CAHA 502

Inner City StudentAthletes

Using Athletics For Personal
Development
Nick Pesik

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
When I first got into college football one of the first things one of my mentors told me
was, Are you sure you want to get into a career where 18-22 dictate the status of your job?
That statement was one that will stick with me until the day I pass and is one that I think about
quite frequently, especially because we are starting to get towards the end of recruiting. In a
perfect world we would be able to get recruits with 3.5 grade point averages and 25 on their
ACTs but we are not in that world and not everyone has the resources to reach those scores.
Since recruiting plays such a crucial role in the teams overall development we need to be able to
choose the right athlete.
Student-athletes are grouped together regionally much like the cultural biases that go
along with trying to educate youth or adults. Some have more opportunities athletically and some
have more educationally and since we, as coaches, have to make sure that the athletes are as
good on the field as they are in the classroom there is a lot we focus on academically. There are
such things as the CHANCE Program here at NIU that help out those student-athletes that are
borderline with their academics to give them a shot to do two things that they have always
dreamed of, a college degree and college athletics. Once I heard of the CHANCE Program it
made me start to re-think the experiences I have gone through in my lifetime. I have been an
extremely lucky individual, while growing up I never had to deal with many hardships. I had a
job, I played sports year-round, and I went to a school that had a very good base of academia. As
I thought about where I am today, it got me curious some of the others backgrounds on the team,
so throughout my first year with the team I got to know some individuals and we would get into
conversations on where and how they grew up and some of the answers brought me back to
reality and it put into perspective aspects of other peoples lives I would have overlooked.

Some of the players that I had gotten to know described their lives and the trials and
tribulations they overcame to get where they are today. Some of the athletes were the oldest of 11
siblings and they had to work to help support the rest of the family. If they were busy working
there was something that had to give and sadly that was academics. There were others that when
they asked for help the teachers would not be able to provide it for them or they were shut out
from a certain teacher when they were younger so academia was not important to them so
naturally they did not put forth an effort in school. Others were part of single-parent households
and sometimes the single parent did not have time to get them to the proper lessons because they
were working. Or some of the guys just never had that proper mentor in their life to point them in
the right direction. The more I got to notice the backgrounds of the guys, there was a certain
consistency with where they grew up. Many of the guys that did not have the traditional
upbringing, 2-parent household and proper schooling opportunities, we from the inner city and it
made me curious on why there was such a discrepancy.
This is what pushed me to look further into inner-city academics and its correlation with
its athletics. Coaches always want high numbers on their teams to create a competitive
environment and in the big cities there are a lot of numbers on teams but the graduation rate is
nowhere where it should be. To go into further detail, it is not just the graduation rate; the grade
point averages, the test scores, and all the other aspects of school are subpar. So if these students
have inadequate schooling, no mentor, has a job to support their family, or dont even have a
family life what are they going to turn to, to help them get out of cycle. There are many answers
but athletics is something many children today can still relate to and is readily available for them.
From what I have read, it is not always a lack of ability that makes inner city living a
cycle it is more of a lack of opportunity. Children are profiled and labeled before they even have

a chance to discredit peoples beliefs. There are many individuals who would prosper if given the
proper setting but as we know the world is not a fair place so not everyone is given a fair chance.
There have been studies that show that by developing an athletic league for youth helps them
keep focus on their academics and lower the delinquency rates, especially in the inner cities.
When the children are off at the park playing basketball, soccer, football, baseball, softball, or
whatever the game of choice it keeps them away from individuals and/or activities that may lead
to problematic lifestyle. The best thing about them playing is that it does not just keep them from
breaking laws but it also teaches them life lessons. Communication skills, team building,
intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, success, and defeat are all things that are learned on the
playing field. The best thing about these leagues on top of teaching todays youth all of these life
lessons is that they have to have specific grades to be able to participate in these activities.
Where I grew up everyone always talked about street smarts and book smarts and athletics
usually combine both of these smarts. You have to get educated from the books to be able to
play in the games and once you are playing you learn some of the valuable lessons that create a
better awareness of everyday life and the obstacles that are presented.
Society today is getting a lot better at giving everyone an equal opportunity to have the
same chances. Women, historically, have always had to wait and do things the hard way but in
todays society many of the biases and barriers are being discredited and broken down. Title IX
has brought an equality to sports that was much needed, with todays society becoming more of
an armchair generation everything needs to be done to help create opportunities for youth.
Women, in todays society, hold all the same jobs as men so why not be able to have the majority
of the same opportunities on an athletic playing field. In one of the articles I read the author
believed that since women were now able to receive athletic scholarships it has increased the

enrollment and the graduation rate for colleges, this was his opinion and there was no research
on the topic that backed his opinion, but I believe his opinion holds some weight. Before women
were not able to pursue an athletic career but now they are able to do so in college and if lucky
enough even at a professional level, which helps them individually and helps with todays youth
by giving them a dream and positive role models they can aspire to be.
STATEMENT OF ISSUE
In rural America college is something that is accepted and the youth upon graduation go
off to college like there isnt another choice. This is an example of what people are like in the
town I grew up in, there are some that go to a 2-year university and there are others that go to a
4-year university but there are very few that do not go to either. From everything that I read, this
is not the thought process in urban America. People should expect to go to college and if they
dont it should not be accepted it should be frowned upon. In todays society, it seems like that
getting your undergraduate degree is quite enough, a lot of employers are looking for Masters
degrees and if you do not get either you are putting yourself at a disadvantage. I did not go and
conduct any interviews but from what I have found those who do not go to college initially are
also those who struggle with their intrinsic motivation and if you cannot motivate yourself well
enough to go to college there is a chance you may not be able to motivate yourself to go out and
try and better your life. This is where many people just take what is given to them or take what is
easy instead of creating opportunities to enrich their lives. Taking the easy way out has been a
label that was given to our generation and is a label that annoys me because not everyone is lazy
but we also cant dispute that, as a whole, our generation is lazy. Ive worked hard to get where I
am today and a lot of that has been due to athletics.

