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.

Tough Love Part 1: What Does Abusive Coaching Look Like?

That’s a good question, and one that the college sports world doesn’t seem to have a comprehensive answer to. Sometimes, it’s hard to draw a line between tough coaching and abuse in athletic environments where athletes are conditioned to endure physical pain and tough things out mentally on a daily basis. However, almost everyone can agree that ex-Maryland head football coach DJ Durkin was an abusive coach.

For those unfamiliar with Durkin, ESPN’s full account of his abuse is located here. The Sparknotes version is that Durkin cultivated a team based on fear, threats, and intimidation. The abuse was so severe that one of his players died during training, after which, Durkin was placed on administrative leave, reinstated, and then reluctantly fired by the University of Maryland only after students protested his reinstatement in October 2018.

In spite of his track record, Durkin was hired by University of Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin to serve as an assistant coach on Thursday. I wish I was making that up, but it’s clear that Kiffin and the athletic department at Ole Miss either don’t view Durkin as an abuser, or they don’t care. And since the NCAA does not define (or ban) abusive coaching, it often goes unchecked and unpunished, even if the physical and mental health ramifications are life-altering.

Abuse in athletic settings is hard to identify for many reasons, mainly because it is often not physical. Coaches would be foolish to physically assault athletes who are almost always physically stronger than them. Although some of Durkin’s abuse was physical in nature, most of it was not, which makes it that much harder to identify. So, my next few posts will cover key elements of coach abuse (scholarship threats, body shaming, verbal abuse, and overtraining/physical abuse), as well as the physical and mental health effects exhibited in athletes who experience them.

I don’t want to end this post with “happy” new year, but may 2020 be the year universities stop hiring coaches who should arguably be in jail, and hold abusers accountable instead of offering them second chances.

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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.

SB-206 Wins the Battle, not the War.

If you follow college sports at any level, you are likely aware that California governor Gavin Newsom just signed the Fair Pay to Play Act (SB-206) into law yesterday morning. This means that in 2023, college athletes may be able to profit from their images, likenesses, and skills, depending on the responses of the NCAA and California universities (It’s a hard “maybe” for now. Check out ESPN’s nifty little School House Rock-esque video explaining the potential path of the bill here).

I think it’s safe to say that everyone deserves to profit from what is rightfully theirs, and many sports fans consider SB-206 a monumental victory in the fight for athletic rights. It’s definitely a win, but it’s probably not as big of a deal as most people think. Here are ten key reasons why:

1.) In spite of the name, the Fair Pay to Play Act isn’t paying athletes. Rather, it’s allowing financially-illiterate eighteen-year-olds the right to be entrepreneurs, which is potentially dangerous because the bill doesn’t provide any monetary regulation or financial education for the young adults it affects. But because it’s a state law, SB-206 is a great way for California to pay off its debt through taxable revenue.

2.) SB-206 won’t grant college athletes employee status and the benefits (e.g. insurance and the right to unionize) that come with it.

3.) The bill won’t fix the fact that there is no definition of athletic abuse in the Division 1 Manual, let alone any rules against coaches and trainers harming the athletes they oversee (Google Larry Nassar, Richard Strauss, or Sylvia Hatchell for examples of what abuse looks like in athletic settings). Athletes will still be just as vulnerable to abuses of power if/when SB-206 goes into effect.

4.) It won’t provide discriminatory protections to minority athletes and coaches. Discrimination is legal, according to the gaps in the Division 1 Manual.

5.) It won’t provide mental health services to athletes, and these initiatives are desperately needed. Poor mental health among college athletes is a silent epidemic, and college athletes are particularly susceptible to anxiety, depression, PTSD, and eating disorders, all of which put them at a higher risk of heart issues and suicide than the general population. The NCAA has yet to address these problems at a meaningful level.

6.) SB-206 won’t improve training room health care for athletes, because the NCAA requires literally nothing of the healthcare specialists that work with its athletes. There’s a whole handbook of guidelines (which hasn’t been updated since 2015), but no hard and fast requirements, which puts athletes at medical risk.

7.) It won’t close the pay gap between male and female coaches, or the funding gaps between men’s and women’s athletic programs.

