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Interscholastic and Intercollegiate Athletics Development in the United States

IT IS important when suggesting new models or reform of any longstanding and accepted system to review where we are and how we got to where we are. This chapter provides a historical review of the American sports development system in an attempt to answer a very interesting question: Why is the United States the only country that has its primary vehicle of sports development and opportunity within its various educational borders? The European model, covered in chapter 5, essentially manifested itself in the same way but now has a much different and inclusive structure in comparison to the United States, most notably how the system is separate and distinct from the educational space. How did two systems that developed at virtually the same time, for many of the same reasons, end up creating drastically different governance and development models? It is a great question and one that must be discussed via a historical overview of how both systems developed.

AMERICAN SPORTS DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION

Few issues in sports have captivated Americans as much as intercollegiate and interscholastic athletics. The passion, the pomp and circumstance, the rivalries, and the unique American flavor of it all make them a significant part of the social fabric. I begin with the development of college sports in the United States because they provided the main impetus to those sports manifesting themselves at the primary and secondary levels of education.

College and other educationally based sports in the United States, while hugely popular and embedded in the cultural framework of the nation, have been the subject of significant concern and empirical inquiry for over a hundred years. Millions of fans attend games between athletes who are advertised as students first and athletes second. These “student-athletes,” as they are commonly referred to, provide fans with entertainment and possess the ability to bring communities together, while ostensibly gaining valuable life experience and access or potential access to a college education, with a financial package to help pay for it. Proponents of college sports, and to a lesser extent high school sports, point to other potential benefits that sound promising, but may not in reality be consistent residual effects of having athletics on campus. This includes such often-cited positive attributes as increasing a school’s visibility on a national level, which can lead to enhanced fund-raising, marketing opportunities, and applications for enrollment. In addition, sports participation is touted as a vehicle to provide educational opportunities for athletes to develop leadership, teamwork, and other beneficial social skills (Dosh 2013; Litan, Orszag, and Orszag 2003; Miracle and Rees 1994). Some critics have argued, with or without empirical research, that coaches and sports administrators will often denigrate academics and overemphasize the importance of sports to an institution, while gaining power to influence the academic primacy and moral compass of the institution (Splitt 2003).

INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

Educationally embedded sports, throughout their history, show both similarities and differences with regard to other models of sports development and governance. The unique relationship of education and sports, forming the primary sports development model in America, essentially happened by accident. It began with American university students seeking recreational opportunities outside the few intramural activities available within their particular institution by organizing sporting events with other colleges, presumably to test their athletic prowess, manhood, and superiority in various events. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, student bodies and even administrations at prominent universities were progressively more determined to win in these rudimentary, student-organized intercollegiate sports, sometimes at any cost. While football was the main focus, other sports were also rising to sufficient importance in colleges’ profiles that certain institutions began to turn a blind eye to academic requirements just to get athletes onto the field. Professional baseball pitchers were becoming campus stars, playing college baseball under pseudonyms. Coaches were inserting themselves and nonstudents into football games.

In the early days of American higher education, faculties and administrators had never planned for anything as frivolous as organized athletics. The concentration was to be solely on academics. But students increasingly clamored for recreational activities that would offer a respite from the daily rigors of academic life (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985). Many faculty members recognized that this was actually beneficial to the academic progress and success of the students (Falla 1981). Whether it was a rowing regatta between Harvard and Yale in 1852, or the first “football game” between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869, these relatively little-noticed, social, yet oftentimes very competitive events were the precursors to today’s nationally popular, multibillion-dollar industry of intercollegiate athletics (Staurowsky and Abney 2011).

While the concept of a sports development model being primarily embedded within higher education might seem somewhat strange to observers who are not native to the United States, intercollegiate athletics have been a part of higher education and university life even outside the United States since the early eighteenth century, when athletics were made part of the curriculum at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Intercollegiate competition in the United States is traced back to before the first recognized intercollegiate athletic rowing event in Boston in 1852, to as early as the 1820s, with no-holds-barred football and rugby games between Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These “informal” events predate most organized athletics in America, scholastic or professional, including baseball (Ridpath 2002; Falla 1981; Howard-Hamilton and Watt 2001; Zimbalist 1999).

