Summary Of Should College Athletes Be Paid To Play

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Everyone in the nation knows of at least one college athlete. Many people have a favorite school and in many cases that is because they either have grown up watching that college team or even attended that school. Most people in the country think that college athletes are important to the school and to our lives because they provide the country with some sort of entertainment. As many sports fans know, college athletes are not allowed to be paid to play until they reach ‘the league’. Some people would even say that these athletes deserve some type of pay, some deserve a scholarship raise, and some think what the athletes are receiving right now is plenty. In Kenneth Cooper’s “Should College Athletes Be Paid to Play?” published in Diverse: …show more content…

Cooper quotes Robert McCormick, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board under President Jimmy Carter, when he says “These young men are laboring under very strict and arduous conditions, so they really are laborers in terms of the physical demands on them while they're also trying to go to school and being required to go to school” (Cooper). Cooper later states “Common law has three tests: the right of others to control a person's activities, whether that person is compensated and if that person is economically dependent on that compensation” (Cooper). In the next paragraph, Cooper tells how the players fit into all three categories. Cooper states, “The law professors find that college athletes meet …show more content…

Sack states a fact when he says, “In 1957, after years of intense internal debate, the NCAA caved under pressure to subsidize athletes, and voted to allow athletic scholarships” (Sack). This tells the audience that at some point in time, athletic scholarships were not allowed, but were strictly academic. The author begins with how the NCAA officially let scholarships be awarded but later in the article he says that, over time, they have turned into more of an “employment contract” (Sack). The author also states “Because they are already essentially paid to play, they deserve the same rights and benefits as other employees, including medical benefits, workers' compensation when injured, and the right to use their God-given talents to build some financial security for their families while still in college” (Sack). Sack thinks that athletes should be awarded more than what they are receiving already, which could include pay or health