It’s time to talk about paying (attention to) our student-athletes
By Patrick Kelly, S.J.
When I was younger I played sports for our school teams and then played football in college. Like other young people who play sports, I had good and bad experiences along the way, but it was a significant part of my young life and formed me in important ways.
For a couple decades now, I have also taught interdisciplinary courses about sport in Jesuit universities. The courses I teach are open to all students, of course. But over the years I have had many student-athletes in the classes, and it is very clear to me that student-athletes want to know that the activities they give themselves to, including sport, have meaning. It is the proper role of a university to help them in this process of meaning making. Unfortunately, universities in the United States have been dropping the ball in this regard.
We have not articulated what sport is or how it is related to education; nor have we identified values associated with intercollegiate athletics that are broader than winning, money, and institutional prestige. At the same time, massive amounts of money continue to flow into the NCAA and its member institutions, particularly in the more powerful Division 1 conferences. Men’s basketball and football programs generate most of the money. The NCAA brings in $1.1 billion annually from the March Madness tournament, with its president making $4 million a year. Eleven college coaches made at least $6 million last year; 26 college basketball coaches made $3 million or more. (I could give more examples, but you get the idea.)
Meanwhile, schools build bigger and better facilities in an “arms race” to attract new recruits. In the major athletic conferences, the universities’ median athletic spending per student-athlete is far greater than the university’s median education-related spending per student. In these ways, the free market operates unfettered. The only people the NCAA and its member institutions have been willing to put restrictions on with regard to the money flow are the players themselves, who are the main attraction.
So, the courts have gotten involved. The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with a ruling recently that the NCAA doesn’t have the right to set a cap on what schools can offer recruits with regard to education-related benefits. The NCAA itself is now allowing student-athletes to benefit monetarily from their name, image and likeness. Many states are changing their laws to keep up. The justices on the Supreme Court are clear that intercollegiate athletics is a business and the student-athletes are workers. In such an economic or free market framing, the emphasis is on the individual person or institution’s right to pursue or have access to the external goods and to decide how to spend them. The relevant question is which individuals have the right to pursue the external goods.
In an educational framing, there are — or should be -different emphases. Educators need to be able to articulate what sport is and what in our time scholars refer to as its “internal goods” or “intrinsic rewards.” In contrast to external goods that accrue to individual persons or institutions, the internal goods and intrinsic rewards of sports will be shared by all participants in the practice. They will have to do with the common good. Because of their experience as practitioners, coaches have an important role to play in helping the university community understand these internal goods and intrinsic rewards. It is only by identifying these that we will be able to understand how sport is related to human flourishing and to education. Educators also need to be able to identify values associated with intercollegiate athletics that are broader than money or institutional prestige.
The Renaissance humanists who initially introduced sports into schools in the Western world thought about these kinds of questions. According to 16th-Century humanist Michel de Montaigne, students are a unity of body and soul and educators need to attend to both. As he put it: “We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a person. We must not split him into two.” This was the rationale he gave for including games and sports in the school day. He said that he wanted the “physical dexterity” of the student “to be molded step by step with his soul.”
Humanists also argued for the inclusion of play and sport in schools based on their understanding of virtue. Influenced by Thomas Aquinas, they thought virtue was associated with moderation. Therefore, they emphasized that students shouldn’t study excessively, but also need time for play and recreation. In his Summa Theologiae and elsewhere, Aquinas wrote that play was enjoyable and done for its own sake. Responding to the criticism that virtuous acts must be directed toward an end, he wrote: “Actions done playfully [ actiones ludicrae] are not directed to any external end; but merely to the good of the player, insofar as they afford him pleasure and relaxation.”
Pope emeritus Benedict XVI was speaking out of this tradition before he was pope when he highlighted how sports are autotelic (done for their own sake) and yet have benefits for the players. When asked in an interview why the soccer World Cup had such appeal all over the world, he said it had to do with the fact that it is a form of play, “action that is truly free — without a purpose and without a need to do it — while harnessing and fulfilling all of one’s personal forces.” But it also has another character, he said, especially with young people: “It is a training for life.” The player has to “take himself in hand” and be temperate in his diet, prudent in his choices, and just in his relations with others. In this way he becomes free. In team sports, he learns how to cooperate with others and “put his individuality in the service of the whole.” He also learns the importance of fair play and respect for the rules of the game. According to the future pope, it is because sport is autotelic and yet has these kinds of benefits that it is so intriguing. As he put it, “It seems to me the fascination of football consists in the fact that it unites both aspects in a very persuasive manner.”
