The Price They Pay
By: Keylee Leong
Tags: Whittier College, Sports, Concussions, Athletics

The Price They Pay

The Human Cost of Collegiate Athletics

Memorial Stadium Newman Field

William Bassett sits in a black office chair in the training room in the Graham Athletic Center moving and clicking a mouse across a desktop computer. The sophomore lacrosse player is taking his fifth imPACT concussion assessment test. His curly black hair, still slick with sweat from practice, gets in his eyes and he wonders if that’s what is slowing him down. When the test is over, he looks over at the trainers and heads to the locker room to change before he gets his results. It’s slow Friday afternoon in the training room — only about 15 athletes had signed in.

College athletics have long provided “physical fitness, leadership skills, discipline, recreation and entertainment to student-athletes and others, often at a relatively low cost,” writes Forbes reporter Richard Vedder in March, 2018 article The Three Reasons College Sports Is An Ugly Business. The article discusses how athletes at major schools generate millions of dollars in revenue for the institutions but are often treated badly in the process.

These Division 1 athletes don’t get a share of the money they make and there are numerous examples of colleges purposely dumbing down college classes for their athletes to keep them on the courts and away from the classroom. Vedder lists many occasions, but this one stuck out: “In North Carolina, thousands of students, many of them athletes, took phantom courses that made a mockery of academic integrity and the NCAA did nothing substantively.”

Just because collegiate athletics are a bargain asset for campuses and their extended communities, though, doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with a cost. Especially for the scholar-athletes who put in thousands of hours of practice and make sacrifices for the chance to play in college. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body overseeing collegiate athletics, fewer than two percent of college athletes will have a professional career. For most, this is the peak of competition.

Athletics at Whittier College became prominent in the 1920s. Back then, the school competed against national powerhouses such as USC and UCLA. The struggling football team has a storied history, not the least of which is because former president, Richard M. Nixon, was a benchwarmer.

Currently, the school offers a wide variety of Division III sports for student-athletes, including football, basketball, cross country, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, lacrosse, water polo, golf, women’s softball and volleyball, and men’s baseball. We compete in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC), against eight other area schools including Chapman, Occidental, La Verne and other similarly situated schools.

The Whittier Poets take their athletics seriously. The student body consists of 30.2 percent athletes according to the Whittier College website. Walking around campus, it’s easy to spot the athletes with their Under Armor-sponsored gear, backpacks, hoodies, t-shirts, pants, shoes, etc. Every athlete gets a custom set of apparel each season, as long as you can pay. In Division III, you don’t get scholarships and the athletic department does not pay for the apparel and gear for most sports. Gearing up can range from $150-$300 out of pocket.

Even on our small campus, it takes two hands to count the number of people on crutches or riding those leg scooters. Most are athletes. It may be hard now to imagine a future prices to pay for playing college sports, but a 2017 Sports Illustrated article looking at Division 1 athletes noted that two-thirds sustained major injuries and half of those became chronic. College athletes are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from chronic injuries than non athletes.

Old injuries are no joke. Studies cited in the SI article indicate that health problems associated with injuries sustained playing college sports grow over time as the injuries limit former athletes’ abilities to exercise — leading to increased risk for cardiovascular disease. According to the article, one study showed former college athletes perform worse in physical fitness tests than non athletes later in life. “You get a physical on the way in,” says Paul Weinacht, a former offensive lineman at Stanford University who is quoted in the article. “But there isn’t a physical on the way out. No one asks about your injuries when you leave.”