Protect and Empower All Athletes (4/8)

Policy Three: The Future of Sports & Society Project

Kaepernik Mural, Oakland, by Stephen Coles (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Basic Idea: Protecting Health and Safety, Civil, and Economic Rights

Athletes face threats to their wellbeing in a variety of ways. In short, they face risks to their physical wellbeing, their civic wellbeing, and their economic wellbeing. This policy option responds by focusing on the protection of athletes in terms of their health and safety and by empowering their civil and economic rights.

Protecting Health and Safety

Obviously sports provide a powerful way for individuals to improve their health. But just as obviously sports can also present significant health and safety risks. These are tradeoffs where we want athletes to come out on the positive side of the ledger. This policy option targets the protection of the health and safety of athletes in age-appropriate ways, with greater societal protections for minor athletes. It would provide public funding for research to enable a researched-based approach to sport safety and health promotion. Most of us recognize that some sports, like BASE-jumping, Mixed Martial Arts, or tackle football are always going to have a higher risk of injury than others. But we still want them to be as safe as possible. Changes to sport rules, equipment, and training practices might make a sport safer.

For example, if a surge in knee injuries in youth sport are linked to overuse and overspecialization in a single sport, the answer might be to diversify the youth sports menu and revise training procedures. Some sports might be inherently unsafe and so only open to adult participation.

Athletes also face health threats off the playing field from coaches and staff. The recently established US Safe Sport Center is designed to protect athletes in Olympic sports from sexual abuse, such as occurred in the US Gymnastics Larry Nassar case.

People should be well informed about the risks associated with specific sports. Being well informed connects to the age of providing informed consent. A sport might be fine for adults who can make informed decisions to take those risks, but not for minors who are too young to provide informed consent. If chronic sub-concussive blows to the head (below the level of a concussion) are linked to the development of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE — a neurodegenerative disease), then the policy might lead us to decide that sports like tackle football that inherently include regular blows to the head should only be open to adults who can provide informed consent to these risks.

In light of the risks of repeated head trauma, a number of states are considering banning tackle football below a certain age. Extreme sports with high injury risks like BASE-jumping or Wingsuit flying set minimum age limits of 18 through their sport association, the USPA — but these are not legally determined limits.

Empower Athletes as Engaged Citizens

Sports can provide a means of liberation and civic empowerment to individuals. Athletes have often been powerful role models for social justice, helping our communities to bridge divisions and address inequalities regarding such things as race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Yet sports organizations often function as means of control, disempowering athletes as citizens and discouraging civic engagement. We might praise past athletes like Muhammad Ali or John Carlos, but we tell current athletes like Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, or LeBron James to “shut up and play.”

This policy option is the opposite of “shut up and play.” It builds on the capacity of sports to empower athletes as engaged citizens to help society move ahead, to address limitations of race, class and gender. It supports the development of an athlete’s Bill of Rights to promote athletes’ civic agency. To encourage the development of athletes’ civic engagement, the policy would structure athletic organizations on a shared governance model, where athletes have a co-equal voice to engage in the governance of their sport and in decisions relating to their athletic performance.

The Women’s Flat Track Derby Association is an example of an athlete-governed sports organization, with a governing philosophy of “by the skaters, for the skaters,” and with female skaters as the “primary owners, managers, and/or operators of each member league and of the association.” If other sports leagues followed this self-governance model, how might the athletes be better protected?

Protect Economic Rights of Athletes

Sports can provide a path of economic empowerment to athletes, helping them move up and out. But athletes, many of whom begin their careers at a young age, face powerful forces of economic exploitation and lack of financial guidance, limiting their ability to advance economically. This policy seeks to empower athletes to take control of their economic futures. It aims to prevent a situation where athletes are trapped as a kind of gladiator class, expending their health for the entertainment of fans and of the powerful organizations that profit from their labor.

CAPA, the College Athletes Players Association is a fledgling labor organization formed to foster the interests of college athletes, to protect them from economic exploitation, and to protect their health.

