The Last Word On Nothing

As I’ve followed the NCAA basketball tournament (join me and some folks from Radiolab tonight, as we live tweet the final game), I’ve been thinking about the value of collegiate sports. My first experience with sports in college came as an NCAA division I cross-country runner. I lettered in cross-country at the University of Colorado my freshman year, but a freak knee injury cut short my collegiate running career. Though I had no experience in the sport, I started training with my school’s Nordic ski team, and I also bought a bike and joined the cycling team.

Cross-country and skiing were both division I, NCAA sports, but cycling was governed by its own body, outside of the NCAA system, and was overseen by club sports, rather than CU’s varsity athletic program. The difference was immediately noticeable. As a varsity NCAA athlete, I received special treatment — advance, preferential registration for classes, private tutoring if I needed it, and excused time from class to attend practice and meets, not to mention free tickets to all sporting events. This special treatment fostered a sense of privilege. We were part of the student body, but we were treated as if we were somehow above it.

My teammates and I were good students, and we were there to get a degree, we didn’t expect to make a profession out of sport. Nevertheless, as varsity athletes, we understood that performance was expected of us. Our sport was no hobby — we were there to win.

Things were different on the cycling team. My teammates and I were no less devoted to our sport, and our coaches were every bit as enthusiastic as those in the division I sports. But we didn’t have the same sense of entitlement or expectation. We were pursuing the thing we loved and didn’t assume that our classmates would share our reverence for our sport. The school wasn’t pressuring us for results; it was us who created the expectations.

We were national champions my senior year, and we didn’t need the school’s adoration to enjoy the thrill of victory. We were pursuing the sport for its own sake and had won because we’d worked hard and our luck had aligned, as it must to win a championship. Our victory wasn’t the result of financial incentives that allowed us to recruit a winning team from afar. Instead, we’d pulled together a championship team through happenstance and training. Sure, we had plenty of talent (one of my teammates would go on to become a Tour de France stage winner and infamous doper), but the riders on our team had come to CU for school, not to prep for pro sports. The opportunity to race bikes in Boulder was an attractive reason to attend this particular school, not the sole reason for being there.

As I’ve followed the NCAA basketball tournament, I’ve been pondering the role that sports should play in our colleges and universities. Top revenue sports like football and men’s basketball (it’s men — always men — who make the big money in sport) can generate millions of dollars for their schools, but take a close look at the numbers, and it’s quickly apparent that the people who benefit from this money are rarely the athletes or students. A Deadspin analysis of data from 2011-2011 found that

athletic departments at 99 major schools lost an average of $5 million once you take out revenue generated from “student fees” and “university subsidies.” If you take out “contributions and donations”—some of which might have gone to the universities had they not been lavished on the athletic departments—this drops to an average loss of $17 million, with just one school (Army) in the black. All this football/basketball revenue is sucked up by coach and AD salaries, by administrative and facility costs, and by the athletic department’s non-revenue generating sports; it’s not like it’s going to microscopes and Bunsen burners.

According to Deadspin’s numbers, the basketball coaches in the men’s Final Four this year are each their state’s top paid public employees. I’m not opposed to coaches getting paid a fair rate, nor would I argue for eliminating sports budgets. My husband is the ski coach at our local college, and I’d be happy to see him cut from the running for lowest paid state employee.

But the drive for revenue among NCAA programs has made universities subservient to advertisers and professional sports. Universities should remain, first and foremost, places of higher learning, not minor leagues for professional sports. Collegiate sport is worth keeping for the things that money can’t buy — the life lessons it can teach athletes and the sense of purpose and togetherness that it can bring to students. I experienced these benefits just as much on my school’s low-budget cycling team as I did on its much better funded division I cross-country and track teams. Paying the coach millions of dollars or pursuing television and sponsorship rights may pad the wallets of a few people within the system, but it doesn’t enhance these experiences for athletes, nor does it help regular students.

Collegiate sports made me a better person. They taught me to set goals, work through challenges and become a gracious winner. Most of all, sport taught me how to make peace with the unsatisfying way that things can turn out. Sometimes you do everything you can, and you lose anyway. Sport taught me to fail gracefully, and that’s a lesson that’s lost when winning becomes the metric against which a sports program is judged.