A student who plays football for the college had gotten some from an opposing player at his last game. The student was tempted to return fire, but his teammates stopped him.
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A student who plays football for the college had gotten some from an opposing player at his last game. The student was tempted to return fire, but his teammates stopped him.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to be talking trash?” John Armstrong, the professor, asked incredulously. “We’re trying to learn to be virtuous here.”
Several students in the class pushed back. Trash talk is part of the game, they said. It’s a way to manipulate your opponent to gain an advantage. Armstrong countered: It can just as easily be a way for your opponent to manipulate you.
In most college classrooms, exchanges like this would be considered off topic. In “Excellence in Sport and Life,” they are very much the topic. The course is a requirement in Southern Virginia’s sport-performance major, new to the college and the first of its kind nationwide.
It’s not sports management, sports communication, or exercise science. It’s simply sports. Students must participate in a competitive sport to pursue the major. The point is to deepen their understanding of their athletic pursuit and to improve their performance on the field, court, or track.
“Humans love sports,” said Armstrong, a philosophy professor. “That is such a broad phenomenon, I don’t know why we haven’t developed majors around it before.”
That is the sentiment of a group of scholars from different colleges around the country who have banded together to bring sports majors to campuses. Calling themselves the Sports Major Collective, they believe that athletes should get credit for their practices and competitions, more like music or theater majors. They meet regularly on Zoom and have been organizing symposiums aimed at sharing the idea and bringing more colleagues into their fold. In addition to SVU, there are efforts to create a major, minor, or certificate at Boise State and Lindsey Wilson Universities, and American University is considering making such a proposal.
Members of this group are evangelists for the idea that sports are worthy of study in and of themselves. The movement is gaining traction, but it will face headwinds. Allowing athletes to major in sports might be a tough sell on a curricular committee made up of academics skeptical of athletics’ commercial influence, which has grown in recent years. Athletes are now permitted to make money off their sport, and some are even paid directly by their college. Could establishing a major in sports be an academically rigorous way to reconcile the two halves of the student-athlete — or a clever way for colleges to drop the pretext of class altogether?
Years earlier, Weight had experienced her most profound educational experience as a college athlete at the University of Utah. She competed on the track team and took a sports-psychology course specifically for athletes. The class, she said, made “the science come to life.” It set her on the path to becoming a sport-administration professor at UNC. Though she knew she was learning so much from track, Weight was getting only a small amount of academic credit for the time she spent there. Meanwhile, her sister, a singer, had studied music as an undergraduate and for a masters degree. She got academic credit for long hours she spent with a vocal coach and for singing with an ensemble. Her sister’s coursework was geared toward making her a better musician, and no one saw that as a problem.
Why did the curriculum encourage the study of music but not athletics? The question was on Weight’s mind when she was elected to serve on a faculty committee at UNC for which the ongoing scandal was a regular agenda item. At one meeting, she asked the group to tell her the difference between an athlete and a musician. A professor told her: “I can have an intelligent conversation with one, and not with the other.”
Weight was stunned to find the dumb-jocks stereotype was alive and well among her colleagues. To counter it, she switched her research focus from business and began trying to understand and demonstrate the educational value of participating on a competitive athletic team. She spent the next 10 years studying the health outcomes, incomes, and well-being of former college athletes and found they often fare better than their nonathlete peers.
Weight’s work received some early support, particularly from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group that advocates for sports reform. But she also faced obstacles. At UNC back then, a culture pervaded, she said, in which athlete-friendly faculty members were seen as part of the problem. She described a fear that “you could be the next faculty member in the headlines.” Programs she proposed never got off the ground.
A lot had changed when, years later, David Hollander, a clinical professor at New York University’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, reached out. Hollander had built a name for himself as a basketball crusader. His popular course, called “How Basketball Can Save the World,” has been prominently covered by national media and became a book. The book and course have “become somewhat of an international movement,” according to Hollander’s NYU bio. He has been credited with getting the Vatican to recognize a patron saint of basketball and worked with the Philippine government to pass a United Nations resolution to create World Basketball Day.
The work got the attention of John Jowers, vice president for communications at Nike, who read Hollander’s book and invited him to give a talk at the company’s basketball festival at Lincoln Center in 2023. Jowers and Hollander brainstormed with others about how to bring the professor’s ideas about the value of basketball to fruition. The idea of a sports major — which Hollander said he’s long believed in — emerged. Now he has become an evangelist for the idea.
“The leap that we’re trying to get people to understand is not that sports is a conduit to learning math or science or that sports is a conduit to learning sociology or leadership,” Hollander said. “Sports is a discipline unto itself, unique and rich, no different than music, art, dance, and dare I say math, literature.”
Sports, to Hollander, is a liberal art worthy of more than one-credit leadership-training programs for athletes. “The only thing that’s different between athletics and these other disciplines is that it’s never been raised to the level of serious academia,” he said. “That’s been a historic mistake.”
Hollander had Nike’s support, but he needed scholarly reinforcement, so he reached out to Weight. Both are adamant that this idea is not about fixing college sports, but establishing sports as a legitimate object of serious study.
The movement is gaining traction. After a January New York Times feature, professors at several colleges reached out to Hollander saying they wanted to propose programs on their campuses. The group meets regularly on Zoom. Thanks to Jowers, Nike hosted the first symposium for interested athletes and scholars in June at the company’s New York headquarters. A second event took place at American in October, and a third will be held at Boise State in March.
