Athletic Scholarships and Financial Abuse

“College athletes are living the dream. They get to go to the best schools, play a sport they love, and never actually attend classes. All for free.”

Oh boy, if I had a dime for every time I heard that line as a college athlete, I might be able to reimburse the NCAA for the money it payed lobbying to Congress last year.

But contrary to popular belief, most college athletes aren’t living a dream–they’re living in poverty, and their only means of financial stability lies in their athletic scholarships. This is problematic, because athletic scholarships are renewable, meaning that they expire at the end of every year, and their consistency is never guaranteed. For example, an athlete earning a 50% scholarship her freshman year might earn 30% her sophomore year if her coach decides to cut her scholarship. There are no NCAA bylaws that regulate the fluidity of athletic funding.

The NCAA also does not ban coaches from revoking athletic scholarships, and coaches can pull a scholarship for virtually any reason. So college coaches can use their athletes’ financial instability to make them overwork themselves and train through injuries or risk losing their scholarship (more on that later). This is a form of economic abuse, in which a person in power controls another’s access to financial resources within the confines of a relationship. For reference, these practices are present in 99% of domestic violence cases.

Athletic scholarships are about control, and the nature of athletic funding creates massive power gaps between coaches and athletes. In spite of the NCAA’s insistence that athletic scholarships can’t be revoked due to injuries and other extraneous circumstances, no formal policy exists that specifically prohibits coaches from doing so. And that gives coaches leverage over their rosters of 18-22-year-old financially illiterate/unstable adults.

Several prominent case studies of athletic abuse involve scholarship threats. At the University of Maryland, DJ Durkin’s staff called football players “thieves” if they weren’t earning their scholarships (a.k.a. pushing themselves to their absolute limits in an abusive training room culture). At the University of Nebraska and Rutgers University, head softball coaches Rhonda Revelle and Kristen Butler, respectively, both used scholarship threats to “encourage” (coerce) their athletes to train through injuries. All three of these coaches are still employed.

It’s easy for coaches to get away with coercing their athletes: there are no rules in the NCAA’s Division 1 Manual that prohibit coach abuse, and the renewable nature of athletic scholarships encourages this kind of behavior. Coaches are allowed, not required, to offer four-year scholarship deals, but why would they do that? Coaches would have no means of controlling their athletes if athletic funding was guaranteed. So financial abuse abounds in the NCAA because college athletes have no financial stability under the current structure.

If this sounds hypocritical, that’s because it is. Especially considering that Michigan State University just signed its football program’s newest head coach, Mel Tucker, to a six-year, $14.75 million contract. If a coach (who comes to MSU boasting a 5-7 record during his brief tenure at the University of Colorado) can guarantee multiyear, multimillion dollar funding, so should the athletes who employ him.

Body Over Mind

“Mind over body.” I cannot tell you how many times that simple phrase has been reiterated to me during training when I wanted to quit. When an athlete’s muscles and lungs are begging to stop during training and competition, the athlete’s mind has to say “absolutely not.” The persuasion of the mind must overcome the weakness of the body for athletes to grow. That’s how mental toughness works, and it’s a good thing in the appropriate doses.

That being said, my title isn’t a typo. Off-the-track/court/field, etc., athletes are wired to take care of our bodies over our minds. Here’s an example: I graduated college with 1.) a hamstring injury, and 2.) anxiety. Guess which one I took care of first?

The hamstring. Because I, as an athlete, knew exactly what to do to heal it.

After graduation, I took two weeks off of running and called up a physical therapist right away. It was a stubborn injury that took about a year to heal, but I was relentless because I knew what to do.

I knew anatomy. I knew kinesiology. I was familiar with sports medicine. So I got to work healing my hamstring, thinking that my mind would follow suit and calm down too.

I thought that when college running stopped, “anxiety” would stop too. And I use quotation marks there, because I knew something was off in my mind, but I didn’t have a word for it at the time. The language simply didn’t exist for athlete Katie, but I had plenty of words to describe what was going on with my hamstring.

My injury had a name: high hamstring tendinopathy. I understood the anatomy behind it too: my biceps femoris was strained from chronic overuse paired with weak hips, and that long hamstring muscle was pulling on the tendon located at the ischial tuberosity at the end of my pelvis. Sitting on it, let alone running, was excruciating, and healing it wasn’t a walk in the park, either. But I pursued physical therapy because that was a natural thought process for an injured athlete: when your body hurts, you take care of it.

As an athlete, I knew all of the complicated anatomical terms associated with my injury, but I had no idea what anxiety was. Now, I do, thanks to my therapist. But it took me two years of dealing with anxiety post-NCAA to do anything about it. Because athletes are wired to take care of the body over the mind.

That’s a problem. And I’ll talk about that more in my next post. Stay tuned!

Division III Violations, Division I Consequences

Several Division I schools have recently made headlines for alleged amateurism violations (Kansas and Georgia Tech, to name some), but now, a Division III school is receiving rare media attention for all of the wrong reasons. Last week, the NCAA stripped The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor football team of its 2017 national title and vacated all of its wins from the 2016-17 season for a self-reported amateurism violation. Institutions usually self-report NCAA violations to proactively avoid harsh punishments from the NCAA by admitting to their wrongdoings before the NCAA finds out on its own.

Apparently, UMHB felt that it violated rules blatantly enough to fear punishment from the head office, even amid the current college hoops scandal and legislation being passed that threatens the structure of the NCAA as we know it. And the head office responded quickly and severely, even with all of its current distractions. So what did UMHB do to stand out in the chaos?

Head football coach Pete Fredenburg allegedly let his players borrow his car over the course of 18 months of his tenure. A 2006 Subaru.