Some Possible Features

Protect physical health and safety

• Publicly fund research related to sports health and safety, to better understand the health benefits and risks of specific sports practices, to develop better injury prevention, treatment, and equipment
• Take a research-based approach to sports health and safety practices, making evidence-based decisions about sports safety concerns including restrictions if sports cannot be made safe
• A public body or governmental agency buffered from commercial interests should play the key role in evaluating sports health and safety concerns
• Allow age-level variations in how a sport is played (adults could have informed consent to take part in risky activities), and make decisions about how much risk people can assume with their own bodies or the bodies of their dependent minors (greater allowances might be made for elite athletes, since they can typically master the greatest risks, surpassing normal human performance)
• Recognize that sports might change over time in response to new health and safety research, and new sports could arise from reforming old ones

Promote athletes as engaged citizens

• Establish an athlete’s Bill of Civil Rights at all levels to enable and encourage athletes to be active citizens, building on the historic role athletes have played in advancing social justice
• Protect athletes from interference from schools, sports organizations, or governments, so they can fully exercise their civil rights, take political stands, and organize collective efforts without fear of penalty to athletic status. College athletes should be able to protest or organize without fear of losing scholarships or impacting their on-field status.
• Athletes should be free to use all forms of expression, such as social media, without external control or censorship
• Encourage athletes to speak out individually and collectively on public matters that concern them
• The policy would explore and encourage ways to protect professional athletes’ rights to take a stand (e.g. through support for collective bargaining). Athletes’ free speech rights could be recognized on the basis that public subsidies for professional sports venues makes them quasi-public entities (so restriction of speech rights would be state action).
• Establish shared governance structures for sports leagues and organizations so athletes have a co-equal voice in the governance of their sports and to protect their rights to be engaged citizens
• Student or youth athletic associations need to have educational programs to help young athletes understand and use their civil rights and to have a voice in their sport’s governance. School athletics need to be connected to the educational mission of fostering self-directed and active democratic citizens.
• Connect the vision of success in sports to a broader vision of success in life as an engaged citizen, building on the positive features of sports for personal and civic development
• Connect sports to broader social justice goals, provide a way to work on issues of diversity and inequality, and change the paradigm so that minority students are not going to college primarily for sports but for education

Promote economic wellbeing

• Protect the economic wellbeing of athletes at all ages — the ability of athletes to earn compensation for their activities whenever revenue is being generated
• Athletes in revenue sports (wherever money is being earned from their efforts) have a right to fair market compensation (including in college and youth sports), and they should have rights to accept sponsorships independent of their coaches, teams, schools, or sports organizations
• Affirm rights of representation in contract negotiations and rights of collective bargaining, recognizing athletes’ rights to negotiate the value and terms of their labor and their property rights
• Provide financial counseling and proactive financial services to protect athletes’ earnings, including features like default opt-in for retirement savings with financial planning to manage the relatively short terms of athletic careers
• Establish an economic Bill of Rights for college athletes, including guaranteed scholarships through degree completion, healthcare coverage during and after college sports, collective bargaining rights and rights of representation by an agent or attorney, the right to market-based financial compensation for athletes in revenue sports, and the right to sponsorships
• Protect against the economic exploitation of youth athletes (minors), by setting up checks and balances on the people working in youth athletics to assure the focus is on the best interest of the child and not just the interest of the sports organization
• Establish an independent mediator or watchdog to look out for the best interest of youth athletes when schools or sports programs make special offers (e.g. to play in another district or sign with a pro developmental team)
• Establish a national youth coaching certification program for all youth sports coaches, focusing on positive youth development principles (everyone plays, keep it fun, etc.), alongside a safety-first approach
• Focus on the quality of sports instruction to avoid youth burnout and to encourage positive attitudes about sports

Exploring Possible Impacts

• How might this policy impact the landscape for sports? What impacts might it have on athletes? On their sports? On sports organizations? How would these impacts look at different levels of sports (from youth to professional sports)?
• What sorts of changes might be needed to implement this policy and make it successful? How else might the policy be implemented to reach the policy’s goals?
• How might this policy be different for athletes in public or private settings?
• What other broader social or cultural implications might this policy option have? What tradeoffs might we face if we adopted this policy approach?

• Go back to the Future of Sports & Society Introduction and List of Seven Policy Options
• Go forward to Policy 4: Focus on Developing Elite Athletes
• Go back to Policy 2: Sports for Healthy Communities