After the first official organized football game, pitting Rutgers against Princeton in 1869, proved to be very popular among the students and alumni as a social event, the faculties of the two schools canceled the following year’s contest because they feared an overemphasis on athletics as opposed to academics (Funk 1991; Zimbalist 1999). This strong faculty intervention might be one of the few times, if not the last, that university faculty exercised such control over the growth and power of college sports. Later, and to the disgust of the faculty, representatives of athletic interests (commonly known today as “boosters”) from both schools tried to leverage the very popular contest to raise funds to acquire property to build their own football fields. The 1883 game, played at the Polo Grounds in New York City, drew more than ten thousand fans and generated the money for the boosters to pay for the new fields. For the first time, intercollegiate sports were beginning to dictate university policy and conflict with academia in ways not even imagined (Zimbalist 1999).

New sports such as baseball and track and field were beginning to be established on college campuses across America. Contests were popular, but, as mentioned previously, many of the athletes were not even registered students at competing universities and colleges. There were even early reports of pay-for-play and recruitment of high-level athletes, mostly nonstudents, to play at certain schools. There was not a national or even regional governing body to harness what was becoming a burgeoning industry within the hallowed halls of academia, but it became apparent that governance was needed.

THE NATIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION

Several attempts at organizing an intercollegiate athletics governing body were made before the eventual formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as the primary and best-known governing body over college sports. On January 11, 1895, there was a historic meeting of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, which later became the Big Ten Conference (Byers 1995). This was the first intercollegiate athletic conference on record that made regulations regarding student-athletes’ eligibility and participation (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985; Wilson and Brondfield 1967). Academic eligibility and participation rules began to spread across the country at other campuses, but many abuses of academic requirements still existed, and more needed to be done to keep the growing beast of athletics under the academic tent. There were many attempts at reasonable compliance, but manipulations of academic standards and what is referred to today by the NCAA and its member institutions as competitive equity standards needed to be addressed collectively by all higher-education institutions at a national level, before the enterprise became too big to control. Regulation and effective governance needed to start with what was as popular a sport then as it is now, the behemoth known as college football (Falla 1981).

In 1905, a nationwide call for college football reform led to the first steps toward creating a governing body for intercollegiate athletics. Collaboration among institutions was initiated not to address academic, booster, or even recruiting abuses, but to regulate college football on the playing field and reduce the numerous injuries and lack of consistency in the rules (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994). The call for reform in the rules of the game came from President Theodore Roosevelt himself. In the eyes of many, college football, with its mass-momentum formations, few rules, and anything-goes philosophy, had reached an unacceptable level of violent play that resulted in several deaths. President Roosevelt used the prestige of his office to try to calm the fears of a majority of the public about the growing sense of lawlessness surrounding college football, including the abuse of institutional academic requirements now pervasive in intercollegiate athletics. Many colleges and universities, fearing overemphasis on sports and seeing the dangers of the game, eventually suspended football, including Columbia and Northwestern. Harvard president Charles Eliot threatened to totally abolish the game on his campus (Grimes and Chressanthis 1994; Zimbalist 1999).

According to Falla (1981), there was a sense that something needed to be done at the highest levels to regulate intercollegiate athletics, as society clamored for the college game to adopt stricter rules. The response to this public outcry brought about the initial meeting in 1906 that eventually led in subsequent meetings to the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), the forerunner of the NCAA (Watt and Moore 2001; Zimbalist 1999). Although most of the concerns about college athletics focused on excessive violence, questions regarding the relationship of academics and athletics received almost as much attention from the first meeting onward (Funk 1991; Sack and Staurowsky 1998). In 1910, the IAAUS adopted a new name: the National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the words of one of the founding fathers, later the first president of the NCAA, Captain Palmer Pierce of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the association would be forever known as “the voice of college sports” (Falla 1981).

THE GROWTH OF SPORTS WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION

By the 1920s and 1930s, almost all higher-education institutions had physical education requirements in the curriculum. This, combined with an increased emphasis on intercollegiate athletics, made physical education and competitive sports popular and, effectively, big business. In the 1920s, intercollegiate athletic competition grew exponentially across the nation, making it a “golden age” of college sports. Students had new freedoms, new drives, and new desires for emotional and physical outlets. College sports seemed to provide the one common denominator (Wilson and Brondfield 1967). Colleges and universities were adding sports and building formidable athletic programs in the process. The NCAA held its first championship in track and field in 1921 (Byers 1995; Falla 1981).