8.) The bill won’t lift scholarship caps. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of college athletes don’t have full ride scholarships, because the NCAA limits the amount of monetary resources teams can provide them. For example, Division 1 track teams receive 12.6 full scholarships to be dealt out to rosters that typically hover around 30 athletes. This keeps resources scarce, which keeps things toxically competitive among teammates, and makes college athletes dangerously controllable. If coaches maintain financial control over athletes, they can make athletes do just about anything, and SB-206 won’t leverage that playing field for the majority of college athletes who aren’t worth millions of dollars.

9.) SB-206 won’t give college athletes any job security. Coaches get multi-year contracts, but can legally cut an athlete’s scholarship without warning, and for virtually any reason.

10.) It won’t give athletes anywhere to go with any of the aforementioned problems. There is no standard operating procedure for reporting athletic grievances, which is why most athletes stay silent when they are mistreated (e.g. the University of Nebraska softball team) and keeps the system in place.

Allowing college athletes to earn money is a good fight to fight, but it’s certainly not the only one. The NCAA needs a complete structural reform before it actually starts benefitting its athletes, so although the one-sidedness of the amateurism conversation is frustrating, the national attention is encouraging. Maybe SB-206 will serve as a good wrecking ball to start dismantling–and then rebuilding–a crooked, but promising, organization.

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.

Equal Pay? Not in the NCAA.

It’s no ~Secret~ that female athletes are underpaid. In fact, the deodorant giant just donated $529,000 to fill the financial gap between the US men’s and women’s soccer teams to prove it.

Last month, Diana Taurasi echoed the sentiment as it pertains to the WNBA, where salaries are maxed out at $117,500. For reference, the minimum salary requirement in the NBA is $838,464. That’s for a rookie with zero years of professional experience.

There are usually two sets of responses to these numbers. Either something sexist like “Women belong in the kitchen anyway,” “Women’s sports is a joke,” or “There’s a WNBA?” And everyone’s heard all of the stale “sandwich” jokes too.

But you might also say something reasonable like “Well, women’s sports just don’t generate as much money as the men.”

If you go for the latter, you’re right. But what does this have to do with the NCAA? A lot, actually.

Yes, it’s true that women’s sports don’t generate as much profit as men’s sports. With rare exceptions like women’s vs. men’s gymnastics, you’re absolutely right. But I want to implore you to consider the root cause.

Many people hail Title IX as a savior for women’s sports and while the document has done a lot for female athletes, it falls short of true equity in the NCAA. In fact, the NCAA’s Title IX Frequently Asked Questions page emphasizes that Title IX does NOT guarantee equal funding among programs:

“The only provision that requires that the same dollars be spent proportional to participation is scholarships. Otherwise, male and female student-athletes must receive equitable ‘treatment’ and ‘benefits.’”

The quotation marks aren’t mine. They’re in the original text. So what do “treatment” and “benefits” mean exactly? Certainly not equal funding or equal opportunity.

An NCAA publication entitled “Where are the Women?” notes that just 40 % of women’s athletic programs are actually helmed by women, down from 55% in 1981. Women coaching men is almost unheard of, statistically significant at under one percent.

But here’s where it really gets fun: another report conducted by the NCAA itself indicates that women receive 18% of operating budgets, 30% of competitive opportunities, 41% of scholarship funds, 46% of championship opportunities, and 29% of recruiting dollars. Female head coaches also only earn 25% as much as their male counterparts for an average of over $500,000 in coach salary gaps.

In total, these findings equal out to a $17.2 million spending differential.

So Title IX doesn’t really do much for women in the NCAA except allow us to play full-court basketball, which wasn’t a thing pre-title IX. Nowhere in the document does Title IX give female athletes the same opportunities as the men.

That’s a problem. There’s no equal playing field in college or professional sports. Women compete on a delayed start line. I like statistics, but you don’t even have to crunch the numbers to see it.

Flip on your TV. When was the last time you saw an advertisement for a women’s college athletic program aired on ESPN? How many more male-centric advertisements do you see? Go to a university bookstore. How many football jerseys do you see? Baseball jerseys? Men’s basketball jerseys? What about jerseys for women’s sports?

