Ethics Class

Learning about and discussing ethical topics in class this year has been truly enjoyable. The issues we read about and discuss are issues that I already naturally talk to my friends about. Being able to relate my personal life to this class has only made it that much more easy to learn. When I was deciding on a major before college, I was thinking about what I wanted to do in life. I knew that I had a passion for sports and so I decided to take the sports route hoping that everything would work out in the end. All I really want is to enjoy my job, and I knew that working in the sports field would definitely allow me to do that. So far in college, I have really loved the classes specific to my major, but it is the classes like these that really remind me that I am on the right track. My favorite TV channel is ESPN and when the same things are being discussed on ESPN as in one of my classes, I knew I had picked something right.
Usually student go through college dreading class and reading and all they really want to do is hang out, party, and somehow magically have the good grades flow to them. And in my case, that is how I feel for most of my non-major specific classes. "Just get the work done the best you can and get this class over with." However, in this class, I looked forward to reading about ethical issues in sports and I looked forward to discussing them in class. Like I said earlier, my friends and I have the same type of discussions regularly, and I would go to class, discuss the same things and then get a grade for it. I could not ask for a class better fitted for me, and I truly enjoyed learning most of the material we went through.

Credit for Athletics

At Universities, students are required to have a certain amount of PE credits depending on their major. We have to take classes like "weightlifting" or "swimming" in order to fulfill our degree requirements. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy these classes. I took softball last semester and had an absolute blast with it. We just went out to the softball fields every Tuesday and Thursday and just played softball, it was the best time of my week. I have heard from other student though that their PE class was not as fun. Some PE professors grade strictly on performance and improvement, and some professors assign papers on the sport and mandatory attendance at outside of class events. That would be the short side of the stick as those classes might be harder to keep up with than my simple, awesome softball class. But either way, we are getting academic credit for playing a sport or participating in a physical activity a couple of times per week. So, would it not be fair for athletes to get academic credit for playing a sport. If we only have class twice a week for less than an hour and half and they have practice everyday for multiple hours, shouldn't they get some kind of class credit for that? It sure seems so.
In these PE classes, not only are we running around and getting our exercise on, but we are also learning to deal with things like teamwork and sportsmanship. These are actually very important lessons in life, especially in the workplace. These PE classes can turn out to be very valuable. So, if we are learning the basics of teamwork and sportsmanship by going to a PE class three hours a week, how much of those two attributes do you think athletes learn by practically having to make siblings out of their teammates throughout the year? Surely they can probably teach the rest of us a thing or two about having to get along and get along well. So these athletes are spending five times as many hours in practice as a PE class does and they experience much more of the lessons learned in these classes but they don't get ANY academic credit for it? Something is wrong with that picture.

Jackie Robinson

In my opinion, Jackie Robinson was the ultimate Black hero. The way he stood up and performed against diversity was like none ever before or after him. Jackie was an all around athlete. He was a star football, basketball, and baseball player, and it was said that baseball wasn't even his best sport. But when the Dodgers went looking for a negro player, he caught their eye, and it was not for his talent. Jackie was not even the best ball player in the negro leagues, but he had the tools necessary to make it in the MLB. A great all around player, Jackie could play multiple positions, hit for a very high average, and steal a ton of bases. But it was not his ball skills that attracted the eye of the Dodger organization so much. Off the field, Jackie Robinson was such a great guy. He was humble and quiet, and he could block out all of the racist remarks heard from everywhere he went. That takes a lot. Think about it, literally everywhere he went there were probably people saying things that should have just pissed him off. Most people did not want a black player in the MLB, and people were not afraid to say that, among other probably much worse things, to his face. Somehow, Jackie was able to not only tolerate it all and stay calm at the time, but he also continuously delivered on the baseball field. So most people hated him and they told him to his face, but he kept playing and playing well. That blows my mind that he could possibly put aside all of the comments and remarks and still perform. His mental toughness is out of this world.
On top of most people hating him and not agreeing with the fact that he was playing with the whites, ticket sales sky rocketed when Jackie joined the Dodgers. So EVERYONE came to watch him play. Every at bat, every play in the field, every breath Jackie took, thousands of eyes were staring at him, waiting for him to do something wrong or out of the ordinary. He never did. Not only did he never really do anything wrong, but with all eyes watching him intensely, he continued to perform at his best and win MVP awards and earn the respect of everyone in the game. Put anyone else in that type of adversity and let me know how they do. The way Jackie Robinson handled it is truly unbelievable.