The post–World War II era brought forth significant rules and regulations that were later adopted by NCAA member institutions as a whole. The postwar NCAA also returned to the business of attempting to restore and maintain integrity in intercollegiate athletics. At the first NCAA convention (actually called the “Conference of Conferences”), in July 1946, the participants drafted a statement outlining “Principles for the Conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics” (Brown 1999; Sack and Staurowsky 1998).

The principles concerned adhering to the definition of amateurism that existed at the time. This included not allowing professional athletes to compete, holding student-athletes to the same academic standards as the rest of the student body, awarding financial aid without consideration of athletic ability, and developing a policy of recruiting that basically prohibited a coach or anyone representing a member school from recruiting any prospective student-athlete with the offer of financial aid or any equivalent inducement. These principles collectively became known as the “Sanity Code,” or Article III of the NCAA constitution when it was first presented in 1947. This code was initially developed to help colleges and universities deal with the growing levels of abuse and violations in intercollegiate athletics, especially football and men’s basketball. The code was a tortured, yet in some ways brilliant effort to reconcile a number of disparate interests and philosophies concerning intercollegiate athletics (Falla 1981; Sack and Staurowsky 1998; Sperber 1990; Zimbalist 1999). At the time of the development of the Sanity Code, values in intercollegiate athletics remained skewed toward winning and athletic success, rather than academic achievement and graduation.

Intercollegiate athletics in the first half of the twentieth century faced other issues similar to those that colleges and universities still deal with today. These included amateurism, academic integrity, financial aid to athletes, and recruiting restrictions and violations. The birth of the NCAA brought the once shockingly high death rate of football players prior to 1910 to an almost nonexistent low by having somewhat consistent rules and regulations to make the game safer, while to some extent keeping academic cheating and pay-for-play under control. Even though rule problems both off and on the field were minimized, as the competition grew nationwide, the exploitation of academic requirements became tougher for the NCAA membership to control (Byers 1995).

Back in 1910, the first NCAA constitution, like the Sanity Code put in place in the 1947 NCAA constitution, had many provisions that are applicable today in the areas of initial athletic eligibility and satisfactory academic progress. These led to the reform of intercollegiate athletics and the restructuring of academic eligibility standards for athletes. Article 2 stated, “Its [i.e., the organization’s] object shall be the regulation and supervision of college athletics throughout the United States in order that the athletic activities in the colleges and universities may be maintained on an ethical plane in keeping with the dignity and high purpose of education.” Article 8 went on to address the area of intercollegiate athletic and academic eligibility, stating that the “Colleges and Universities in the Association severally agree to take control of student athletic sports as far as may be necessary to maintain in them a high standard of personal honor, eligibility and fair play and to remedy whatever abuses may exist” (Falla 1981, 134–35). These goals are still supposed to drive the governance of educationally based sports in America today.

However, problems arising from the drift away from academic primacy were exacerbated by four major changes in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first step toward actual professionalization of college sports happened in 1956 when the core definition of amateurism, concerning not receiving any remuneration for athletic competition, was modified to allow athletic scholarships that paid for tuition, books, and course-related fees as an “educational award” for college athletes. This was done in an attempt to curb prohibited payments and other benefits to college athletes. Athletes were also given a stipend of $15 per month as laundry money, until that became impermissible in the early seventies.¹ At the time of this redefinition, athletic scholarships were guaranteed for four years and could only be taken away for extraordinary, college-based reasons, such as not meeting academic standards, and not for athletic reasons, in an attempt to keep education at the forefront and preserve athletics as a true extracurricular activity. Athletes were still able to keep their athletic awards even if they quit the team voluntarily.

The second step toward professionalism came less than a decade later, when many universities expressed frustration at that last provision, that an athlete could quit a team, but keep his or her athletic scholarship. This early version of guaranteed scholarship had also planted the seeds for an athletes’ rights movement, mostly by African American athletes who began demanding equal rights and treatment parallel to civil rights demands and protests that were happening elsewhere in the United States. Coaches and administrators grew frustrated with what they felt were challenges to their authority and a growing lack of control over athletes. In response to the concerns of many athletic departments, the NCAA determined in 1967 that scholarships could be canceled if an athlete quit a team. In 1973, the athletic scholarship was made a one-year award that could be taken away for virtually any reason at the end of the period of the award, even for athletic reasons. It essentially became a yearly pay-for-play contract, with coaches given immense authority over whether an athlete would remain on scholarship (Strauss 2014).²

