LiberalArtsOnline Volume 5, Number 11
November 2005
Are academic standards lower for college athletes? Chances are, if you randomly polled people on the street, the vast majority would say yes. With headlines in the media like, "Race for Athletes Makes Colleges Dumber and Dumber," (Financial Times, June 11, 2005) it's not hard to see where they might have gotten this idea. It would be nice to say that these are sensational but unsupported sound bites, blown all out of proportion in order to catch the reader’s attention; unfortunately real problems exist beneath the hype. Just go to the NCAA website, click on "Current Issues," and you'll see "Academic Reform and the Academic Progress Rate (APR)" listed as the third item. This is not a recent issue either. The NCAA maintains that they've been focused on "reconnecting … intercollegiate athletics with higher education" for almost twenty years.
Although college sports at Division I institutions used to be the primary targets of criticism, lately other institutions have come under scrutiny as well—see The Game of Life and Reclaiming the Game, recent books on the subject. Past issues of LiberalArtsOnline have discussed these books and the relationship between college athletics and academics. This month’s author, Donald Luidens, professor of sociology at Hope College, researched athletic recruiting at Division III schools to determine if they too have succumbed to the pressures that have led some institutions to trade off academic success for athletic prowess. In the course of his work, he discovered that club sports have dramatically changed the face of collegiate athletic recruiting.
--Kathleen S. Wise, Editor
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NCAA Division III Athletic Recruiting and the Impact of Club Sports
by Donald A. Luidens, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Hope College
Big-time college sports are under the microscope these days, examined by the media, foundations, universities, and the governing NCAA for their recruiting and playing practices. But what of small-time college sports—those that are played on Division III fields, where scholarships are prohibited for athletes and where a student-athlete is decidedly a student first? Recent critiques, most notably the widely cited Reclaiming the Game, by William Bowen and Sarah Levin, suggest that D-III institutions are shortchanging their constituents by recruiting athletes who diminish institutional academic quality. As a faculty athletic representative at Hope College for the last few years, I have been privy to annual academic records of student-athletes. While there is some variability among the students and teams, the overall pattern has belied the dire warnings broadcast elsewhere. Have D-III athletic programs followed the dismaying pattern found in many D-I institutions and undermined student-athletes’ intellectual rigor in favor of athletic success? Resolved to understand the reality of student-athlete recruitment, I welcomed the opportunity to take my sabbatical at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College. The Center of Inquiry afforded me the opportunity to visit D-III colleges throughout Middle America, hearing from coaches and students about the policies and practices of student-athlete recruitment.
To begin my research, I traveled to D-III colleges associated with two premier athletic conferences, the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference and the North Coast Athletic Conference. These conferences, each with ten member institutions, have been at the forefront of many D-III sports. First, I was able to conduct extensive interviews at nine of the ten SCAC schools and all ten of the NCAC institutions. At each institution, I talked with the athletic director, the senior woman administrator, three or four coaches, a faculty athletic representative, and a representative from the admissions office. At most of the schools I also met informally with student-athletes to gain their perspectives on their recruitment and collegiate experiences. In addition, the schools provided an ideal set of test cases for the procedures and practices of athletic recruiting and their relationship to academic and admissions standards. What follows are some initial findings.
Interviews with Coaches
Throughout my interviews with coaches there was one constant: they all begin their search for student-athletes with a clear understanding of the academic threshold established by their respective admissions offices. In most cases, institutions have developed ideal profiles of the academic standards and demographic characteristics desirable for their incoming classes. Usually these profiles are expressed in terms of minimum SAT or ACT scores and high school GPAs. More refined models include rigor of high school classes and class rank; some institutions also weight high school quality. In virtually all cases, these data provide guides for admissions personnel as well as for athletic recruiters. While the threshold varies from institution to institution, coaches are very clear: they do not want to expend any energy on non-eligible recruits or students who will not succeed academically. As one rather bluntly put it, "It’s a waste of my valuable time [to bring unqualified students to campus]." Many others echoed this sentiment, citing the disruption to the team and program that devolves from an academically unsuccessful teammate.
