sports

Preserve College Sports

The institution of college sports is faltering.  With growing revenues, greater exposure, and increasing volatility, college athletics are more heavily scrutinized as institutions bring in more money.  In tandem with this grand commercialization of college sports, the governing body of major college sports – the NCAA – hands out more and more violations each year.  Most violations are frivolous rules that seek to aggressively enforce the NCAA ideal of amateurism in college sports.  That is, college athletes will never see a penny of the billions of dollars generated by one of the greatest spectator sports in the world.  The issue of whether to provide salaries for college athletes has gained steam in the last few years; people are beginning to get fed up with players losing eligibility and teams being vacated of their wins and championships.  

However, paying student – athletes a salary will cause irreparable damage to the institution of college sports, creating complications that will not only shake the foundation of college sports, but could prove to destroy them altogether.  This is no doubt that college athletics need to be fixed, but it is a matter of deciding to effectively overhaul the way college sports is governed.

Beyond the Game

Sheth and Babiak talk mention an NBA social responsibilty initaitive in their study of CSR and sports.

Milton Freidman’s article regarding the corporation’s social responsibility has been the most intriguing article I’ve read in this class all semester.  I agree with it on many levels, but also keep finding good arguments against it, as we have discussed in class.  I decided to dig a little deeper on Google Scholar, seeing which articles, specifically about sports, had cited Friedman.  367 articles had popped up as articles about or including sports that had also cited Freidman, but many past the first page only mentioned sports in passing and was not going to be useful.  The second article that was listed was unavailable to view, so I clicked on a link that gave me related articles.  After browsing for a few minutes,  I came upon an article from the Journal of Business Ethics published by Hela Sheth and Kathy Babiak, called “Beyond the Game: Perceptions and Practices of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Professional Sport Industry.”  This was perfect, and it even cited both Friedman and Freeman.   Continue reading →

Pass me the ball, I’m open!

Athleticism is one of the main components of my personal identity. I consider myself to be pretty athletic and very competitive when it comes to sports. I grew up playing three sports (water polo, swimming, and softball) and succeeded in all three. Over the past three summers I have been a beach lifeguard in Corolla, NC where I have participated in big lifeguarding competitions and placed in multiple events in the South Atlantic Region. At Bucknell, I am a co-captain of the women’s water polo team (where we just went 4-1 this past weekend!) and have started all four years. Sports have consumed and play an important component of my life.

From my personal experience, I still see a large part of American society being sexist towards women’s athletics. For example, during high school gym class, we would play all sorts of co-ed sports including softball, basketball, handball, volleyball, and tennis. When it came time to the team sports, I would always become very frustrated. During handball for example, the boys would never pass me the ball even when I was wide open, in a scoring position, and calling for the ball. It was discouraging and frustrating and I ended up just walking back and forth on the court since there was no hope for me to get to participate. I have not only experienced this discrimination on the field but also by the attendance to female sporting events versus men. The men’s water polo team here at Bucknell will have the stands packed during their home games while the women’s team will have maybe a quarter of the attendance (mostly family). Continue reading →