich schools; recruiting wars will lead to more frequent scandals; and the regulatory powers of the NCAA will exponentially increase. Worst of all, pay-for-play will encourage schools to shirk even further the imperative to educate the young athletes. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster presents comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, to put academics first, and to end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.

College Sports on the Brink of Disaster

College Sports on the Brink of Disaster PDF Author: John LeBar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 168358449X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America's much-beloved games of college basketball and football are being threatened. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff and lavish comforts for fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be justified; and yet, American society has allowed this intractable problem to fester for more than half a century. Lured by the glitter of untold riches, naive young players enroll year after year in colleges and universities expecting the ultimate reward of a highly paid career as a pro. Only a minuscule few will advance that far; even fewer will reap significant financial rewards. Instead of educating them, colleges and universities force them into full-time athletic jobs in which their labor is shamelessly exploited. Small wonder that outraged critics demand compensation for the players, but these same critics only present vague answers when asked how such a radical change would work. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster, first published as Marching Toward Madness and now newly updated, cites twenty-one reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, among them the prospect that the player talent pool will be concentrated to even fewer rich schools; recruiting wars will lead to more frequent scandals; and the regulatory powers of the NCAA will exponentially increase. Worst of all, pay-for-play will encourage schools to shirk even further the imperative to educate the young athletes. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster presents comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, to put academics first, and to end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.

How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls' Sports

How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls' Sports PDF Author: Rick Eckstein
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538177587
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Featuring a new preface by the author, this book looks closely at college sports and how they shape the athletic and personal landscape for girls and young women. Filled with interviews from female athletes of all ages, this book chronicles how college and youth sports have become more corporate, to the detriment of participants.

The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium

The University of Illinois Memorial Stadium PDF Author: Kevin Hinders
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040143873
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This book offers a rigorous but graphically compelling narrative historic analysis of one of the most important civic buildings not only of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, or the State of Illinois, but arguably of the United States, Memorial Stadium. Like all spatial products, the design and construction of the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium embodies the social, political, economic, aspiration, and aesthetic values of its time. This book will engage in critical analysis including documenting the civic discourse that led to the Stadium and thereafter explore the iterative nature of the Stadium in shaping civic discourse. In this vein, central topics include its role in embodying the state’s economic growth; the changing nature of the sociocultural tendencies and its impact on campus life and the University’s community; the Stadium’s effects on UIUC sports and the campus’ built environment; the rise of College sports as big business; and the impact on mass culture across the State and the country, like the use of stadiums as concert venues and place of public discourse. More than a simple study of the building’s conceptualization, design, and construction, this book reveals why Illinois’ Memorial Stadium is an iconic part of the American Midwest’s built landscape and in many ways part of the American mythic landscape. This will be interesting reading for all those familiar with the building, as well as all students and scholars of sports architecture.

Pay to Play

Pay to Play PDF Author: Lori Latrice Martin
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 1440843155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book takes a hard look at historical and contemporary efforts to control sports participation and compensation for black athletes in amateur sports in general, and in big-time college sports programs. The book begins with background on the history of amateur athletics in America, including the forced separation of black and white athletes.

Billion-Dollar Ball

Billion-Dollar Ball PDF Author: Gilbert M. Gaul
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143108638
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
“A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

An Athletic Director’s Story and the Future of College Sports in America

An Athletic Director’s Story and the Future of College Sports in America PDF Author: Robert E. Mulcahy
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978802129
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
An Athletic Director's Story is the story of Robert Mulcahy's transforming decade as Rutgers University athletic director. His first-hand account describes the challenges awaiting him in 1998: To elevate the athletics program's assets - coaches and staffs, student athletes, facilities, and school pride - from hardly known to national prominence and achievement in NCAA Division I sports.

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc.

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. PDF Author: James T. Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000737012
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education. Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports. Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.

The Myth of the Amateur

The Myth of the Amateur PDF Author: Ronald A. Smith
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477322884
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In this in-depth look at the heated debates over paying college athletes, Ronald A. Smith starts at the beginning: the first intercollegiate athletics competition—a crew regatta between Harvard and Yale—in 1852, when both teams received an all-expenses-paid vacation from a railroad magnate. This striking opening sets Smith on the path of a story filled with paradoxes and hypocrisies that plays out on the field, in meeting rooms, and in courtrooms—and that ultimately reveals that any insistence on amateurism is invalid, because these athletes have always been paid, one way or another. From that first contest to athletes’ attempts to unionize and California’s 2019 Fair Pay to Play Act, Smith shows that, throughout the decades, undercover payments, hiring professional coaches, and breaking the NCAA’s rules on athletic scholarships have always been part of the game. He explores how the regulation of male and female student-athletes has shifted; how class, race, and gender played a role in these transitions; and how the case for amateurism evolved from a moral argument to one concerned with financially and legally protecting college sports and the NCAA. Timely and thought-provoking, The Myth of the Amateur is essential reading for college sports fans and scholars.

The Black Athlete in West Virginia

The Black Athlete in West Virginia PDF Author: Bob Barnett
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476678979
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This chronicle of sports at West Virginia's 40 black high schools and three black colleges illuminates many issues in race relations and the struggle for social justice within the state and nation. Despite having inadequate resources, the black schools' sports teams thrived during segregation and helped tie the state's scattered black communities together. West Virginia hosted the nation's first state-wide black high school basketball tournament, which flourished for 33 years, and both Bluefield State and West Virginia State won athletic championships in the prestigious Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (now Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association). Black schools were gradually closed after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the desegregation of schools in West Virginia was an important step toward equality. For black athletes and their communities, the path to inclusion came with many costs.