Athletes live for the present. Feedback to athletes is prompt, if not instantaneous, coming from coach, teammates, the athlete's own self-assessment, and when in competition, from spectators and opponents. Particularly if the team is successful, college athletes know little delay in hearing about their latest performance from schoolmates and often from boosters, administrators, and professors. Such direct linkage between action and result is satisfying, but it holds the danger of diverting the athlete's attention from the less immediate, more extended and tenuous business of acquiring an education and adequately planning for the future.Since the environment of intercollegiate athletics leads participants, intentionally or not, to focus upon the immediate, often at the expense of the future, a growing number of institutions are providing advising programs to help athletes orient to their own lon-term welfare. Some of these support systems for student -athletes are extensive, while others are minimal. In this paper I will (1) discuss the rationale for special advising programs for athletes, (2), relate three surveys assessing the amount and kind of special support programs for athletes in operation at NCAA institutions, (3) describe features of advising/counseling support in use at various institutions, (4) comment upon the need for role-conflilct counseling, and (5) summarize those areas of advising/counseling for athletes about which we know too little.
College athletes are exploited when some aspect of their athletic involvement mitigates against their receiving a full and useful education toward a postcollegiate career. We do not have a systematic means for assessing degree of academic exploitation within and among campuses. To be useful to athletes, measures are needed that will assess degree of exploitation while it is occurring and is correctable, rather than measuring exploitation after the fact. Two specific means for assessing academic performance and progress of athletes are suggested here. These measures provide a timely assessment of progress for athletes that more acutely measures their academic performance than traditional means. Further, these measures may become a base of data that can be used to assess academic performance of athletes between teams on a given campus or between schools. Privacy regulations prohibit researchers from obtaining raw data from academic records at institutions other than their own. A method for pooling and sharing this individually obtained data is suggested. Use could be made of this data base by social scientists, administrators, and prospective athletes who want to compare the academic environment for athletes at colleges they are considering.
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