We could look back at the ideas of the Renaissance humanists as quaint. And enumerate the ways they don’t apply in our contemporary context. But these humanists did ask fundamental questions about how sport is related to human flourishing and education. In that sense, they are way ahead of us. But maybe they are also relevant. We do, after all, split young people into two in our context. Our student-athletes have spent much of their lives playing sports and now spend much of their time and energy doing so on our campuses. But when do we ever ask them to reflect on their experiences of playing in the academic context? (Apart, perhaps, from the few who are majoring in sport-related fields.) The athletic and academic parts of our universities often appear to be separate universes. It seems that Descartes’ mind-body dualism has been institutionalized on our university campuses.
Maybe our hesitation to ask students about their experiences also has something to do with the fact that sport is a kind of play. Our own suspicion of play started early with the Puritans, and in the context of the development of the “work ethic” our country is well known for. The economic, market-oriented framing for our current debates fits comfortably within this heritage. Prominent academics such as Johan Huizinga, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gordon Burghardt have complained that scholars have not paid enough attention to play itself. Instead, they focus on play as a means to some other end, and so do not understand it adequately. The instrumentalization of higher education is also related to our inability to address these fundamental questions about sport. The humanities are best equipped to do so. And yet they seem to be particularly undervalued and at risk in our current climate. On the other hand, programs that focus on sport management and administration presume that the right way to name sport is as an “industry.” No one bats an eye.
I’m grateful I was able to do my doctoral studies with the late psychologist and polymath Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the flow theory. While doing his own doctoral studies, Csikszentmihalyi studied the creative process of painters he met in the Chicago area. These painters enjoyed painting and completely immersed themselves in it for hours on end, even though they were not likely to make money or become famous as a result of it. He recognized that the then-current approaches in psychology did not have a way to understand what he was observing. In his first book, he set out to understand the enjoyment people experience when engaged in complex activities such as painting, by studying people at play and in other autotelic activities. Recognizing that many people also enjoy their work, he included in his research people involved in different kinds of work as well.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, people experience enjoyment when they are involved in a challenging activity that requires skills. In such an activity, they put the whole of themselves into what they are doing and go beyond where they were in some way that is meaningful. They experience a merging of action and awareness as they center their attention on what they are doing. They don’t have attention available during such times to be thinking explicitly about themselves in a self-centered way. They also have a greater awareness of being part of something larger than themselves. In team sports, people often speak of a bond with their teammates. They experience time as passing differently than it does in ordinary life, usually much faster.
For Csikszentmihalyi, the enjoyment experienced during flow is not opposed to excellence. On the contrary, people experience such enjoyment precisely when they are growing or getting better. Whether in play or at work, people who enjoy what they are doing are willing to go beyond the minimum requirements and often break new ground.
My students appreciate reading about Csikszentmihalyi’s research and writing papers about their own experiences of play, in sports and other contexts. Just as Csikszentmihalyi was doing something new in trying to understand enjoyment itself, the student-athletes have the experience that they are being asked to do something new: to reflect on experiences they have had all their lives of playing sports. They feel seen and appreciate that their experience is being taken seriously. They are doing a kind of Examen, but on an area of their human experience that they have not been asked to reflect on previously in their Jesuit education.
Reflection on their embodied experiences at play in sport and other contexts provides them with insight into the meaning of their lives and their relationship with others and the world around them. It also helps them to understand the dynamics associated with a rewarding life. This can help them pivot to the rest of their lives.
I encourage the student-athletes, in particular, to pay attention to where — outside of their sport — they experience joy as they immerse themselves in something intrinsically rewarding, find it easy to concentrate, can make use of their gifts in a selfless way that contributes to something larger than themselves, and where it seems like time flies. These kinds of experiences can serve as pointers to what they want to major in or choose as a career. In this way, their earlier flow experiences in sport are a resource for them to draw on as they pay attention to their felt experiences while making important life decisions.
In the context of the recent Supreme Court ruling and the change in the NCAA name, image and likeness policy, we are paying a lot of attention to the NCAA, athletic administrators, institutions, external goods and their just distribution. But we can learn something important by shifting our attention to the experiences of student-athletes playing sports and listening more closely to them in dialogue with research of scholars like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
As was mentioned, one important part of their experience is that they have a sense of being part of something larger than themselves by playing on a team; they are introduced to the experience of community and the common good. This emphasis on community can remind the NCAA and members of athletic conferences that it is important that they work collaboratively to articulate the values associated with intercollegiate athletics that are broader than money and institutional prestige; these values will be related to the internal goods of sport itself, which are shared by all participants and so are part of the common good.
After all, when it comes to the well-being and flourishing of our young people, we all should be on the same team.
Patrick Kelly, S.J., is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy and author of Catholic Perspectives on Sports: From Medieval to Modern Times (Paulist, 2012) and of the forthcoming Play, Sport and Spirit: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry (Paulist, 2023). To learn more about his work, see sites.udmercy.edu/faith-sport-cultures.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of the University of Detroit Mercy.
