Chapter 9: The Everyday Athlete

We have spent much of the time on the pages looking at exercise and sports and their benefits to the Special education department. This page I am going to take a non-sequitur and talk about the average students benefits of athletics. I make a living working with young men and women who are athletes. I believe we use the term "student athlete" with the intention of "Student" being first. This idea has a lot of empirical data that suggests student athletes have more success during their sports season. This is a big selling points for sports! However I will be sharing a piece from an article that contradicts the idea that students have a higher GPA during the season (This will be after the video).

I want to show you the longest video I have ever entered into this forum. I want to show you a video that is super powerful, this young man is a great example of a student athlete:
 * 3-4 hours a day of free time
 * Can't work to make $$$
 * Discipline w/ time management

This video is really powerful and It is great for our students to see a video like this! I believe the work of people like this man in the video will one day get these NCAA athletes paid. They truly do deserve it!

So to get back to younger kids we talk about the student-athlete life. A study was done by the Journal of Sports Economics, that came to the conclusion of:

"There are academic costs to participation for varsity athletes, though the size of this effect (a decrease in in-season GPA of 0.0234 grade points) is small." [7}

"In terms of policy recommendations, one should not be greatly concerned that participation in athletics takes too much time from academics as these negative effects are small and only occur for a subset of athletes at the highest level of high school participation" [7]

The GPA going down .02 points would not be incredibly concerning, especially after watching a video and learning about the time that these athletes do not have to spare.

Keep reading! We have so much more exciting content and I am working through the night to create a great product.

References:

[7] Schultz, K. (2017). Do High School Athletes Get Better Grades During the Off-Season? Journal of Sports Economics, 18(2), 182-208.