College Athletes Sould Be Paid

6 Pages 1539 Words

For years, Division I athletes have been pouring their hearts out day after day, week after week, to protect the pride and tradition of their universities. With television contracts and shoe deals alone, the athletes are really bringing in the money and other forms of revenue. Sure, you can say that the typical athletes scholarship is enough to compensate, but is that really true? A pure athlete plays the game simply because he loves it. Unfortunately when you’re at the Division I level of sports, it is more or less a business and it has become a way to make money for the schools. Also, these athletes give up many of their social and academic freedoms. For a given number of hours per week, they give their blood, sweat, and tears just to play a sixty-minute football game or run two times around a track. Take these factors and combine them with the athlete’s academic responsibilities, and it is a lot to account for. When all is said and done, how much money does the athlete see?!
Well, aside from scholarships…zero.

Intercollegiate athletics is more or less a business in itself. Let me break it down for you. A business has different departments; the owner, the management, and your employees. The owners of course have provided the money for the company, the managers run the company, and the employees perform the work. I have never heard of a business that doesn’t pay its employees. And of course no one would work for them if such a thing did exist. Many people think that an athlete should just be thankful for the education he receives in exchange for a few hours of practice. But an enormous amount of cash is being circulated within that school, at the athlete’s expense, which that athlete will never lay eyes on. Author and sports writer Steven Wulf says, “They are required to put in long hours of hard work for next to nothing, in hostile conditions, always under intense scrutiny of their bosses.” (Wulf) Of course this...