front cover of 20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student-Athletes
20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student-Athletes
Rick Burton
Ohio University Press, 2021
The premier NCAA student-athlete handbook, now in a second, updated edition designed for today’s competitive market and with a new chapter on name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. Few student-athletes dreaming of athletic stardom ever make it to the pros. Yet, the discipline and skills they’ve developed while balancing a sport and academics make them ideally suited for satisfying careers elsewhere. The book’s authors draw on personal experience, interviews, expert opinion, and industry data to provide a game plan for student-athletes to help them transition from high school to college, navigate evolving rules about NIL rights, and find success in life after college. Modeled after Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this expanded and updated guide provides a much-needed strategy for student-athletes as they prepare for postcollege careers, while serving as a valuable resource for their parents, coaches, and sports administrators across the country.
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front cover of 20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student-Athletes Who Won’t Go Pro
20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student-Athletes Who Won’t Go Pro
Rick Burton
Ohio University Press, 2017

The vast majority of student-athletes dreaming of athletic stardom won’t make it to the pros. Yet, the discipline and skills they’ve developed while balancing a sport and academics make them ideally suited for satisfying careers elsewhere.

In 20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student-Athletes Who Won’t Go Pro, the authors draw on personal experience, interviews, expert opinion, and industry data to provide a game plan for student-athletes through key transitions at each stage of their careers, from high school through college and beyond.

Modeled on Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this book provides a much-needed strategy for achieving career success. Readable and concise, it will be a valuable tool for students, parents, and sports administrators.

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front cover of Alternative Models of Sports Development in America
Alternative Models of Sports Development in America
Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health
B. David Ridpath
Ohio University Press, 2017

In the United States, the entanglement of sports and education has persisted for over a century. Multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums, college coaches whose salaries are many times those of their institutions’ presidents, psychological and educational tolls on student-athletes, and high-profile academic scandals are just symptoms of a system that has come under increasing fire. Institutions large and small face persistent quandaries: which do they value more, academic integrity or athletic success? Which takes precedence: prioritizing elite teams and athletes, or making it possible for all students to participate in sports? How do we create opportunities for academic—not just athletic—development for players?

In Alternative Models of Sports Development in America, B. David Ridpath—a leading sports development researcher who has studied both the US system and the European club model—offers clear steps toward creating a new status quo. He lays out four possible alternative models that draw various elements from academic, athletic, and European approaches. His proposals will help increase access of all young people to the benefits of sports and exercise, allow athletes to also thrive as students, and improve competitiveness. The result is a book that will resonate with sports development professionals, academic administrators, and parents.

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front cover of Beyond the Black Power Salute
Beyond the Black Power Salute
Athlete Activism in an Era of Change
Gregory J. Kaliss
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown’s endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete’s effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. As Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, he also explores the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.
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front cover of Changing the Playbook
Changing the Playbook
How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports
Howard Chudacoff
University of Illinois Press, 2015
"In Changing the Playbook, Howard P. Chudacoff delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues--race and gender, profit and power--that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent today:
  • the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players;
  • the thorny racial integration of university sports programs;
  • the boom in television money;
  • the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues;
  • Title IX's transformation of women's athletics;
  • the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s;
  • the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments.

A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, Changing the Playbook reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow."

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front cover of College Knowledge for the Student Athlete
College Knowledge for the Student Athlete
David Schoem and Shelly Kovacs
University of Michigan Press, 2011

This book was written to support the academic success of student athletes—whether at a large or small university or college, whether team or individual sport, whether women or men, whether on scholarship or not.

While all college students must learn to negotiate the complex transition from high school to college, student athletes face unique challenges, including the complicated set of regulations set out by the NCAA and individual conferences that determine eligibility. The current environment in college athletics makes it even more critical that student athletes understand what they need to do academically and how to avoid potential situations that could jeopardize their athletic careers.

