College Athletes Should Be Paid Essay

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Imagine being extremely passionate and dedicated to a sport, spending an endless amount of hours working on becoming the best of the best, but being faced with the realization that you have no money to support yourself. Your endless hours of practice consume most of your time making it extremely difficult to work an actual job. Do you continue fulfilling your passion or do you step away from it to get a job just to support your basic needs? This is a challenge faced by many college athletes. Not everyone is presented with the gift of a full ride scholarship to play a sport like Football, Basketball, or Baseball. Many athletes especially aren’t born into families with financial stability. However, this conflict has a simple resolution, pay the …show more content…

College is where athletes have the chance to prove themselves as a value to a professional team. These young men and women spend countless hours practicing to become the next pro athlete in their selected sport. Oddly enough, these hours turn to only be useful to them during a game/ match for their respective sport. After that they are left with a very limited amount of time to work a job to provide for themselves. According to Michigan state lawyers Robert and Amy McCormick, football and basketball players put in enough hours to be considered employees under federal labor laws. Labor laws are of course put into place to protect people from being overworked, but why would this not apply to a college kid in their late teens/ early twenties? According to Joe Nocera, “Many athletes routinely put in 50 hours a week on their sport,” (Should college athletes be paid?). A full time job is considered to be 40 hours, which means they work full time and then overtime. In addition, these hours can also restrict the majors student athletes have the choice of taking. Therefore you can absolutely say they’re more of an athlete than a student due to the fact that the sport’s schedule does actually interfere with their education on a high