Without exception, the coaches with whom I conversed were committed to the high academic standards their institutions expected. While there were some coaches who argued for the acceptance of occasional academically marginal students whom they saw as particularly promising—both athletically and academically (especially among students with an uneven high school record), I heard of no hidden agenda to entice unqualified students. Indeed, as a group, the coaches took considerable pride in the academic accomplishments of their students. One coach waxed eloquently about the five seniors on his team who were Academic All-Americans as well as outstanding four-year players. As another coach put it, "I’m even more proud of them when I see what they’ve accomplished after graduation than I am about their success on the court." This opinion was repeated to me countless times; coaches at these D-III schools are committed to academic excellence among their athletes.
Institutional Self-studies
One of the consequences of the recent spate of critiques of college athletic programs has been a wave of institutional self-studies. With few exceptions, the schools I visited had recently undertaken comparative analyses of the academic accomplishments of their student-athletes in relation to non-athletes. Many schools shared their findings with me. Consistently, student-athletes perform at or above the norms for their peers on GPAs, and retention and graduation rates. Moreover, anecdotal and institutional evidence demonstrates that student-athletes choose majors in all academic fields. As I reviewed these data, differences among teams became apparent. Women’s teams almost universally had higher GPAs than their non-athlete, female peers. With a couple of notable exceptions, men’s teams were similarly at or above their peers’ levels. In addition, in both the data collected by the schools and personal accounts from many students, there was general agreement that athletes perform better academically during their athletic season than outside their playing season. Even athletes in the most problematic sports, football and men’s basketball (the centerpieces in many critiques), were frequently on a par with non-athletes in the various academic measures. With these factors prominently in mind, I asked: What are the possible causes for stronger-than-expected academic performances among athletes?
Time Management
Students (and coaches) repeatedly pointed to the heavy demand on their time during their playing season as an explanation of their disciplined approach to academics. With two to three hours a day dedicated to practice or competition, students find it imperative to be very structured about their use of time. Many begin their years with semester-long calendars in front of them, mapping out the times of travel and assignment due dates. Coaches are especially vigilant about their first-year students, who find the "free time" in college to be seductive and hard to manage. Students generally credit their higher in-season academic performance to their calculated approach to time use, and they attribute lower grades in the off-season to less structured time.
Many players and coaches talked about extensive monitoring of athletes’ academic progress. Some athletes are provided with formal day planners in which they record their academic and extracurricular involvements. With the stringent NCAA regulations limiting coaches’ non-season contact with their players, many coaches see these monitoring sessions as one way to keep in touch with their players. While there was some grumbling among the students I interviewed about the paperwork, there was general agreement that this extra effort by coaches—unparalleled by any other institutional source—provided the added incentive for them to keep up with coursework and academic assignments.
While this is one explanation for academic success among student-athletes, a more important reason, in my estimation, looms in the background. It is one that comes from outside the academy.
The Impact of Club Sports
There has been a sea change in the structure of pre-college athletics that has developed completely outside the orbit of high schools and institutions of higher learning. As my interviews progressed, I became aware that coaches for many sports talked about the "efficiency" built into recruiting made possible by attending major, club-sponsored tournaments. While clubs do not control all sports, their prominence today is overwhelming. Clubs for budding athletes often begin at the early elementary levels and progress through athletes' high school years. They are generally sponsored by municipal recreation departments or commercial enterprises. Considerable selectivity occurs at their elite levels, from which college varsity athletes are drawn, and participation costs for travel, uniforms, rental of fields, courts, and pools have escalated significantly.
Today’s premier high school athletes (with the exception of football and boys’ basketball players, to be discussed below) are increasingly found within these extra-academic contexts. For a soccer coach to find the most accomplished soccer recruits, it is incumbent upon him or her to attend one of the major tournaments (held periodically throughout the country, with particular showcases at Thanksgiving and Christmas). At these events, the coach can count on seeing 20 (some venues will have up to 60 teams, although most involve about 20) outstanding goalies and dozens of well-coached back- and front-field players. Moreover, the organizing agency will have collected academic, demographic, and other information on these players, thereby facilitating coaches’ sorting process. Coaches can quickly eliminate all players who do not conform to their institution’s desired academic profiles and make their contacts with the select few who remain.
While one may debate the merits of the club system, its evolution has been largely outside the purview of the NCAA. Many coaches I interviewed indicated that they would only venture into high schools to show continuing interest in athletes who had come to their attention during club play. Others only recruited from the premier traveling teams. It is important to understand the consequence of this "pre-sorting" mechanism. Club and traveling team involvement is based strictly on the principle of "pay to play"—resulting in a significant socio-economic pre-sort taking place before college recruiters even begin their efforts. Commonly, a player will spend $2,000 to $4,000 a year to play, travel, and receive private coaching.