Nike’s involvement has raised some eyebrows, according to the Times piece. Hollander said Nike helped draw attention to the effort and provide a venue for the first gathering, but the company is not involved in curriculum design and is not paying for anything beyond the first event.
“We could probably do that here,” Armstrong said, after a colleague showed him the Times article at a women’s basketball game. He proposed the major in the spring. It was approved and became an official offering this fall.
Why SVU? About two-thirds of its 900 students are athletes. Though the college is not owned or funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, most students and faculty are members. Armstrong saw a connection between the college’s faith and the sports major. “The Latter-day Saint tradition emphasizes the importance of the body,” Armstrong said, and the idea that “both in this life and in the future, our highest joys are to be found in a body rather than separated from one.”
Armstrong began class one day in September by asking his students to share how their latest competitions fared. “We had a good game,” said a women’s soccer player, whose team had just won 10-0. Everyone clapped.
Next week’s athletics schedule was on the board. Armstrong encouraged everyone to attend each other’s games.
The lecture toggled between philosophical discussions about sports to conversations about students’ experiences on their teams. Students were expected to journal each week about their athletic goals and a set of virtues Armstrong was trying to teach them to embody.
Many of the students want to pursue a career in athletics, though not all. Most said they plan to pursue the major. Allyson Arguello said it was the major that had brought her there. She’d been considering transferring from a community college outside Chicago to SVU, a campus where she could play beach volleyball, but decided against the move because she had a better academic opportunity closer to home. But when she learned about the major, she changed her mind.
Arguello is interested in physical therapy and hopes the major will help her pursue a career in that field. “I think it gives you a deeper knowledge of what athletes go through inside and outside the sport,” she said.
Like many small liberal-arts colleges, SVU has used athletics to recruit students, said Bryce Pendleton, vice president for brand and technology. Josh Monsen, the athletic director, said he and his coaches now talk about the major on the recruiting trail. As of Wednesday, 29 students had declared the major, Armstrong said. Monsen predicted it could soon be one of the university’s most popular.
SVU is currently the only campus with a sports major, but they are not the first to try. In 2021, Lou Matz, a philosophy professor at the University of the Pacific, submitted a proposal for one there. His upper administration nixed it because they did not believe it would attract new students, Matz said.
But Matz is part of the movement to bring the major to other campuses. Last week, he and several dozen other scholars, athletics administrators, coaches, students, and commissioners attended the second sports-major symposium at American University, where there were talks and panels on what the major is, what it is not, and how to create one.
Jonathan R. Alger, president of American and member of the Knight Commission, loved the idea. At his suggestion, American faculty members met the day after the symposium to discuss the major and consider whether to propose it.
Sports’ role in civic life appealed to Alger, he said.
“That’s our history and mission, that public-service mission,” he said.
Mark Woychick, a clinical assistant professor in the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State, was there to describe his plan for his campus. He will propose a certificate program, and then, if there is enough interest, build a minor or major. Woychick’s college is focused on experimenting with different ways to deliver higher education to students. This idea seemed to fit well with that mission, he said. A proposal for the certificate is due this month; if it is approved, it will be offered next fall.
Eric Carter, assistant vice president for student success and academic growth at Lindsey Wilson University, also spoke at the symposium. He first warmed to the sports major while working with the basketball team at Georgetown College earlier in his career.
“I realized what harm we were doing to our student-athletes by separating and siloing their identities,” he told attendees at the event.
Now at Lindsey Wilson, a small college in Kentucky that Carter says is about three-quarters athletes, he has proposed a sports-performance major. It would be only for athletes, and 12 credits in the major would be awarded for sports participation. Though Carter expects many in the faculty to vote for the major in November, he said some are skeptical.
Critics of the sports major do not all object to the best version of the idea. But they worry about how it would work in practice given the incentives built into college athletics today. Julie Sommer, executive director of the Drake Group Education Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for reform in college athletics, said the major could create a new way for coaches to put pressure on athletes.
“At the core of that really is giving athletic departments and coaches even more control over athletes,” Sommer said.
She worried coaches could compel athletes into the major, seeing it as a show of dedication to their sport. She wondered whether coaches or members of athletic departments would give grades for athletic participation and how they would be trained to do so.
Others worried colleges could use the major to keep athletes who are struggling academically eligible to play.
“The suggested sports-performing major seems an excuse to list current professional or semi-professional college athletes as university students,” Murray Sperber, an emeritus professor of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington and the author of Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, wrote in an email. “It seems a sad fiction.”
He noted that there are already programs in sports management and coaching for students who want to pursue careers in sports, but likely will not become professional athletes.
Charles T. Clotfelter, an emeritus professor of public policy at Duke University who has studied college sports, noted that sports isn’t the only extracurricular activity that doesn’t come with academic credit. Colleges should emphasize the whole person, he said, but not everything is academic.
Weight, the UNC professor, said her own research counters the eligibility concern. While there are horror stories about athletes falling through the cracks, athletes are often more driven in their careers post-college, she said.
As for the coaches, Weight agreed that they need to be trained in how to evaluate students for the participation component — which would only be a small part of the degree’s overall requirements.
After the event at American, Weight felt bittersweet. Her university may not have been embraced the sports major, but the enthusiasm in the room suggested other campuses would. In that way, it was a triumph.