If this sounds absurd at face value, it’s even more ridiculous when you look at the Division-III Manual. According to Bylaw 16.9.1.6: “Staff members may provide reasonable local transportation to student-athletes on an occasional basis.” There’s a similar rule in the Division I Manual, which is why I think it will only be a matter of time before a D I school finds itself in trouble with transportation rules.

Personally, I don’t think Fredenburg did anything wrong, given the phrasing of the legislation, but I’m not the one making the rules. “Reasonable” and “occasional” are ambiguous, which, unfortunately, lends power to the NCAA. That gray area will likely come in handy for the head office, as UMHB has appealed the punishment, and for good reason. Unlike the scandals permeating Division I, Coach Fredenburg seemed to have good intentions when he violated the NCAA’s amateurism rules. When asked about letting his players borrow his car, Fredenburg said “I have a passion to help youngsters. [The athlete] desperately needed some help. I felt like I was okay with the interpretation of the rules. I had an old car that was in my driveway and I loaned it to him.”

The sentence worth repeating is “I felt like I was okay with the interpretation with the rules.” Apparently, the NCAA is not, which is why its policy is so vague. At the end of the day, the NCAA owns the interpretation of its rules at the expense of its member schools.

Another point worth noting is that Division III athletes are not allowed to receive athletic scholarships. Per the Division III Manual’s philosophy statement, athletic intuitions “shall not award financial aid to any student on the basis of athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance.” These athletes don’t receive any scholarship money to compete. Isn’t it “reasonable” to allow them to borrow a 2006 Subaru?

Still, the NCAA is rarely, if ever, reasonable, even with its true amateurs: Division III athletes are the ones who are playing for the love of the game and who most closely reflect the NCAA’s purported nonprofessional ideal. But amateurism is all but obsolete at the Division I level, and it looks to me like the NCAA is flexing its power as long as it can. This time, it’s targeting its actual amateurs.

A Tale of Two Scandals

It’s almost time to start the Fall semester, so it’s only fitting that another academic scandal just broke in the NCAA. I’ve been receiving lots of questions about it and I’m here to offer a one-word answer. But first, here’s the background information:

On Friday, the Mississippi State football and men’s basketball teams were placed on a three-year probation for academic fraud. According to ESPN, a tutor completed multiple assignments and exams for Mississippi State athletes in exchange for payment. While I think the punishment is far too light, it’s fantastic that the NCAA stepped in and punished the programs involved. However, many sports fans are crying foul, because the University of North Carolina was involved in a similar academic fraud scandal two years ago and escaped unscathed.

To recap, in 2017, a report from the University of North Carolina uncovered an eighteen-year history of academic fraud. Over that timespan, roughly 3,100 students took a fraudulent “paper class” and were given credit for half-baked assignments and minimal work (please read this essay from the class. It received an A-minus, gives you a good picture of what happened at UNC, and literally takes ten seconds).

Athletes, in particular were funneled into the class, but it was also available to the general student population, which was why the NCAA didn’t step in. Instead, it deferred to the university, because a fraudulent class offered to everyone wasn’t athlete-specific and therefore, not an impermissible benefit.

I call BS. The NCAA didn’t step in because UNC is too valuable in March.

Many people believe that football is the big moneymaker of the NCAA, but the reality is that the head office generates about 90% of its annual funding from March Madness. That’s also why the NCAA decided to punish Mississippi State, while letting UNC slide in 2017: Mississippi State isn’t nearly as valuable in March.

Mississippi State’s men’s basketball team finished seventh in the SEC last year, as opposed to UNC finishing second in the ACC, the better basketball conference. UNC has a brand name for basketball and March just isn’t the same without the Tar Heels. Plus, keeping UNC out of trouble means there’s a possibility for a Duke/UNC rivalry game in the national tournament. Mississippi State doesn’t have the same March presence or a rivalry so voracious.

This might feel a little like a conspiracy theory, but there’s a pattern here. Consider Michigan State and the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal. The NCAA purported that Nassar’s actions never “substantiated violations of NCAA legislation” and opted not to punish Michigan State for its institutional negligence.

It’s an absurd ruling from an organization that claims to be committed to student-athlete well-being. Many questioned why the NCAA gave Michigan State a hand slap rather than a postseason ban or a department-wide death penalty. Again, I point to March. Michigan State has a tournament-qualifying streak that spans back to 1998 and a fierce rivalry with the University of Michigan, which has also qualified every year since 2011. In other words, strong power five basketball programs are all but immune to NCAA violations.

But wait, what about the University of Louisville?

That was another case entirely. In 2013, the NCAA stripped the University of Louisville men’s basketball team of its 2013 title after the head of basketball operations was found guilty of providing escorts to players and recruits. Aside from the obvious ethical murkiness of that situation, the athletic department provided these individuals with an “illegal benefit,” or a perk that’s only available to athletes. That’s an amateur violation, which threatens the organizational structure of the NCAA, which is why the punishment was so harsh.

I (along with half the state of Kentucky) still don’t agree with the ruling, but it made sense from the NCAA’s vantage point: the Cards were on a performance decline after their last Sweet Sixteen appearance in 2015, so it was safe for the head office to make an example of a flailing program after a three-year drought. The NCAA essentially used U of L to make a statement: Nobody questions the Association’s business model and gets away with it. And at the end of the day, the NCAA is an athletic, not an academic institution, no matter what its PR says.

So that’s my take. The NCAA doesn’t care about academic fraud nearly as much as it cares about its bottom line and if you’re consistently good in March, you’re bulletproof. Lots of people have asked me what the difference is between the University of North Carolina scandal and the current situation at Mississippi State and I offer everyone the same one-word answer: March.