The third and arguably the biggest challenge to college sports’ being an integral part of education was the growth of television and other media in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is difficult to fathom today that as recently as the mid-eighties one could only watch one college football game per weekend, or potentially another regional game, if lucky. If Ohio State was playing Michigan in football, one of the greatest rivalries in college sports history, it had to be selected by the NCAA for national TV coverage or it would not be available for the general public, unless, of course, you had a ticket to the game. The logic behind this was multipronged. There was a belief that television, despite the potential mass marketability, would dramatically affect the home-gate revenue of participants in a negative way. However, the potential for television revenue drove several schools, most notably the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia, to challenge the NCAA’s authority to control television broadcasts in a landmark legal case, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1984.³ The NCAA lost in a 5–4 decision that forever altered the landscape of intercollegiate athletics and moved the collegiate system even further away from a primary focus on the academic mission in regard to athletes. The NCAA wanted desperately to control broadcasts and revenue, not just to protect the live gate, but also in an attempt to provide a level playing field among competitors. The fear was, if schools and conferences negotiated their own television and other media contracts, it would lead to a system of haves and have-nots, along with damaging the live gate. This could influence schools to have a “do whatever it takes” mentality to get star players and star teams on the field or court, in order to make more revenue via television and, by extension, corporate sponsorship rights (Byers 1995).⁴ While it can be argued that a system of haves and have-nots has existed anyway, since the beginning of college sports, it is true that this decision opened up unprecedented amounts of revenue for some schools in the more high-profile conferences. This in some ways forced smaller schools to overspend and overextend in a desperate attempt to keep up with the major institutions, often trumping educational priorities in the name of athletic success, or face the prospect of dropping out of Division I football altogether. Some, like Drake University, decided to downgrade to a lower, non-scholarship division; others to this day are trying to keep up in a race they cannot win.⁵

The last of these steps toward professionalization was letting freshmen compete in varsity athletics and not requiring a year in residence if they had met minimal academic standards in high school, measured by grade point average and/or standardized admission test scores. Freshman athletes were ineligible for varsity competition until 1973. The purpose of the one-year residency requirement was to allow an academic transition to college without the distraction of ultracompetitive sports. Many schools had freshman teams that played lighter schedules, therefore limiting practice, travel, and emphasis on competition in order to minimize the impact on academics. Doing away with the mandatory year of residence before varsity play continued to solidify, for many, the impression that college athletics was no longer “education-based” in any meaningful sense, but had become more about winning and revenue generation.⁶

The debate about intercollegiate athletics, and, by extension, American sports development grounded primarily within the existing educational system at all levels, has been growing for over a century. It is exacerbated by an inability to fully quantify its costs and benefits within an educational model. Thelin refers to college and university athletics as “American higher education’s ‘peculiar institution.’ Their presence is pervasive, yet their proper balance with academics remains puzzling” (Thelin 1994, 1). According to Sperber (1990), intercollegiate athletics participation and competition have been scarred by abuse of academic requirements for athletic eligibility almost since their very beginnings in the early nineteenth century. Abuse of academic requirements in intercollegiate athletics has had a long and sordid history (Ryan 1989; Sperber 1990).

THE PROBLEM OF SHAM AMATEURISM

In America, the United States Olympic Committee and/or other sports national governing bodies (NGBs) could actually act as the broker for the athlete, and bargain for an educational opportunity outside of directly competing for the school. The US government could also adopt ideas used in Europe and provide educational credits or grants to assist athletes of national and international caliber to maximize their opportunities in both athletics and education. Let’s not forget capitalism, either. If individuals and/or corporations want to sponsor athletes either solely or in conjunction with the government to further their athletic development and educational opportunities, then that should be encouraged and formalized. Considering that the USOC is the only privately funded Olympic committee in the world, it is not a huge leap to believe that the private sector could be involved on behalf of elite American athletes in a more flexible model such as this. It’s conceivable that private individuals and companies could directly assist athletes and help finance their educational goals. Currently, arrangements like this would run afoul of archaic NCAA rules prohibiting direct assistance as not aligned with the tenets of amateur athletics. Even though individuals can donate to university foundations for athletic scholarships, at this point in time any direct payment to an athlete would be a violation and cause the institution to be sanctioned.⁷ But this raises the whole issue of amateurism in American sports, an issue that we need to revisit in this society.

