Religious Symbols In Sports

For years, religious symbols have made appearances in sports at the collegiate and professional levels. It also has brought about a lot of controversial arguments with each case. From what I learned in the ESPN article, they have been debating religious symbol cases dating back to the 1960’s. The smallest symbol, like a cross to represent a deceased teammate has sparked debate in the public. Although small things like these have caused strong feelings between different groups of people in society athletes still continue to express some form of religion. The ESPN article also lists many cases that players and coaches combined have worn a religious symbol during a game or made religious gestures. Another point I found interesting that they

It gave main examples of how NCAA has mainly conflicted with religion. I found interesting that cases involving religion appeared in the 1950’s with the NCAA. One of the main examples they use to support the conflict between the two is when a religious university made it into the NCAA World Series. Their universities rules specified that their athletes couldn’t have games on Sundays, which was when some of the games in the series was scheduled. I learned the NCAA wouldn’t change it for the school forcing it to drop out and then later when that same school made it to the series again they still couldn’t participate. Even though this isn’t an example of an actual symbol like on a uniform or mascot, it still is symbolizing the importance of Sundays as a religious day for certain religious universities. What I learned even further in this article is that for a time the NCAA board changed the rules to accommodate such universities but then 25 years later got rid of the rule because they didn’t have to change the rules for them. Along with that, the article talked about praying in the end zone and how it is ruled as excessive celebration that religious institutions will get penalized for