Abuse In Collegiate Sports Essay

Sports are the backbone of entertainment in America. Whether it’s parents who sign their children up for little league baseball, or the NCAA March Madness tournament, everyone has sought out sports as a form of entertainment. Unfortunately, there is a completely other side to those who are involved in sports where there may be abuse involved. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on the problem of abuse in collegiate sports. When talking about abuse, I am referring to psychological abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, which includes medical negligence, and sexual abuse. I delve into why abuse happens in collegiate sports by taking a look at the extremely different power dynamics between an athlete and their program which includes coaches, coaching

2022; LeRoy, 2021). Athletes are subject to many different types of abuse, McMahon (2022) discusses research done by Stirling and Kerr where they studied a team of college swimmers, who had experiences physical, emotional, and verbal abuse from their coach. The swimmers also experienced instances where their coach would act aggressively and hit or throw objects at them. Coaches are the biggest culprits for abuse at the collegiate level. With the growing awareness abuse student athletes are experiencing, they are resorting to psychological abuse, “Coaches have allegedly engaged in racial intimidation, sexual degradation, homophobic behavior, and bullying, causing psychological problems including suicidal thoughts” (LeRoy, 2021). An ACHA assessment done in 2014, that questioned students in all of the NCAA divisions, found that 14% of collegiate athletes had “seriously considered suicide” and that 6% of student athletes have previously attempted suicide (Wolff et al., 2015). In the 2010 GOALS study, the NCAA collected data from 20,000 students athletes, questioning athletes if their coaches are bullies, in Division I sports, they found that “31% of men’s basketball players and 22% of football players reported that a coach ‘puts me down in from of others,’…and only 39% of women’s basketball players strongly agreed that ‘my head coach can be trusted” (Wolff

And just as sexual violence is now under society’s microscope, so are college sports” (Statum, 2020). It is important to acknowledge that the increase of reports of sexual abuse may be because of feelings of empowerment provided by the “Me Too” Movement, and because of the accessibility to digital tools, but that it does not reflect that there may have been less cases of sexual abuse in collegiate sports before the era of “Me Too” and before tools and support became more easily accessible (Wolff et al., 2015). It is possible that there may have been just as many occurrences of sexual abuse, or that there may have been even more cases than there are