A repulsive example of how current eligibility and amateurism rules can detrimentally affect an elite athlete is the story of former dual-sport athlete Jeremy Bloom. Bloom was a noted professional skier, world champion in moguls skiing, and a member of the US Ski Team from the age of fifteen. He represented the United States in the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City and became the youngest person and only the third American ever to win the World Grand Prix title. Bloom was also blessed with the ability and in some ways the misfortune to be a highly successful athlete in two sports, one of which happened to be part of the American intercollegiate athletics system. He enrolled at the University of Colorado in the fall of 2002 and excelled as a Division I football player, gaining a number of receiving, punt return, and kick return records and earning freshman All-American and Big XII honors in 2003. Later that year, he won a world championship gold medal in mogul skiing. In 2004, despite Bloom being an outstanding student, the NCAA declared him ineligible due to the compensation he was receiving as a professional skier, and he lost the last two years of his football eligibility.

Note that the problem here is with definitions of amateurism in intercollegiate sports specifically. The US Olympic model at least allows athletes, even college athletes, to earn outside income through endorsements, sponsorships, and employment, often actually brokered by the USOC and/or a particular sport’s NGB. While not receiving a straight salary, Olympic athletes can provide themselves a good living, depending on their marketability, along with receiving funds or in-kind support for training. Under USOC rules, Bloom was allowed to earn outside monies as a professional skier.

As a football player, Bloom did everything he was supposed to as an amateur athlete. He did not receive any impermissible income based on his marketing utility as a college football player. In fact, even under then-existing NCAA rules he would be allowed to receive income as a professional skier—that is, as a professional in a sport other than football—without sacrificing his amateur status. Many athletes have done exactly this over the years, including such luminaries as John Elway, who was paid six figures by the New York Yankees organization as a Minor League Baseball player while he was quarterback at Stanford during the early 1980s. Other prominent college stars who were also simultaneously amateur and professional athletes include Kirk Gibson at Michigan State University (football in college and Minor League Baseball), Trajan Langdon at Duke University (basketball in college and Minor League Baseball), Danny Ainge at Brigham Young University (basketball in college and Major League Baseball with the Toronto Blue Jays), and Tim Dwight at the University of Iowa (indoor track in college and NFL football), to name just a few.

Bloom, however, in a shocking departure from NCAA precedent, was ruled to be receiving impermissible benefits via endorsement income as Jeremy Bloom the college football player—even though those endorsements were contracted with Jeremy Bloom the professional skier. Bloom fought the NCAA in the courts, but to no avail, due to the potential for further sanctions against the University of Colorado. In the end, he was forced to abandon his final year of college football so he could continue to earn compensation as a skier.⁸

It’s particularly troubling to me that, even as Bloom was pursuing his legal case against the NCAA, it was revealed during a congressional hearing that Tim Dwight had received endorsement income as a member of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, but was able to continue at Iowa as an amateur athlete in indoor track and field without penalty. In a 2004 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution (in which Bloom and I both testified), an NCAA representative, Jennifer Strawley, pressed by Indiana congressman John Hostettler to explain the “substantive differences” between the situations and NCAA treatment of Bloom and Dwight, stated that Dwight had asked for forgiveness after the fact, whereas Bloom had asked for permission prior to competing as a skier.⁹ There are many cases of inconsistency and unfairness in critical NCAA decisions, and people like Bloom have suffered for it.

The point here is that it can be quite normal for a professional athlete to attend college (or high school, for that matter) and make money playing a sport, or receive outside income as a result of being involved in a sport, without impacting their education. No one can say that John Elway was not a viable student at Stanford while he was earning a significant amount of money as a minor league baseball player, and the same holds for the other examples presented. Meanwhile, no one seems to mind when the Olsen twins are making millions as child stars, or Natalie Portman or Jodie Foster continue to work as actresses while enrolled in college. Did it make them bad students? Did it take away from their education? The answer is an unequivocal “no.” The same can be true for many athletes—if adjustments are made.

Earning money for being an athlete doesn’t in itself make someone a worse student. Forcing student-athletes to make unreasonable commitments of time, while those around them manipulate the system of academic eligibility against their best interests, certainly can. It is time for us to end what is essentially a sham regarding amateur athletics in America. This model will enable that, while still keeping some aspects of school-based sports that we seem to value as a country.

