Faculty Advisor: Andrea Smith Hunter
Course:
Abstract: Understanding the experience of student athletes and what drives academic motivation and athletic motivation for those students during a time of upheaval in NCAA sports is important, not only from an enrollment and retention standpoint, but also from an identity and development standpoint for all students. With recent NCAA sports rule changes for revenue-producing sports, student-athletes are now capable of generating significant economic rents for some colleges (Garthwaite et al., 2020) there is heightened potential for a bifurcation between those sports where athletes will be viewed as employees (Corrado, 2020), and all of the rest where the motive for participation is much more about the liberal arts ideal of a well-rounded life. The larger schools with a primary emphasis upon revenue-producing programs, now have the potential to create their own “ecosystem†into the future. While this division has been developing to an extent for the last 50 years, the tension is now particularly heightened.
If the large revenue-producing programs and their schools become their own ecosystem then the remaining programs and institutions become all the more important. With this in mind, we conducted our study of academic and athletic motivation, at a small to mid-sized school population offering Division I athletics. We seek to shine a light on what we think is representative of a significant portion of the college athletics world outside of the large revenue-generating sports. In some ways, our focal colleges’ sport program may constitute an ideal laboratory for liberal arts ideals in this, the early 21st century. The school under study is located in the Northeast quadrant of the United States and has a somewhat homogenous population with an enrollment approximately 3,500 students. The composition of the athletic program at the focal college is: 351 total Division I athletes, White/NonHispanic 268 (76%), two or more races 26 (7.5%), Hispanic 12 (3.5%), Black 20 (5.5%), Asian 2 (0.05%), American Indian 2 (0.05%) and International 26 (7.5%). Primary focus in terms of scholarship support from the college for women goes to Cross Country – Track & Field, Basketball, Soccer and Swimming and Diving in that order. For the men, support goes to Basketball, Lacrosse, Cross Country – Track & Field and Soccer. None of these sports generate enough revenue to offset costs, nor could they be regarded as revenue-producing. We surveyed student athletes to determine their athletic and academic motivations, to understand whether or not they experienced role conflict in their work as athlete and emerging scholar, and to assess how ethics plays into daily life. The response size for the survey was 78 from among 351 potential respondents.
Our exploration of student athletes hinges upon: the Academic Motivation (AM) and Sports Athletic Motivation (SAM) constructs formulated and tested by Joy Gaston-Gales (Gaston-Gayles, 2005); ethics constructs as outlined by James Joseph Phillips (Phillips, 2007); and organization theory from studies on Role Conflict first described by Karl Weick (Weick, 1995, 2001; Weick and Sutcliffe 2001; Valentine et al., 2010). Our work follows the aforesaid empirical work done by Gaston-Gayles on Academic Motivation (AM) and Student Athletic Motivation (SAM) in explaining the variables related to academic success for the student athlete and extends that work into the environment of the small, relatively unstudied, homogenous college athletic program. It also seeks to compliment previous literature on the impact of athletics on the liberal arts environment, while offering several novel conclusions related to role conflict and role ethics. Our primary research questions deal with these related issues: What influences Academic Motivation (AM) in the small school context? What drives Student Athletic Motivation (SAM) among college student athletes? Are the results from our small college survey different from those reported by student athletes at larger schools where revenue sports are prominent? What makes college athletes academically successful in a small Liberal Arts College?
We form several hypotheses, from a review of the literature related to college athletes and motivation. Our survey deals with the major factors impacting AM and SAM for athletes, namely: potential conflict between the student athlete’s role in the classroom and their role on the field, influence of coaches and college personnel who are peripherally involved in the athlete’s academic life, and financial constraints. The factors outlined above will impact the grades and academic performance of the student athlete in the setting of a small Liberal Arts College. On many of these points, the survey validated our hypotheses.
Location: MAC, Table # 27
Poster Presentation