Four Years Under The Microscope
The double standards as a student-athlete in college
Story: Evan Elliott
Photos: Morgan Stilp & Kjell Redal
As James Molyneux-Elliot fired his fists into his dresser, his long road with soccer came to a cross-section. But it wasn’t two roads merging — it was a rock and a hard place.
He never thought he’d ever have to question his love for the game. It was what he and his lads did for fun, passing the time and expending energy on the grassy expanses of Sammamish.
As time went on, he noticed soccer becoming less fun and more regimented. He grew frustrated, feeling like soccer was no longer adding value to his life. This feeling festered until it culminated in his retirement from the sport in the spring of 2014 after one season playing for Western.
Despite appearing in every match in his freshman season, he felt devoid of the gratification soccer once gave him. He couldn’t find a rhythm. Following practices, he would often come home furious or leaving games disappointed and “punch the living crap” out of the his dresser.
“I began to boil over,” Molyneux-Elliot says.
He no longer recognized himself when he looked in the mirror. Soccer was dragging him down. He felt he couldn’t meet the goals he’d set for himself on or off the field. To top it off, he says the coaching staff offered him feeble support, if any, in a formative time in his life. When coaches told him his social life didn’t matter, Molyneux-Elliot says he felt they were the last people he could come to as a resource. It was time to get pragmatic.
“Shortly after, I informed [my coach] I would no longer be playing because I was so anxious and depressed,” Molyneux-Elliot says.
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Keenan Curran was having a solid day on the gridiron in San Luis Obispo, California as his Montana Grizzlies took on the Cal Poly Mustangs. Then it came down to one play, in the endzone, with the game on the line. Curran, a wide receiver, couldn’t haul in a go-ahead touchdown and the Grizzlies lost a heartbreaker, 42–41.
Local reporters made Curran feel their wrath, ready to move on from the redshirt sophomore just three games into his career donning Montana’s maroon and silver.
“You would’ve thought I dropped 10 passes that game,” Curran says. “The critical things people say about athletes actually hurts sometimes.”
Curran used the external doubt to fuel his fire, rattling off nine touchdowns in the following five games and receiving praise for his efforts. It’s a double standard not lost on Curran. He must play well or else.
“The fans see us as property so to speak,” Curran says. “In reality, we’re all young adults still figuring things out and to shame a kid for making a mistake is horrible.”
Property. That’s an issue the National Collegiate Athletic Association has been battling over the span of six decades regarding its student-athletes.
Student-athletes. That’s a term that’s been buying the NCAA wins in the battle over how they treat, what some call, their property.
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Ernest Nemeth likely isn’t a familiar name to even the most die-hard college football fan.
In 1953, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Nemeth, of the University of Denver’s football team, was an employee of the school and warranted worker’s compensation from the school.
With this decision, the NCAA had to do something. After all, its entire business model was now under siege.
Thus came the birth of the term student-athlete. In essence, the NCAA sought to establish its athletes as students in order to distance them from ever being categorized as employees.
Why? Because as employees, they would want to be compensated. The NCAA didn’t, and doesn’t, want that. Why would they? Following the first year of college football’s playoff, payouts for schools participating in bowl games rose by nearly $200 million to an estimated $505.9 million total distributed among schools and conferences — but not to the student-athletes who performed.
In a 2006 paper from Washington Law Review, Robert and Amy McCormick concluded NCAA student-athletes often meet requirements of an employee under the Common Law Standard.
In the paper the two stated that, “[Student-athletes] perform services for the benefit of their universities under an agreement setting forth their responsibilities and compensation, are economically dependent upon their universities, and are subject virtually every day of the year to pervasive control by the athletic department and coaches.”
In the present, the issue of player compensation is at the forefront of criticisms of the NCAA and the multi-billion dollar business it runs.
The issue has brought about those like Kain Colter and fellow Northwestern University football players, who attempted to unionize in 2014. A regional director for the National Labor Review Board in Chicago approved the request, which was swiftly overturned the following year after appeals from the university.
