In my last column, I talked about a friend of mine who tutors athletes at a prominent Division I school. At this school (and many other Division I schools, I’ve come to find out), there are numerous tutors who write papers and help the athletes cheat in order to stay on the team. They can help their teams win national championships so the school can earn a lot of money off of corporate sponsors who are foaming at the mouth to get their logos on anything and everything.
At UCSD, while athletes don’t get the same “”breaks”” the athletes from other schools receive, they at least learn the value of time management and hard work. That is what will matter in the end, when they step into the real world after they graduate. Unfortunately, for many athletes at schools that cater to them, they will have a large disadvantage when they graduate.
As soon as these athletes discover their immense talent in their respective sports, they automatically receive better treatment. It’s no wonder why other athletes expect their homework to be done and their papers to be written for them. It starts early. It’s an ugly and destructive pattern that starts developing from the get-go. Apparently, many of these promising young athletes are taught to just worry about playing well and winning ‹ instilling the idea that that’s all they need to be important. Of course, this isn’t true for all of them; there are many who realize the importance of academics and hard work in addition to being a star athlete.
However, there’s more than enough who are taught the opposite. It saddens me, because many of these Division I athletes that my friend tutors firmly believe that all they’re good for is sports. So many of these touted athletes, as hard as it is to the stomach, are told, “”Well, you’re black, so you won’t amount to much, so you might as well only think about being good at sports.”” Some of them would even say, “”Oh, I don’t need to worry about my grades, coach says he’ll take care of it. Besides, I’m making it to the pros so I don’t have to worry about graduating anyway.””
Unfortunately, they don’t realize that many of them won’t even get considered for the pros. For example, only 1.3 percent of NCAA seniors get drafted in the NBA. But their coaches lead them to believe otherwise so they can get them into the college to play for them. What they don’t know is that when they don’t get the call on draft day or they get cut in the preseason, they’ll have to rely on the “”skills”” they learned off the field. But they won’t have the practical skills they were supposed to learn in college and high school.
Despite the apathy toward athletics that is rampant at UCSD and despite the fact that many of our perennially successful teams are hardly recognized, our school at least attempts to instill the value of hard work and refuses to give anyone an easy way out. UCSD will graduate athletes who have learned the tools to help them succeed beyond sports. I noticed that many seniors who bid farewell to their teams this past fall would be moving on to bigger and better things. I’m sure they’ve applied the same, if not more, dedication to their studies as they did on the court, in the water or on the field. That same work ethic will translate for them either in grad school or the jobs they begin right away. And that is the advantage they hold over the athletes who don’t have professors or coaches teaching them to survive without sports.