Scholarships for STUDENT Athletes

These days it seems like every good college athletes is on scholarship at his or her school. You can just scan the field or court and realize that most of the players are basically getting paid to be there. These kids get their whole college paid for so that they can play a sport for the school. The ironic thing is though, is that athletes are notorious for having trouble when it comes to maintaining good grades in school. A lot of athletes don't even graduate. So in reality, they are getting their school paid for, but then don't end up learning or getting the beneficiaries of school, knowledge. The school is paying for the kid to be a "student-athlete" at their school, but the kid doesn't really partake in the "student" part of the deal. So what is the college paying for in the end? This is one reason why it is not right to give out athletic scholarships, because the school is paying for the kid's privilege to learn, but he doesn't end up learning anything in the end. If an athletic scholarship is awarded, it should be awarded to a kid who will up hold the "student" part of "student-athlete." Otherwise the University if wasting money if the kid isn't going to learn or graduate in the first place.
When an athlete is on scholarship, it is not news to him, he is well aware that he is extremely gifted in his sport. The fact that he is on scholarship just boosts his ego even more. Some of the time in can even present the message that his sport comes first in college. Since he is on scholarship, they are paying him to play a sport right? So the sport should come first, right? Well the fact is that they are actually paying for his schooling so that he can have the privilege of playing the sport. Student comes first in student athlete, and sometimes scholarship players forget that.

Steroids and the Olympics

There was a time when people competed fairly and no one complained of cheating with performance enhancing drugs. But that time is far from now. Foreign countries first started using steroids in the mid 20th century to aid their teams in the Olympics. At this time, no one really knew anything about performance enhancers, so they had no way of knowing that it was cheating to use them. They just assumed they had found a great way to get much stronger much faster. When these other countries started using, we had to use also just to keep up. Well, the Olympics found out about the enhancers and they decided that something needed to be done to stop the use of illegal enhancers. So, they started testing for the basic enhancer and hoped that the countries would see that they were going to be tested and then stop using the drugs in all. The only problem is that the Olympics were only testing for the basic enhancer of that time so all the users had to do was tweak the drug a little bit to avoid it showing up on the test. People were still using performance enhancers now even though the Olympics had started testing for them. This game continued for a while. They would improve their tests but then the athletes would just keep finding the loop holes and avoid getting caught using. Finally, the Olympics figured out how to prevent all steroids and such from being used at the games. With this though, athletes would just use their drug until about a month before the games and then stop using so that it would not show up on the tests at game time. To this day, athletes continue to find loop holes in the system so that they can keep using performance enhancers. Perhaps if the Olympics had just eliminated the thought of steroids when it first came up, people would not be using them now. Either way, it continues to be a big problem in sports today and there seems to be no real solution to completely removing them from the athletic society.

Violence in Football

Since it has now been proven that the physicality athletes partake in when playing football causes serious health problems later in life, should people be risking their health to play the sport in the first place? According to the article "Offensive Play" by Malcolm Gladwell, football players, especially linemen, are at very high risk of CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, when they grow older. The constant damage the head takes when making and taking hits in a football game amounts to health problems at an older age. Can anything be done to the sport to make it less violent and reduce the risk of health problems? The answer to that question is no. If violence would some how be taken out of the sport, it would change the game as a whole and it would no long be America's prime time. There is no way that football could be played to the level of excitement it is now without the physicality it brings to the table. Removing the violence would completely change the game as a whole. Instead of removing the violence, the NFL could try and require safer equipment and padding. This would reduce the risk of injury, but it would increase the violence of the game. If the players knew that they could hit harder and be more aggressive without risking their health, they would throw their bodies around and probably cause even more traumatic damage than before. Improving the safety of the equipment would only increase the violence. Seeing now that there is no real way to remove the violent risks from football, should parents let their kids play in high school? Playing football in high school is really not a very big health risk. There is not near enough physicality to cause health problems later in life. There is, however, the risk of breaking a bone, or getting injured in the present tense. But, the fun the kid has and the friendships he makes should be well worth any chance of getting injured that he has. Being part of a high school football team can enhance the high school experience way more than an injury can hurt it. Once a player gets good enough to make it big time though, the family has a decision to make. Is it worth the health risks to play college or in the NFL. It really depends on the player's love for the game, but sometimes, the health risks can be so high that outsiders would seriously question the decision of the athlete.