Student athletes deserve pay

Does the name Andrew Wiggins ring a bell? If not, it should.

He is the new main attraction in NCAA college basketball, and he is Canadian. Last month, not only was he featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated alongside Kansas legends Wilt Chamberlain and Danny Manning, but he was also the lead story for ESPN The Magazine’s college hoops preview, and had a photo shoot with GQ Magazine.

Due to NCAA regulations, he has done all of this advertising without earning any compensation in return.

Recently, there has been some discussion regarding whether or not college athletes should be paid while they are in school. A common argument is, “They’re already getting a scholarship! That’s more than anybody else!”

However, a scholarship doesn’t necessarily equal cash in a player’s pocket. Let’s look at how much a scholarship is actually worth.

Without athletes, we wouldn’t have millions of fans buying tickets for games.

On average, a full Division 1 scholarship is $25,000 per year. That’s $100,000 over four years. This may seem like a lot of money, but it really only covers the basics. It covers thousands of dollars in university fees, tuition, housing, a meal-plan, and multiple hundred-dollar textbooks.

Contrary to what naysayers believe, being a student-athlete is a full-time job. Being a NCAA student athlete myself, on a typical day, I will wake up before classes, get to the gym at 6:15 a.m., practice from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., try to get an extra weight or conditioning session in two to three times a week, go to class, have individual sessions with my coaches, watch films of practices or games and then study for my classes. On top of this, I work.

However, once the season starts up, I can’t have a job anymore. Every two weeks, we are on the road from Wednesday until Sunday. Sometimes we are gone for two straight weeks if we make playoffs. The professors let us do our work from the road, but my job isn’t going to pay me just because I was playing basketball on a road trip.

Even though the athletes make no money, the NCAA basketball tournaments, or “March Madness,” have become a huge business. As Forbes’ Chris Smith wrote, CBS and Turner Broadcasting make more than $1 billion off these student games — due in part to 30-second advertisement spots costing $700,000 during the Final Four.

Athletic conferences, as well, receive millions of dollars in payouts from the NCAA when their teams advance deep into the tournament. Same goes for the coaches of the final squads standing. The NCAA, as a whole, makes approximately $6 billion annually.

Contrary to what naysayers believe, being a student-athlete is a full-time job.

People should ask themselves, who generates this excitement? The players. And they are not allowed to receive anything from the billion dollars they generate every year while they risk career-ending injuries every time they step onto the court, field, or rink.

Why shouldn’t collegiate student athletes be paid? The billions of dollars that collegiate athletics generates would be non-existent without them, on the field or on the court, performing and entertaining millions of college sports fans. Without athletes, we wouldn’t have millions of fans buying tickets for games, or people buying sports gear, jerseys, and video games, usually bearing the likenesses, and often the autographs of their favorite college players.

We should re-evaluate the system as a whole. The main purpose to play NCAA sports used to be to get a good education. Now, elite prospects like Andrew Wiggins go to school for one year and make the jump to the NBA. What if an amateur league existed in which the players would get compensated, alongside the NCAA league, in which students could play college sports without missing on an education?

Until then, college athletes are just like all other hard working people, who should receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.