Picture hundreds of thousands of shouting supporters and fans packed in a Michigan stadium, with a handful of them in the midst of a yellow and blue Mexican wave as they strategically hold out placards to form the letters of their favorite team. Suddenly, a man dressed in a blue mascot outfit runs wildly across the football field while carrying his team’s flag with excitement as great as bettors who intend on betting on March Madness.
While this frenzy takes place, understand that this is no professional team playing at a prestigious club competition. Instead, it’s the American football team belonging to Michigan University that’s playing at home, in the country’s largest stadium that’s measured based on its seating capacity. As this happens, growth and opportunity thrive in the USA for a bigger sports industry and robust sports infrastructure to occur.
College sports date as far back as the 1850s when Harvard University and Yale’s boat clubs decided to go head-to-head with one another. Now that bat and ball games were becoming a significant part of the competition, the friendly rivalry between these two universities gradually grew into becoming a full-fledged tournament where different universities from across the country began competing in a yearlong schedule.
Today, American college sports rank with sports as big as the NBA, MLB, and NFL. Managed by qualified professionals, each game is held under exceptional infrastructure using state-of-the-art facilities with the support of cash-rich companies. It’s here that we see college sports acting as a feeder to our more professional leagues as players in the system get treated like stars who are already playing for a professional league. The only difference between the two is that instead of having these college students receive wages, they get a living allowance and scholarship for their tuition.
University sports continue to gain increasing popularity. Although this comes with many benefits worth noting, some drawbacks come with adopting such a model, especially for countries like India.
One of the main drawbacks has to be with how funds will be divided from the academic department to the sports department. One department shouldn’t come at the cost of another in a university; therefore, the reality of things is that such things do happen despite university sports being known to earn large revenue from its sporting events. Institutions are established to cater to students studying careers like science, arts, and law, so the same effort would also need to apply to sports personnel if India were to adopt the American college sports system.
Another point worth noting is that adopting this college sports system places students who thrive in academics and sports at a disadvantage. According to reports, sports coaches often encourage players to choose less-taxing courses from an academic perspective so they can devote enough of their time to sports. This pushes many players to pursue subjects that they are likely not interested in; any such instances may be disappointing for students who aren’t able to make it as professional spokespersons since they would end up stuck in an industry they may struggle in.
When it comes to students who aren’t part of the sports program, the responsibility of finding a subsiding education for that specific sports athlete is normally placed on other students’ tuition fees, and this leads to high education costs for others.
If college sports in India were to make a lot of money, these funds are typically reinvested into various sporting systems, and this won’t benefit university student communities at all.
Sports coaches are known to earn outrageous salaries, and these could easily outweigh many intellectually passionate university professors by a questionable margin. This budget distribution questions the existence of many of these universities as educational hubs, pushing sports to become the face of many of these universities. This causes a massive imbalance in the economy.