College Knowledge for the Student Athlete is a road map and tour guide for a successful career as a student athlete. Tips are based on research and the authors’ experience, as well as the wisdom and advice of hundreds of former student athletes.

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front cover of The Embodied Playbook
The Embodied Playbook
Writing Practices of Student-Athletes
J. Michael Rifenburg
Utah State University Press, 2018

The Embodied Playbook discovers a new approach to understanding student literacy in a surprising place: the university athletics department. Through analysis of a yearlong case study of the men’s basketball team at the University of North Georgia, J. Michael Rifenburg shows that a deeper and more refined understanding of how humans learn through physical action can help writing instructors reach a greater range of students.

Drawing from research on embodiment theory, the nature and function of background knowledge, jazz improvisation, and other unexpected domains, The Embodied Playbook examines a valuable but unexplored form of literacy: the form used by student-athletes when learning and using scripted plays. All students’ extracurricular prior knowledge is vital for the work they undertake in the classroom, and student-athletes understand the strengths and constraints of written text much as they understand the text of game plays: through embodying text and performing it in a competitive space. The book focuses on three questions: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? How can teachers of composition and rhetoric better connect with student-athletes?

The Embodied Playbook reveals the literacy of the body as a rich and untapped resource for writing instruction. Given the numbers of students who are involved in athletics, whether intramural, community-related, or extracurricular, Rifenburg’s conclusions hold important implications not only for how we define literacy but also for how writing programs can serve all of their students most effectively.

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front cover of The Myth of the Amateur
The Myth of the Amateur
A History of College Athletic Scholarships
By Ronald A. Smith
University of Texas Press, 2021

In this in-depth look at the heated debates over paying college athletes, Ronald A. Smith starts at the beginning: the first intercollegiate athletics competition—a crew regatta between Harvard and Yale—in 1852, when both teams received an all-expenses-paid vacation from a railroad magnate. This striking opening sets Smith on the path of a story filled with paradoxes and hypocrisies that plays out on the field, in meeting rooms, and in courtrooms—and that ultimately reveals that any insistence on amateurism is invalid, because these athletes have always been paid, one way or another.

From that first contest to athletes’ attempts to unionize and California’s 2019 Fair Pay to Play Act, Smith shows that, throughout the decades, undercover payments, hiring professional coaches, and breaking the NCAA’s rules on athletic scholarships have always been part of the game. He explores how the regulation of male and female student-athletes has shifted; how class, race, and gender played a role in these transitions; and how the case for amateurism evolved from a moral argument to one concerned with financially and legally protecting college sports and the NCAA. Timely and thought-provoking, The Myth of the Amateur is essential reading for college sports fans and scholars.

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front cover of Special Admission
Special Admission
How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes
Kirsten Hextrum
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Honorable Mention - 2022 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award​

Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts the historic and contemporary relationships between colleges, athletics, and white middle-class communities that ensure white suburban youth are advantaged in special athletic admissions. Suburban youth start ahead in college admissions because athletic merit—the competencies desired by university recruiters—requires access to vast familial, communal, and economic resources, all of which are concentrated in their neighborhoods. Their advantages increase as youth, parents, and coaches strategically invest in and engineer novel opportunities to maintain their race and class status. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their racial and economic advantages through admission to elite universities.
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front cover of Whither College Sports
Whither College Sports
Amateurism, Athlete Safety, and Academic Integrity
Andrew Zimbalist
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Intercollegiate athletics is under assault from all sides. Its economic model is yielding increasing and unsustainable deficits and widening inequality. Coaches and athletic directors are the highest paid employees at FBS universities (NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision) by factors of five to ten, or more. Athletes are being cheated on their promised education, do not receive adequate medical care, and are not allowed to receive cash income. Substantial change, either toward reasserting the intended primacy of education for intercollegiate athletes or a further surrender to commercialism, is coming. This book lays out the starkly different paths that college sports reform can follow and what the ramifications will be on the athletes and on the institutions in which they are enrolled.
 
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