An Interesting Story

I’m going to stay away from basketball for today and talk about the athletic program as a whole for today. As most of you know in my other life I drive a UTS bus here at UVA and I wanted to share a story of a conversation I overheard between two student athletes while I was driving my route on Sunday afternoon. The conversation was between someone who I believed to be a 4^th year and a new first year. The 4^th year was explaining to the first year about how his performance this season was slipping a bit as he was trying to get good grades this semester to get into grad school. The conversation then turned to something that I found very interesting. The 4^th year athlete began counseling the 1^st year that he needed to take his studies very seriously because, and this is a quote I really thought was interesting, “[Your sport] is what got you here, but your degree is what’s gonna get you out.” He then went on to explain that while athletics may be great, the likelihood of this player moving on to play professionally is slim and that he should use the opportunity he was given in order to get a degree from this prestigious university that will be an enormous advantage to him later in life. This was fantastic for me to hear because as much as you hear sports commentators talk about how receiving an education is payment enough for playing, until you hear it come out of an athlete’s mouth it’s hard to believe.

                This got me thinking about how the school handles the academics of its student athletes and while I was doing so I stumbled on a bit of a contradiction. Virginia has the highest admissions standard for athletes of any school in the ACC and one of the highest in the country. It also requires that athletes complete at least 54 credit hours by the end of their second year in order to remain eligible, a full 6 hours higher than the ACC mandated minimum. What this says to me is that Virginia emphasizes the student aspect more than the athlete in its student athletes, which is perfectly fine with me. However Virginia also demands results on the athletic field. As you can see by all the heat placed on Coach Leitao for this losing basketball season the athletics here are under tremendous pressure to do well. Now I’m just a lowly bus driver but occasionally I find it difficult to balance the 20 or so hours a week I drive with all my schoolwork. Think about having to go to practice for 35-50 hours a week and have games and go on the road, and still be expected to complete 13.5 credits per semester. That situation leads me to believe that UVA, since it is so committed to academics, would have one of the best academic support systems for its athletes of any school in the country, but this is not the case. In an interview with Adam Gottschalk of Sports radio 1400 WKAV, an unnamed UVA football graduate said that the UVA academic support system was a joke and that it felt like he was on his own to complete his degree. This statement to me is ludicrous and is something that absolutely needs to change. As the kid on the bus said we are presenting these kids with the opportunity of a lifetime, and to rob them of that because we’re demanding a winning team is unfair. The athletic department needs to either vastly reform the academic affairs branch or reduce the standards once the student athletes enter the school, otherwise you will see more and more cases like Jameel Sewell of students who just could not keep up, which to me is completely unfair. Athletics bring in millions of dollars and attention to the university each year. The least the school can do is give those athletes a fair shake.