Seems to me that agreeing to be a scholarship student athlete is a huge risk, at least from the description MIR is giving, which I assume is correct. You're sacrificing any real shot at a quality education, you're basically doomed to be broke in college, and the odds of going pro are astronomically small.
So why are there so damn many scholarship athletes across the country? Are scholarship athletes uninformed suckers when it comes to this stuff?
Woah
And yes being a student athlete is a risk and it requires sacrifice on some level
Maybe I misunderstood you, or i'm actually responding to an argument I heard at another time, so I don't want to put words in your mouth. I imagine that in most cases, getting a quality education is much harder for athletes than it is for some idiot frat boy (like myself), simply because they had this gargantuan time commitment that they had to attend to. Most people would agree with that, right?
And my last post wasn't meant to be rhetorical. If we accept that scholarship athletes get such a raw deal (which I do), then why are there so many across the country? How do you respond to the idea that no one is holding a gun to these guys' and gals' heads and saying: play college sports?
I don't think the time commitment from athletes interfere with their quality of education, aside from some missed classroom time. Athletic departments provide plenty of academic resources and all parties have a vested interest in keeping athletes in good academic standing.
The sacrifice is in all of the other stuff that is entailed in being a college student. Athletes simply don't get to enjoy the student life that non athletes do. College is the time of your lives for a reason. I'll tie this to the walkon point that tonite is on. I had the opportunity to walkon a community college basketball team. I did it for two weeks before I discovered that waking up at 5:30 to lift weights when I was never going to play was not to me, best decision I ever made. At K-State we had a walkon basketball player in our fraternity, we rarely saw the guy, his experience in the fraternity was much different than the rest of us. He spent so much time with team related stuff and studying he just didn't have time for anything else. He loved being on the team but it wasn't some glamorous posh life.
Why do they do it? Some feel obligated, some are chasing a dream, some don't know anything else; almost all of them feel an intense sense of camaraderie with their teammates. Again I don't think these athletes are suffering by any means but I don't think the system is doing all for them that they can.