A further consequence of the club structure is that it produces recruits who can call on an immense amount of family support. For many families today, the intensity of involvement surrounding athletics is so serious that, barring sports and sports-related travel and activities, inter-generational communication is rare. Families structure their lives around their children’s athletic commitments. Since not all families are able to dedicate this kind of time and energy to their child-athletes, club sports are even more strongly embedded within a context of middle class activities and structures.
The result of this sea change is that the precollege student-athletes who rise to the top of their sports’ charts are upper-middle-class, white, nonurban, and family supported, a happy confluence of factors for the academic standards of D-III colleges, since race, class, residence, and family support are the strongest predictors of academic success. It should be no surprise, therefore, to find that the volleyball team comprises excellent students as well as accomplished athletes. It has been carefully filtered for both.
At the same time, football and (to a lesser extent) basketball continue to be organized around the high school framework. As a result, these sports remain the most democratic in their formation and diverse in their demographic composition. Not having benefited from the socioeconomic pre-sort which marks other sports, football and basketball continue to provide considerable diversity to the ranks of many institutions. In several of the schools in this study, a disproportionate number of nonwhite students were included in the ranks of football and basketball teams.
Concluding Remarks
What is to be made of all this? First, there are some prevalent myths about the lack of academic promise among student-athletes that must be challenged. Given the increasingly important role that club sports are playing in pre-sorting athletes, detractors of "jock schools" must reconsider their criticism. I found in my interviews that many student-athletes regularly hide their athletic involvement for fear of reprisals from faculty hostile to athletics and athletes. Rather, recognition must be made that student-athletes at the institutions under investigation in this study are among the brightest and most promising of their generation. They have been selected for their academic promise as well as athletic prowess, their progress is being regularly monitored by coaches, and their academic success is seen as paramount by these athletic programs.
Second, with the exception of football and basketball, sports will no longer—if they ever did—provide a means for diversifying institutional demographics. Instead, given the growing importance of club sports, the most accomplished high-school-age athletes can be expected to be white, upper-middle-class, and nonurban. If it is diversity that a D-III institution wants, then it will not come through most athletic programs. On the other hand, football and basketball (although girls’ basketball is also succumbing to club structures and schedules) will generate the greatest demographic diversity among topflight players. If institutions want to diversify their student bodies through the recruitment of athletes, it will be through the football and men's basketball programs that the most success will occur. I was reassured that every football and basketball coach with whom I spoke was able to recruit qualified student-athletes who fully met the institution's desired academic profile. However, in their very diversity, these programs will not produce the high GPAs found among athletic programs that experience the pre-sort related to club play.
Finally, many of the schools I visited relied on a third to a half of their annual recruits to be drawn in by athletic programs. Not only do coaches have to recruit select players, but they are also called on to communicate with students who are sent their way from the admissions office. Although a few of these latter students may be athletic "diamonds in the rough," most have little chance of contributing to their athletic programs. The amount of time and effort routinely expected of coaches is, in their minds, universally underappreciated (an assessment with which I came to agree). While the critical role that the athletic program plays in recruiting students is underappreciated, so is the importance of athletics to incoming student-athletes. Among the dozens of students with whom I talked, all expressed deep and abiding affection for their institutions. Yet when I asked them if they would be enrolled if their sport were not offered, with one exception, all said they would have gone elsewhere to play their sport. Clearly, while sports were not a sufficient reason to attend a particular college, they were a necessary ingredient in choosing that school.
Undoubtedly there are cases of individual coaches who abrogate Division III’s standards in the area of recruiting; undoubtedly there is good reason to be vigilant on all campuses against incidental abuse; but my survey of these institutions within D-III gives me great confidence that the overwhelming concern among the athletic programs is for the academic—as well as athletic—success of their charges. Moreover, with the increasing reliance on premier high school players who have been pre-sorted by socioeconomic status and parental support, the best high-school-age athletes will also be the premier students. Indeed, so selective will the pool of student-athletes become, that D-III schools will have to look elsewhere for students of diverse demographic backgrounds. In the end, the success of the pre-college clubs will rebound to the academic and athletic departments of D-III schools. Selectivity will increase, but the ancillary costs to diversity will need to be carefully monitored.
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