The main argument for student-athlete amateurism in the United States is that these athletes should play sports as an avocation and not a vocation, with an educational opportunity as the payoff. Earning market value for playing an educationally based sport has long been thought of as a perversion of amateurism that would taint the sports themselves—and make them less marketable, since school-based sports are supposedly popular because of their amateur aspect and would suffer commercially without it. This is central to the NCAA’s argument in the O’Bannon case.¹⁰ If the NCAA were to win on these grounds, it would essentially mean that it could prohibit wages and other compensation for college athletes (including outside income from use of a player’s name, image, and likeness) precisely because allowing such compensation would make colleges sports themselves less marketable. It is easy to refute this. We heard the same arguments regarding the Olympic Games when an end was put to the requirement that competitors be “amateur” athletes, and it is nondebatable that the Olympic Games are more popular than ever. These types of restrictions also exist, of course, at levels below intercollegiate athletics, where athletes are also prohibited from participating in sports aligned with educational institutions if they receive outside compensation. LeBron James, the standout All-Star NBA forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers, once had to miss two games for receiving an extra benefit in high school.¹¹

It is my belief that athletes should be allowed to receive financial support in any way that can maximize both their educational and athletic access and success. As noted, there are many ways this is being done in Europe. If we want to continue to have restrictive amateurism rules in educationally based sports in America, then we can. But we can also have a parallel alternative system that would allow athletes to profit from their athletic ability and compete at the highest level during the time in life when they are most able to do so.

It is debatable in the twenty-first century whether lofty ideals of amateurism from the mid-twentieth century have ever been close to being achieved. Many of the same problems that existed during the first hundred years of intercollegiate athletics, such as recruiting improprieties, the changing definition of amateurism, and excess commercialism, are still happening today, but they are more frequent and much more publicized. Despite the stated mission of intercollegiate athletics as being about education first, it is challenging to justify the system in its current state as being an education-first model, as opposed to an athletic-development model. The inherent flaws of the NCAA, and why the system should be modified to a more education-centric model, are examined more closely in later chapters.

INTERSCHOLASTIC SPORTS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

During the same period in the twentieth century, public and private school systems began to copy their higher-education counterparts, installing extracurricular activities, specifically sports, outside the existing curriculum but still within the confines of the school. Previously, primary and secondary school students, like college students, had organized clubs to engage in all kinds of activities, including sports, outside school hours as a way to have a needed break from the academic rigor of studying and classes. School officials recognized that some of these extracurricular activities were difficult to control, and many experienced discipline problems. As a consequence, sports clubs were incorporated into the primary and secondary educational systems so that schools could have control over the activities, with one intent being to keep them from conflicting with the educational mission (Pot and van Hilvoorde 2013). Although colleges and universities wanted control of activities in order to prevent injuries, while also gaining the benefits of competition with other schools, having control was also a major reason to not let athletics flourish outside the primary and secondary education systems.

In contrast, school systems in Europe were primarily reserved for academics. Extracurricular activity would take place outside the school doors, allowing for greater integration and participation in sports by members of all socioeconomic classes and academic backgrounds via a community-based club system. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in various European countries it was the student body that established sports clubs outside the schools and independent of school officials, but that is where many of the similarities end. Unlike in the United States, European school officials felt no need to place such student clubs under their supervision, as the students and parents typically cooperated with school authorities and for the most part kept the activities separate and did not let them become a distraction from education. Another and more compelling reason for student clubs, including athletics clubs, not being under the supervision of school authorities is that throughout the bulk of the European education system separate high schools existed and still exist for students of different social and academic classes. This makes populations in most European schools rather homogeneous as compared to the American system, at least in public schools, which in the United States are typically more diverse. Due to this homogeneity, students and parents felt no need or obligation to further associate with the same people from their schools in extracurricular clubs or in interscholastic athletics, but certainly there was a desire to associate, through sports and other activities, with others in their central community whom children might not interact with during the school day (Stokvis 2009).

Like university sports, virtually all youth sports in the United States were integrated within the educational system and have remained, with few exceptions, embedded in this system ever since. Primary and secondary schools in the United States are similar to their university counterparts in that they often have both elite and mass sports facilities on campus and numerous teams that participate in interscholastic competition and tournaments locally, regionally, and even nationally. These interscholastic events are frequently characterized, through their strong emphasis on competition, as effective enhancements to education, and are often very selective in nature. As with colleges and universities, achievements in these interscholastic events are viewed as important for the status and brand identity of both students and schools, even though the effect of this connection is often disputed by empirical research (R. Mandell 1984; Frank 2004; Orszag and Orszag 2005; Orszag and Israel 2009).

