College Athletes Lose Everything

Source: http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/

When you look at value of athletes and how it would change after an injury is suffered you never really think about the value of a college athlete because they are not “paid” a salary.  Rather, these athletes earn athletic scholarships to play a sport at the college.  When college athletes get injured it is a huge deal because these athletes are relying on scholarships to get a secondary education, so if they lose these scholarships they will lose lots of opportunities in the job world because they may not end up going to college.  In some cases these players are so good they can make it to the next level, the pros, where they can make millions of dollars.  In the article “A Fight to Keep College Athletes From the Pain of Injury Costs” written by New York Times writer Ben Strauss it talks about these devastating injuries that college athletes suffer which end their careers indefinitely.  The article gives many examples of how college athlete’s values get affected after an injury, and ultimately they found that it hurt the athletes value greatly.  I agree with this stance because when these players suffer bad injuries they come back worse than before and they lose their scholarships if they have a career ending injury.  

In college sports the pay is a little different from the pros.  In the pros athletes receive real paper money, were in college sports athletes receive payment in the form of a scholarship.  This can be a full ride, 75% scholarship, or even 10% scholarship and so on, but that is the currency in college sports.  When looking at the value of an athlete after an injury you need to consider not only what their future in the sport can entail, but also if they get to keep their scholarship they had before the injury or if they get it cut down to a lower percentage or potential end up losing it all.  

In the article, it states that “Kyle Hardrick lost his basketball scholarship at Oklahoma after he tore his meniscus.”  In this case, Hardrick lost all of his scholarship because of a career ending injury.  He started with a very high value and now he basically has no value in the sport what so ever, he no longer has a scholarship or a potential in the game of basketball at the next level.

The article also stated that “Jason Whitehead nearly lost his football scholarship at Ohio University after he injured his neck.”  In this case Whitehead suffered the injury but fortunately was able to come back to playing the game and still having his scholarship.  Now, this does not mean that he has the same value as he had before.  His value decreased because through the rest of his playing career his play on the field suffered greatly due to this injury.

Overall, when a college athlete suffers a horrible injury they tend to lose great value to the team and the sport.  In many cases these players who get injured end up losing their scholarships and are out of the game indefinitely.