Convenient Reverence: Forward with Scholarships (Pt. 1)

Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

'CONVENIENT REVERENCE'

[Originally written as a discursive paper for conference presentation]

'On the judicious use of university athletic scholarships to increase the number of British champions and better a nation's sporting culture'

1.1: Introduction.

London 2012's biggest question mark wasn't about bricking the stadium, working the underground, keeping people secure. It wasn't about medal tallies or fair ticketing. The biggest question mark came afterward. LOCOG neatly repackaged its fractured aspects as “legacy”, and plenty of people have since taken to Twitter, to the BBC, to the letters pages of newspapers to decry the change in funding and the slashing of events for Rio, now the world's eyes are no longer on us.

But to call it legacy is perhaps unhelpful. A legacy is what's left over when you're dead, when you're gone. It's a politician's word, a watch you leave to your son, a bunch of bad laws that take an age to unpick. It would be more helpful to call it “where from here?”.

It is essential that the 2012 Olympics are not considered a time of convenient reverence – a time in which we stood our athletes on a pedestal when it suited us, and ignored them for the next three years, cutting their programmes and fading out their achievements. These athletes were exhorted to 'inspire a generation', an action which should not simply encourage the winning of Olympic medals, but also asks a nation to begin believing that sport is an indispensable part of everyday life; a means of staying healthy, finding strength and learning lessons. The Olympics urged us to recognise and apply the power of sport.

In order to prevent the decay of sport in the national imagination, the entire current structure needs a radical shake-up; a reorganisation of the system and the attitude. Enough money was thrown at London 2012 in enough time to bridge the gap between a handful of parents pushing and funding a few children, and a slew of medals. But really stare at British sport, and it's possible to see the bottom. There's simply no depth.

We are at a critical juncture here. 2012 marks an unprecedented opportunity to set in motion lasting change.

We rely on a system in which it's so easy to fall through the cracks. Unless your parents encourage you to specialise early and are happy/free/rich enough to drive you to private practice; or unless your school has a strong sporting programme, the likelihood is that you'll shine a couple of times along the way, and then your star will fade.

Money intervenes, education intervenes, time intervenes. Not everybody can 'make it happen'. There is not a system in which young athletes find themselves supported, educated and prepared. Britain has more champions than it dare admit; but the structure and scaffolding of sporting culture in this country is failing them.

To pick a statistic: most medals won by the USA were won by college graduates or those currently in or likely to attend college. This was also the case with British medals. But the difference in reality across the Atlantic is staggering. Here in the UK, the attendance of university is almost incidental to an athlete's professional development – it can even hinder it. University sport features at best, twice a year in the national consciousness – the Boat Race (rowing) and at a push, the Varsity Match (rugby). Both involve the same two universities; both televised versions are men's events and both boast programmes that attract, in the main, semi or full professional athletes, on a 'break' from the Olympic quadrennial.

These are the only two programmes remotely comparable to college sports in the US. In most cases, university sport in the UK merely provides qualifications for fallback after an athletic career is over. Certainly, it is important for an athlete to hedge her bets. Sports careers are brutally short. But despite high levels of participation, university sport in the UK is not nearly competitive enough and goes largely unnoticed.

Comparatively, college in the USA is a logical step for most young athletes. A place where they can train and compete in an environment that prepares them for the professional world. College sports are well funded, well reported and boast professional coaches. Top sports are often televised and the level of funding parity for women and men, though not perfect, is much more impressive – thanks to Title IX.

High school students are not forced to choose between turning pro or college – or at least the availability of full or generous scholarships takes some of the pressure off. They are not forced to compete amongst a debilitatingly mediocre pool of weekend warriors. They have proper coaching, proper programmes, well-supported gamedays and three or four years to develop their skills at a critical time.

The debate in the UK is (or certainly should be) about how to increase and then maintain the pool of talented participants in a range of sports, and then pass the financial and athletic development batons from pushy parent to capable, regulated institution.

America has the answer for us: college scholarships. In fact, America's college scholarship system has been so productive in its manufacturing of champions that the NCAA has become a victim of its own success. In America, the debate is about reining in an NCAA spiralling out of control; regulating its almost-pro side and supporting elite athletes facing huge training and competing costs straight out of college.

But the truth is that America has a plan for its high school athletes; it looks after its champions for an extra three or four years, allowing them to mature, make crucial decisions and build a path towards pro' participation whilst fulfilling their academic potential.

The college block represents key 'maturity' years, in which no young person should be forced to make decisions that might dramatically affect their future, without knowing how far their biology or brain will support them. Amongst other functions, the NCAA and athletic scholarships postpone big 'deciders' and allow for students to find out via a more organic process, whether they have the mettle to make it as a pro. Though the NCAA's mandates and actions are by no means perfect, the theory of the system outlines the bare bones of a solution that British sport officials need take serious note.

This series of articles – originally written as a discursive paper – will discuss how, in one move, British sport can play a blinder – how it can pick and choose the parts of the American system that work and apply them to a failing system in which potential champions play hard in secondary school and leave to party hard at university. This series will argue that a clever scaffold of sports scholarships at university level will, to a greater extent:

• increase the number of British champions at Rio 2012

• increase the number and quality of professional sports leagues in the UK

• raise the importance of sport in school to a level equal to core subjects such as Maths and English – reflecting a much-needed approach to personal health and fitness

• force an improvement in the equality of funding for women's sports by forcing a legal change similar to Title IX

• encourage athletes to stay in school and secure their futures beyond sport

• end the choice for young athletes between turning pro or attending university

• encourage children of poorer demographics and communities to aim to attend university

• fund those from poorer demographics to attend university on appropriate courses

• improve school and university academic test scores by supporting athletes properly

• improve the sporting culture of the country

• encourage a number of economic and business benefits

Though this series does not pretend to solve the problem of a nation on the whole happy to watch sport, but loathe to participate; it offers instead a step towards redressing current attitudes, rebuilding sport in schools as part of the truly core curriculum and stacking our future champions high. In many ways, his paper merely reiterates the oft ignored truism that to succeed in sport, one must have the proper financial and structural backing – an actuality repeatedly and unbelievably ignored at a macro and micro level in British sport.

Support women's sports and SHARE this story with your friends!

• Sports
• College
• High School
• Student-Athlete
• Recruiting
• Research
• Politics
• NCAA

This article was written by a WomenTalkSports.com contributor. Sign up here to start publishing your own women's sports content.

View Felicity (Fawkes) Hawksley's Full Profile