Another main reason why competitive sports morphed into the club system rather than being based in schools in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Sweden, specifically, was a heavy resistance against sports within the educational system by academic officials for its un-pedagogical elements such as competition, selection of athletes, and a strong focus on winning. Many authorities considered competitive sports to be dangerous, unhealthy, or even immoral (van Hilvoorde, Vorstenbosch, and Devisch 2010; Pot and van Hilvoorde 2013). However, this does not mean that some form of school-based sports programming does not exist in Europe. As in the United States, having at least some form of physical education in schools in Europe was intended to compensate for sedentary behavior and promote a healthy lifestyle for students, apart from the pressure of competition sometimes found at certain levels in the sports club system (Stokvis 2009).

In the United States, interscholastic sports are organized in a way similar to colleges and universities in which the best athletes from schools compete against each other. These interscholastic school sports are mostly selective in nature and highly competitive (Park 2007). The competitive characteristic of interscholastic sports is considered important for the social functioning of American schools. For instance, being selected as part of a school team is deemed important for the status of athletes within the school and local community. Conversely, it can be socially and psychologically devastating when one does not make a team or is demoted to a lower level of competition, but this can also provide a teachable moment on how to deal with adversity and challenging situations (Miller 2009). The competitiveness of US educationally based school sports is further illustrated by the rituals and symbols that surround interscholastic matches. As in intercollegiate athletics, these rituals and traditions run deep. Things like intense rivalries, mascots, bonfires, and championship playoffs, while smaller in scale, are just as intense and popular. These rituals, traditions, and symbols at both the high school and intercollegiate level can serve to enhance competitiveness and the importance of beating the opponent, not just for the competitors, but also for the students and other stakeholders such as parents and alumni (Stokvis 2009).

While sports competitiveness is important in almost any culture, it is often amplified in the United States because sports within the education system form a separate social sphere in which competition and rivalry are more accepted (Pot and Van Hilvoorde 2013; Curry and Weiss 1989). The social network that interscholastic and intercollegiate sports can provide in the United States is present instead in the European club system, and is perhaps even farther-ranging. In Europe, the desire for competitiveness and socialization is mainly fulfilled in the sports club system, while what rudimentary forms of interscholastic competition as exist are characterized by a focus on physical wellness. Taks (2011) notes that community-based sports clubs are primarily voluntary, led by boards of directors and requiring cooperation among all of the stakeholders. Sports clubs in Europe were further solidified by the Sports for All movement, which began in 1966 and was designed to promote participation in sporting and fitness activities by children, teens, and adults. The Sports for All movement opened the doors for greater development of the sports club system as national, regional, and local governments started to provide direct and indirect support to the voluntary infrastructure and keep the physical activity and social aspects of the clubs going (Pot and van Hilvoorde 2013; Curry and Weiss 1989; Taks 2011). This European sports-for-all ideology is partly related to the nonselective nature of interscholastic school sports that initially existed in America, but which has mostly given way to an emphasis on competitive excellence rather than non-elite participation and wellness.

Several other factors differentiate the educational sports model in the United States from the European sports club system and what exists as far as school sports in Europe. One factor is the intensity of the competition itself. In the United States, high school sports involve weekly (or more frequent, in some sports) competition in which school teams play against other schools in regional, state, or even nationwide events. At most schools, these competitions are taken very seriously and the athletes practice numerous times a week, even outside the season. Conversely, interscholastic sports outside the sports club systems in Europe vary, but usually require very little time in comparison, and may range from one to five days per week at various times throughout the year. This comparatively low intensity can be explained by the dominance of club sports, but it is not uncommon for even a very competitive sports club to have a more relaxed competition and practice schedule in comparison to US educationally based sports (Pot and van Hilvoorde 2013).

This is likely the result of the dominance of club sports and the less competitive relationship between the educational and sports club systems found in Europe. As Pot and van Hilvoorde note, in their comparison of school sports in the Netherlands with those in the United States, “one of the main goals of interscholastic school sports in the Netherlands is to increase sports participation rates among children, excluding children by means of selection and competition is not a desired effect. In addition, competitiveness in Dutch interscholastic school sports is not stimulated, as performances in school sports have little or no influence on the status of either the school or the students involved. Therefore, rituals and symbols that provoke (and are provoked by) competitiveness are absent in most schools” (ibid., 1168).