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As a redshirt junior goalie at the University of Washington, Sarah Shimer has seen the flaws in the world of student-athletes firsthand.
“Time commitment is huge,” Shimer says. “I didn’t fully grasp the extent to which I belong to the coaches until I got to college.”
The NCAA allots 20 hours a week, in season, for training to occur on the field. The assumption is student-athletes should be spending the rest of their time furthering academic pursuits. And they do.
Requirements for Shimer and her team include academic tutoring, study sessions, multiple meetings a week, film study, community service, yoga sessions and individual meetings with coaches, dieticians and athletic trainers.
All seems according to plan though, as far as the NCAA is concerned. Shimer says her team has won UW’s large team GPA academic leader for several quarters in a row.
“My coaches definitely put an emphasis on academic achievement, but with the amount of time they ask us to commit to other things outside school, I don’t think they treat us like students first,” Shimer says. “If it were up to me, I’d have more time devoted to my academics, because I know at the end of the day my career is going to be in something outside of soccer.”
But it’s not up to her.
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“The reason student comes first in the phrase student-athlete is because obviously you have to pass your classes in order to play, but you have to do just that — pass your classes,” Curran says. “It is not required for you to excel.”
Molyneux-Elliot says the student part comes first, but described the academic standards expected of him and other student athletes as “pathetically low.” To his coaches, being eligible to play was always more important than his academic performance, he says. Any academic support came in a short-term capacity — they would rather him pass his classes than plan for a prosperous academic future.
“[The] coaching staff does not get paid for having their players graduate on time, and I’m certain that if I did not quit when I did I would not have graduated in four years like I am now,” Molyneux-Elliot says.
Time commitments conflicting with academics only become exacerbated if, or when, professors don’t hold athletics in high regard.
“I’ve had a [professor] falsely accuse me and a group of athletes for cheating in his class once, simply because he hates athletes,” Shimer says.
Curran sees professors as accommodating on a campus, and within a town, that lives and breathes Grizzly football. In Curran’s experience though, as a man of color, being a student-athlete has been a matter of sticking out like a sore thumb living among white people in Missoula, Montana.
“When I walk around campus with my fellow colored teammates, it is just expected that we are athletes. We are all in shape, taller gentlemen and colored in a very diversity-challenged community,” Curran says. “Professors also assume that I am an athlete, and they don’t really hold it against me. It is just interesting.”
Shimer is picking up what Curran is putting down. She too, has a desire to be seen for more than her athletic skill set.
“For me, I am a lot more than an athlete. Athletics are a big part of what has molded me into who I am, but my identity doesn’t lie in it because I see the bigger picture that sports can’t last forever,” Shimer says. “Even the greatest athletes of all time have to hang it up eventually.”
All things considered, Curran still finds the sometimes overwhelming experiences as a student-athlete to be a privilege.
“Being a student-athlete is challenging, but just as rewarding as it can be stressful,” Curran says. “The time commitments are large, and it consumes a lot of energy both in and out of season but I think the stresses that are put upon us comes back to help us out in both game time and real life situations.”
Molyneux-Elliot’s time to hang it up came before Shimer and Curran. His decision was made partly in order to finish school in four years but, more importantly, to focus on who he was away from the pitch.
“It was the best decision I have made up to this point,“ he says. “I finally spent some time on me and my mental health, and came to realize that soccer had become my main source of self-worth. I worked to combat that mindset.”
In the time since, Molyneux-Elliot has ran for Associated Students President at Western, brewed his own beer with the help of his friends and is set to go to law school after graduation.
Soccer may have caused an upheaval in his life and threatened his mental psyche, but Molyneux-Elliot has come out the other side battle tested. It could’ve had something to do with the question all student-athletes should ask themselves before selecting a school for the next four years.
“At the end of the day I asked myself one very crucial question, would you be okay living there, going to school there, if you weren’t playing sports?” Molyneux-Elliot says. “Well I am glad I considered that now given my retirement.”