Athletics and Academics: The Academic Battle of the Sexes

Contributing Writer
 

   During the 2006-07 school year, 41 University of Arkansas-Monticello student-athletes were selected on the Academic Honor Roll, yet only 13 male student-athletes were selected.

   At UAM over 70 percent of the student-athletes are males, but the academic honors tend to favor women’s sports.

   A trend in Division II college athletics shows female athletes graduate more frequently than male athletes as shown in a study ran by the NCAA in 2006.

  The study, using athletes who entered college in 1999, showed female athletes graduated at a rate 16 percent higher than their male counterparts. In all sports on the UAM campus with both male and female counterparts (baseball, softball and basketball, specifically) female athletes graduate at a rate as much as 19 percent higher.

   Athletic Director Alvy Early said the situation might have to do with male athletes coming to the university with dreams of playing professional sports.

   “For us at the Division II level or for any program at any school at the division II level, I think academics should be incorporated into the program,” said Early, also the head softball coach. “We don’t have a lot of people going on to the NFL or NBA or Major League Baseball at this level and getting a college degree should be foremost on their mind “

   The softball team’s grade point average ranks the highest on campus with a 3.48 and he said the team’s graduation rate is well over 90 percent. He said when asked by a parent of a recruit how many of his players graduates, he tells them all that want to.

   Junior softball player Meredith Heckel agrees with his assessment on why female student-athletes seem to succeed more academically.

   “We don’t have another level,” she said. “We all want to be able to establish a career and a life and a family. If you work hard for how many years you’re in school, then you have the rest of your life to take it easy and go on your own path, where as if you kind of play around hoping for a goal that is unattainable then you miss out of everything and work your entire life to get back where you were.”

   Very few student Division II athletes become professional athletes after their college eligibility runs out. Head football coach Gwaine Mathews said he could only think of two former UAM players playing professional football last season in either the NFL or the Canadian Football League.

   Head basketball coach Mike Newell, who has coached both Division I and Division II basketball, said only a handful of the athletes he coached made it to the next level. Only one of his players at UAM, Billy McDaniel, made it to the professional ranks, playing overseas in Japan.

   “Billy could have stayed here and finished up during his fifth year, but $150,000 a year is hard to turn down,” Newell said. “I will be shocked if he doesn’t come back in get his degree. He may not do it at UAM but he’s within a year from doing it.”

   Newell said he takes pride when one of his players graduates and has seen around 17 of his former UAM players achieve it.

   When comparing male and female student-athletes, he takes a different approach.

   Newell said, “I think there is a big difference in what you call your Olympic sports, like women’s softball and swimming. You can’t compare those sports with football and basketball in my opinion. There’s not near the emphases put on it.

   “Society, they won’t put the women’s softball or women’s volleyball team if they win a big game on the front page of the sports page. It’s going to be somewhere on the fifth or sixth page. That doesn’t take anything away because it just as important to those kids and those coaches. What I’m saying is society dictates that.

   “In men’s basketball and men’s football the socio-economic make up of where those people come from is a lot different from where they come from in men’s swimming and men’s golf. Those are county club sports. They come from two-parent families; they come from money so it makes a big difference.”

   Although they both stress academics to their players, Early takes a more hands off approach and Newell is apt to give more chances with his players.

   Mathews on the other hand takes an almost drill sergeant approach when it comes to the academic well being of his players.

   “If they don’t do a good job for me in that classroom, they won’t be around,” Mathews said. “That’s just the way it goes. With me you can almost mess up and do something wrong with campus security or miss practice or something like that. But let me tell you if you do something wrong in that classroom, if you have a bad semester, lie about your class attendance, or if I hear a teacher say your disrupting her class, that’s the fastest way to be dismissed from this football team. I have zero tolerance for that.”

   Mathews said he kicked three people off the team the past season for academic reasons and kicked off a lot more in the past since he took over the reigns as head coach in 2005.

   One of the things Mathews does not tolerate is players missing classes. He gives his players three unexcused misses on Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes and two misses for Tuesday and Thursday classes. Also on any disputes between player and teacher, he said he always sides with the teacher sometimes handing out punishment without even talking with them.

   With this style, he landed three players on the 2006 GSC Football All-Academic team and six on the academic honor roll.

  

Have a comment? Please e-mail us.

©The Voice 2008