Interscholastic sports in America, by comparison, seem to be clearly more important to the athletes, coaches, and local community. In local newspapers (city or town), school sports can take up pages. Local stations and regional networks report results of what has become a dominant weekend activity not just for local people attending games, but, through the media, for anyone (Miracle and Rees 1994; Stokvis 2009). Schools use this media exposure to distinguish themselves and use the achievements of their student-athletes to promote their institutions. From a marketing perspective, prestige can be gained from interscholastic school sports in the United States. In Europe, schools by and large do not use their interscholastic school sports results in their marketing strategies, because the prevailing wisdom is that people do not associate the school’s athletic performance with the educational value of the school. While interscholastic sports achievements typically do not gain any media coverage, that void is filled by the local sports club or clubs, all the more so due to the different levels of participation in terms of age, gender, and skill. Meanwhile, in the United States, school-based athletes have a higher status and are often viewed as more prominent than other students.¹² This higher status influences the connection that student-athletes feel to the school, since their status depends on their relationship to the school community (Fredricks and Eccles 2006; Hintsanen et al. 2010; Marsh and Kleitman 2002). The status of the sports club athlete may not be as pronounced as that of the school athlete in the United States because of the lack of affiliation with an institution, but successes are known and celebrated by members of the club and local residents.

One of the other and arguably most significant differences between US school-based sports participation and the European sports club system is the connection or lack thereof between academic results and athletic eligibility (Barber, Eccles, and Stone 2001; Broh 2002; Marsh and Kleitman 2002). In the United States, essentially, students are not eligible to participate in interscholastic and intercollegiate sports if they do not meet academic eligibility criteria, usually by maintaining a certain grade point average.¹³ As noted previously with regard to intercollegiate athletics, the tie-in with academic eligibility is both a blessing and a curse. It creates numerous issues that call into question the entire concept or model of educationally based sports. The idea behind these eligibility criteria in the United States is maintaining a balance, even with trade-offs, between academic work and school athletics. Although negative effects are indeed observed by some—including myself, on many points—it can be argued that these eligibility criteria can intensify the interest of athletes in their own academic achievement, since they will be unable to play if they neglect their academic priorities (Coleman 1961; Marsh and Kleitman 2002; Stokvis 2009). On the other hand, eligibility requirements have led to many academic scandals in interscholastic and intercollegiate athletics over the years, when decisions were made to keep top athletes eligible to compete, no matter what damage was done to the value of educational primacy. The constant tension between academics and athletics in sports development in the United States has been an increasing concern, recently illustrated by a massive academic scandal at one of the finest public universities in the United States, the University of North Carolina. This particular scandal involved a curriculum being developed for athletes that involved no-show classes and classes that required very little work, just to ensure athletic eligibility.¹⁴

In Europe, participating in a local sports club or even in school sports is open to all students who desire to compete, regardless of their grades. While education is stressed (and study time is even provided for athletes at many local sports clubs in Europe), absolute academic criteria for practice and competition in sports clubs are rarely, if ever, in place or, if in place, enforced. In my time researching in Europe, I found no sports club in Germany or the Netherlands that enforced an academic policy or eligibility standard. However, clubs allowed for study time, many even offered opportunities to study at the club, and students were able to miss practice and/or games to study or attend class. It is primarily left up to the parents to decide if any penalty should be applied for not meeting academic expectations. Given the absence of eligibility criteria and the disconnection of sports and school in Europe, it would be difficult to determine by comparison whether the American interscholastic sports system prepares participants better than the European club sports system does. One could draw inferences from academic performance levels, US-based university college board exam scores of American and European prospective college students, and other criteria, but it is difficult to say one system is better educationally that the other because of a lack of hard data. However, I hypothesize there is a potential correlation between academic performance and the presence or absence of highly competitive sports and elite development within the two systems that needs to be examined via future research.

The differences between the United States and Europe in the competitiveness, intensity, and prestige of interscholastic sports provide an interesting basis for discussion and empirical inquiry as to whether the current US model of educationally based sports development is the best choice going forward. Does the use of eligibility criteria enhance the educational and athletic experience of the young American athlete? Is it better at doing so, when compared to the experience of the young European athlete? While some elements of the American model of interscholastic sports, in its organizational structure and social impact, may work to improve academic performance and self-esteem, it can be argued that the European sports club system promotes many of the same intrinsic values.