The Broken System of College Athletics, And Why We Need to Put Athletes First
When you’ve experienced the broken system of college athletics as an athlete, grad assistant, or director, the negative impact of the system is clear:
The current state of college athletics has been built with a win-at-all-costs mentality to put institutions’ profits over the long-term development of athletes.
There’s a cost to playing athletics — a level of sacrifice on the part of the athletes. But they shouldn’t be expected to risk their health and wellbeing, as they often do.
When I say the system is broken, it’s not because the NCAA doesn’t build great athletes, or provide opportunities that players otherwise wouldn’t have, like the $3.6 billion they put into scholarships annually. It’s because jobs are on the line and they’re tied to a W-L record.
No coach is a stranger to the hot seat, and every coach knows it affects how they coach and lead their athletes. Have there been bonus structures added to coaching staff salaries based on GPA and graduation rates? Yes — but they pale in comparison to bonuses that exist for postseason play and wins.
When that pressure is mounted on us, our job security relies on eeking out wins, not being mindful of the health and wellness of their athletes (beyond what is needed to win that week).
As an athlete and coach, I lived in a constant state of stress that led to burnout and spurred on a case of severe depression. A large part of that was because my mood (and job security) depended solely on the outcomes of games. I saw the need for therapy and deep personal reflection, which made me a better person. However, none of this support came through the institution.
Thankfully, some coaches are recognizing this but have not had the resources to give it the attention it deserves. After all, it’s easier to measure an improvement with force plates than with mental health. So where does the budget go? Straight to the weight room. The issue is bigger than just budget though.
The point is that the system has mutated into one based purely on performance at the cost of the health and wellness of student-athletes.
We’ve lost sight of the reality that by developing human beings, you lay the foundation for higher performance. The incentives for holistic health and high performance are aligned. Truly high performance requires optimal holistic health.
When we focus on athletes as humans first, we empower everyone working in the system to view their role in light of an athlete’s well-being.
College athletes are impressionable young adults in a high-pressure environment that’s unlike anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives. They’ve likely never lived away from home, never had to build a safe environment for themselves, clean a room or apartment themselves, manage expenses, or create structure for themselves. Nor have they dealt with the pressures of life and athletics without the aid of the people who brought them into this world (their parents). Many of these young athletes don’t know how to structure a bedtime routine, or cook for themselves, or develop an environment that is going to be optimal for sleeping, studying, and feeling safe.
So who do they look to? The worst-case scenario is nobody, and the second worst is that coaches are more worried about the athlete’s performance and their job rather than the human being behind the athlete. This glaring issue causes a major difficulty in facilitating trust in a system and staff that forever has preached that its main focus is the athlete, which isn’t true. So if we’re wondering why trust is hard to come by, it’s because it has been broken again and again.
When players get recruited, their parents are promised they’ll belong to a program that will lead them, educate them, love them, and develop them. What they’re not told is that it comes with one big caveat: only as long as they’re winning.
If teams aren’t winning, or if players are underperforming, all of these promises break, and organizations often do anything to get back on the winning track. Early morning workouts, late-night study sessions just to keep them at the facility, extra meetings and film sessions, and ‘extracurricular’ activities labeled as team building. This creates a vicious cycle of poor health and worse performance.
Situations like Penn State football, Standard softball, and Louisville basketball, among many more, only occur in a broken system that prioritizes winning to the detriment of everything else. Instead of focusing on leading, educating, loving, and developing players, it becomes about coaches’ jobs, salaries, and positions of power.
33% of student-athletes experience significant mental health issues. Of those, only 30% ever seek help.1
Why do athletes not seek help? It’s not due to a lack of the number of coaches. It’s because the system doesn’t value their mental health unless it’s keeping them from playing. How can we empower change if one moment we are grinding on athletes to win, but then on the other hand want them to open up to us about their struggles?
42% of student-athletes are sleep deprived, while 76% of athletes have never been taught how to sleep properly.
Continuing to push and robotically execute the laundry list of actions put in place by the staff to control the athletes to improve the likelihood of wins leads to, unsurprisingly, sleep deprivation. The irony here, of course, is that good sleep is the ultimate health enhancer.
Instead of education on sleep and healthy habits, athletes go through a revolving door of workouts, practices, film sessions, recovery sessions, study hall, and rehab sessions, keeping them constrained by the system rather than allowing them space to learn how to recover on their own accord. Why do we have recovery sessions when we know that recovery is a state of being, rather than an action?
Because of the control. Rather than educating and empowering the athletes to learn, understand and seek these modalities; it becomes a mandated or ‘optional mandatory’ as a way to make the staff feel like they’re doing everything they can do to win, and as a byproduct keep their jobs. It doesn’t matter the type of people or students they’re developing. It only matters how many wins and championships they achieve.
The other irony here is that focusing on health gives a disproportionate impact for very little time and energy on behalf of the coaching staff. Priorities don’t equate to time and energy invested. All it takes is a system and a few frameworks (like the 8 Controllables) to empower athletes to focus on health, with the guidance from the coaching staff.
The NCAA states that the leading cause of mental health issues in student-athletes is:
- An athlete not being able to do what they enjoy and do best
- Overtraining syndrome
We know that under-recovery, not overtraining, often is the culprit for athletes. And since 42% of student-athletes are sleep deprived, and that’s a foundational leading cause of mental health and recovery issues, our next steps become obvious: create a coaching framework that encourages and empowers athletes to improve their health and well-being.
Lastly, add to the fact that you have athletes who will make six and seven figures through the new NIL, it’s even more crucial that they develop fundamental habits.
College athletics can shift to prioritize empowering athletes.
Now is the time for us (coaches, administrators, commissioners, etc.) to put the empowerment of our student-athletes first. When we see athletes as humans, education and empathy-in-motion become a must.
Programs don’t have to forego winning. In fact, caring more for student-athletes, and educating about the impacts of stress, sleep, health, and recovery prepares student-athletes to perform at their highest level. As I said above, if high performance is the desired outcome, health has to be optimized. There’s no way around it.
It’s time to act now knowing that the system needs change. Leave our judgment at the door and hear the sides of those that have struggled under the system, and open our eyes to the unkind outcomes that are the reality for some student-athletes.
It starts with us. It starts with the leaders. It starts with those who have been there before, and continue to be blessed to hold the seats that they do.
This is not about being a ‘hover parent/coach.’ It’s about equipping each player with their data and education around it to empower them to make real lasting changes, not just because that’s what the itinerary or coach says.
