Reproducing Sports Stars: How Students Become Elite Athletes

Abstract

Background/Context School-sponsored sports programs are seen in both the public and policy spheres as meritocratic mobility institutions. In the U.S. context, athletic participation can yield access to college via sports performance. Meritocratic mobility would be achieved as individuals use their athletic ability and effort to enter universities and in turn improve their social standing. Yet few existing studies empirically examine the extent to which interscholastic athletic participation yields mobility. As a result, little is known about how individuals access colleges via athletics. Purpose/Objective This study's purpose was to understand how individuals began a path to college via sports. In doing so, it asks: what larger social forces influence how youth become top-level college athletes? It draws upon social reproduction theory—how publicly funded educational entities ensure the maintenance rather than the reduction of class inequality—to determine whether youth sports participation facilitates mobility. Research Design This qualitative study examined the athletic and academic trajectories of 47 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I student-athletes from one university classified as Research-1, Tier-1, and as a member of a power-five athletic conference. Data include semistructured life history interviews, an original database, and institutional reports. Population Participants were recruited from four teams to investigate the athletic selection process: men's and women's track & field and rowing. The teams offered multiple comparisons in macro- and micro-social processes. Rowing draws from White and elite communities, because it requires tremendous resources to participate. Conversely, track & field requires fewer resources and draws more participants from marginalized communities. Findings Research reveals a sports-track-to-college pipeline and a correspondence between White middle-class communities and greater access to elite universities via athletics. Access to the sports-track-to-college pipeline is co-constructed through interactions at the individual, familial, and institutional levels. Five reproductive mechanisms are discussed—community access, bureaucracies, social access, knowledge, and enacted knowledge—all of which emerged as greater determiners for college athletic recruiting than individual athletic merit. Conclusions Recommendations offer policy and programmatic changes at the high school, college, and NCAA levels that make athletic recruiting more transparent and systematic to lessen the reproductive effects.

Segregation, innocence, and protection: The institutional conditions that maintain whiteness in college sports.

“…These institutions may violate their public mandate to serve and represent their state demographics by creating and supporting racially and economically exclusive athletic programs. Data that show that white athletes are overrepresented in nonrevenue sports (i.e., Hextrum, 2019; Lapchick, 2018) might underestimate their demographic counts. These authors rely upon the publicly available NCAA data, which only reports the race (but not the class) of scholarship athletes.…”

“…Study participants accessed resources to develop their athletic talent—which later served as driver for college access—through predominately white communities (Hextrum, 2018a, 2019). Community-organized sports are a setting to achieve the intergenerational transfer of particular values associated to whiteness, including effort, goal setting, and achievement (DeLuca & Andrews, 2016).…”

White Property Interests in College Athletic Admissions

“…Concurrently, over the past 40 years, the rise of commercialized pay-to-play youth sports have supplanted low-cost, public opportunities to learn athletic skills (Coakley, 2011). The majority of college athletes must travel through pay-to-play leagues in order to be recruited (Coakley, 2011;Eckstein, 2017;Hextrum, 2018Hextrum, , 2019. Changes to amateurism such as permitting athletic scholarships never addressed whether all American youth have equal opportunities to play sports and in turn compete for university spots.…”

“…These narratives influence coaching and recruitment decisions as Black athletes are more often slotted into certain sports and positions based upon their race (Carrington, 2013;Coakley, 2015;Washington & Karen, 2001). These narratives also influence athletes' decisions about what sports and positions to pursue and invest their time and energy into (Hextrum, 2019(Hextrum, , 2020b.…”

“…Athletic departments are not required to craft uniform nor transparent criteria of how athletes are evaluated (i.e., no equivalent to the SAT exists for athletic admission). Studies indicate these evaluations are subjective and favor athletes with connections to high-status coaches, teams, and private clubs (Eckstein, 2017;Hextrum, 2018Hextrum, , 2019Hextrum, , 2020a. Coakley (2011) explains how privatized club sports have secured higher reputational status during the neoliberal era replacing low-cost youth leagues.…”