How much do you pay for a softball game versus a baseball game at your university of choice? There’s a 40% gap for season ticket deposits here at the University of Texas (softball price here. Baseball price here).

Did you notice that the 2019 men’s basketball championship game was aired at primetime on a weeknight while the women’s championship was aired at 5:30 on a Sunday?

What about the fact that there’s no female equivalent to college football?

We can debate for days about the merit of equal pay and the legitimacy of women’s sports, but one thing is clear: female athletes don’t have a fighting chance against the boys because we’re not marketed the same. It’s a societal problem and it’s another reason repealing amateurism won’t solve half the issues within the NCAA: some images and likenesses are simply less valuable than others.

This is speculation, but I think the NCAA wants to keep it that way to make more room for male athletes to excel. Because they’re more profitable. Because athletic departments want them to be so that’s where the money goes. Do you see the cycle here?

So regardless of where you stand on equal pay or the value of women’s athletics, it’s undeniable that women are competing with a slanted scoreboard. That’s why we’re so passionate about pay gaps. We have to be. It’s not like we get much help from Title IX or the organizations that champion it.

SB-206 and (Ir)Responsible Recruiting Standards

Today, I’m going to do two things I really don’t want to do.

First of all, I’m going to go out of order. I wanted to start off this series with the NCAA’s commitment to value-based legislation. We’re going to be talking about its commitment to responsible recruiting standards instead. It’s a short commitment, so I’ll include the full text:

“Recruiting bylaws shall be designed to promote informed decisions and balance the interests of prospective student-athletes, their educational institutions, the Association’s member institutions and intercollegiate athletics as a whole. This commitment includes minimizing the role of external influences on prospective student-athletes and their families and preventing excessive contact or pressure in the recruitment process.”

Recruiting is a dirty game for a lot of reasons, but I’ll talk about that in another post. For now, let’s move onto the second thing I really don’t want to do, because you’re going to want to stick around for this one. Today, I have to admit that Mark Emmert is right about something. That’s painful for me to write but I have to give him credit. It’s only responsible.

Last week, the NCAA released a statement in response to the Fair Pay to Play Act passing the California assembly. It only has one more hurdle until it becomes law and has until July 11^th to do so. Emmert is lobbying to prevent that from happening. And his justification actually makes sense. Here’s an excerpt of the letter he wrote to the final committee that explains why:

“When contrasted with current NCAA rules… as drafted the bill threatens to alter materially the principles of intercollegiate athletics and create local differences that would make it impossible to host fair national championships.”

He’s right. I hate to say it, but Mark Emmert is right. Which links back to responsible recruiting standards and excessive pressure, and externa influences mentioned in the Division 1Manual. Any reform to amateurism needs to be comprehensive. South Carolina representative Mark Walker knows this, which is why he’s working to pass a similar law through congress. I like his approach a lot better than California’s. Here’s why:

If only California athletes are allowed to accept payment, that creates an egregious unfair competitive imbalance to California universities. Coaches will be able to leverage that when they recruit high school athletes and the Pac-12 will have national championship teams until other member states hop on board, which could take a while. That’s not fair.

I’ll give you a scenario to illustrate my point: University of Southern California head coach, Clay Helton and defending national champion coach, Dabo Swinney both go to recruit an athlete. Swinney has prestige on his side and USC hasn’t won a national championship since 2004. But, should SB-206 finally pass, Helton now has money on his team, or at least the potential for his athletes to earn it.

Helton can offer recruits the opportunity to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars while they play at USC. Swinney can’t do that unless he wants to do it illegally. He won’t. Swinney doesn’t think athletes should be paid in the first place. Who do you think is going to win that recruit over? Especially if he comes from poverty, which, contrary to popular belief, most full-ride athletes do.

I’ve said before that I’m all for fair compensation. It’s not the NCAA’s right to give or take away in the first place. But amateurism reform needs to be comprehensive. That’s why I’m a fan of Mark Walker’s bill and critical of SB-206. Widespread bylaws are the only way the NCAA can maintain its commitment to responsible recruiting standards. Mark Emmert is right. And I hate to admit that. But it’s only responsible.