VandVsmama
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2011
Just to offer a different point of view from the schools that only celebrate athletic achievements, this school plays music & has a little celebration before every AP exam for its high school students.
Not to mention the money it brings into the community. I live in a college town(just outside of Iowa City, go Hawks!) and see first hand how much business the store I work for and the one my husband works for do on football (and in lesser amounts) basketball game days.Just to add to my prior thought, I never played varsity football or basketball at all. I was in the band, math comps, and lesser sports. But, I recognize what the top sports meant to our school & why they were so celebrated. Nobody - not even my parents - ever saw me in a math competition, but there were literally thousands of people in the bleachers for a home football game.
At the college level, a good football/basketball program brings in big bucks for the school as Eliza pointed out. But, it goes beyond that. Having good teams is a HUGE recruiting bump for non-athletic students. Attending the games is a big part of the "college experience" for a lot of kids. DD15 is the anti-athlete. She's also a huge football fan.
So yeah I agree athletes aren't "more valuable" than others, but I also see why big-time sports get more attention than the chess club. That's just common sense.
Same thing with college sports. I went to the University of Pittsburgh during their heyday (Dan Marino, tony Dorsett). Our college football team brought in millions of dollars for the school, which paid for a lot of non football stuff, I know for a fact that every band, cheerleading and a few other non athletic scholarships were funded from proceeds from the football program. Penn State football program pretty much provides the scholarships for all the other sports right on down to quiddage (joke).
I have a hard time with college athletics because of how few schools actually make money on them, and how much pressure there is on schools to compete athletically even at the expense of the students who are there for academics. It really chafed to get hit with an 8% tuition increase this year, one semester after the school completed a brand-new $30mil basketball arena and send the softball team on an expenses-paid "tournament" trip to Daytona over spring break. It is also frustrating to see student-athletes get a pass for missing as much as 1/4 of the meetings of a particular class, while hauling my butt to school sick because the professor penalizes us mere students for missing class. And this isn't a D1 school raking in money on TV rights and merchandise or sending anyone on to the pros; it is a regional college that only students and alumni root for.