Our society idolizes professional sports, they make obscene amounts of money, are
treated like royalty, and receive many other bonuses because they are bigger, stronger, and faster
than the average person. Everyone that I grew up around dreamed of being a professional athlete
and now that I look back on it, we did not put the work in to get there but we also did not have
all the tools around us that would and could possibly propel us onto that stage. Youth leagues
were not readily available all year long to us; we had baseball and softball in the summer,
basketball and wrestling in the winter, and lastly football and volleyball in the fall. I am a big
believer that youth should not just play in one sport because each sport has something different
that it focuses on: football-power and agility, basketball-explosiveness and agility, wrestlingstrength and mind, baseball/softball-hand and eye coordination but if kids do not like playing the
other sports they really did not have a chance to play them until that season emerged. What about
soccer, tennis, golf, hockey, gymnastics, etc. all of these sports were not available to us until we
were older and by then it was too late because we had other responsibilities so we could not even
give them a chance. Developing youth leagues can get rid of the armchair label and get people
more involved with each other and more importantly the community. By giving the community
and identity it will provide motivation and that same motivation is the one that can drive some of
those who get left behind to college so they can better their lives. People today are all about what
is it going to do for me now and how am I going to get something out of this; if we are able to
help out the youth and get them to the next step of their life you never know what the
possibilities are. You will never know the impact you can have on someones life or how life will
turn out but if you dont ever try and help out you will know how to feel regret and wonder what
if. As a society, we are letting todays youth slip in between the cracks by not being proactive and
trying to help. Making ourselves readily available and trying to develop the youth instead of

accepting their lack of motivation we, as adults, need to accept our role as mentor and put the
youth on the right track.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The first article I read was Team Sports Achievement and Self-Esteem Development
Among Urban Adolescent Girls, it was a study headed up by Sara Pedersen, University of
Montreal, and Edward Seidman, William T. Grant Foundation. The reason they wanted to do this
study is because they wanted to test the hypothesis that there is greater achievement in team
settings during a young ladys adolescence because this is where they usually distance
themselves from athletics and sometimes it is the time in their life where self-esteem issues tend
to rise. Also they suggested that participation and achievement in sports is reflected differently
from girls to boys; the girls may even benefit more from them (Miller, 1998; Richman &
Shaffer,2000). There also was a debate about if there was a difference on the effects between
individual sports and team sports. They addressed the debate and both explained their position on
it but they mostly wanted to focus on a team setting (they both agreed there were some benefits
from individual athletics but they wanted to focus more on the interpersonal skills, development,
and maturation). What they found is that there is a positive link between self-esteem/ personal
development and team sports with young ladies. There were some biases obviously but the study
was based in a lower-economic area that was culturally diverse. 80% of the participants were
minorities and of that 80% the heavy majorities were African-American or Latina. With these
results there are clear implications to develop and maintain opportunities for young women to
participate in team driven athletics. Even though creating the opportunity is the majority of the
battle, rewarding the girls is just as important because it is said that rewards and positive
feedback from someone they respect is essential for producing the positive psychosocial benefits.

Beyond the Playing Field: Coaches as Social Capital for Inner-City Adolescent African
American Males was an article submitted by Joseph B. Richardson Jr., on his experiences
growing up in New York and some he also conducted some interviews with some adolescents
that live in his old neighborhood. He refers to his town as Soulville and how it has some of the
best street basketball in the country; there are multiple people that got out of the area solely by
the education they learned on the courts. Joblessness, drug addiction, poor health, infectious
disease and massive rates of incarnation of both men and women in low-income communities
have significantly diminished the pool of available adults who can socialize youth and encourage
healthy meaningful relationships between youth and adults (Alexander 2010;Rose and Clear
1998; Wilson 1987). Social father, is a term used in the article where an adult from outside the
family steps in and plays the role of the mentor and helps out whenever needed (with athletic or
personal development related endeavors). From the interviews that he conducted it was prevalent
that many of the adolescents did not have a role model until their coach or a parent stepped in
gave them something to believe in. Most of the kids were either boxers or basketball players
(two relatively cheap sports) and every single one of them said if they didnt have their
coach/mentor they would have been in the streets peddling drugs or working some kind of hustle.
But once they were hooked on their sport they said there was nothing that was going to get in
their way or make them deviate from their passion. All but one interviewee said they never
thought about college until they were approached by a recruiter or until their mentor told them
they were good enough to make it there. There was not a follow up done yet on the retention rate
of these student-athletes that went off to college but they all went to college or turned pro (2 kids
went to Europe to ball basketball professionally) but it opens up our eyes and shows what may
happen if we were just there for todays youth.

One of the tools I did not have accessible to me when I was in college was an academic
support center and now being a part of an institution that does have one it provides so much help
for the student athletes. Being a student athlete requires a lot of time and teaches you time
management skills but these student athletes are still young adults and need help and mentoring
so much like they have coaches on the field, they have coaches for the classroom. There were
two articles that I looked at that focused on academic support services, Academic Support
Services and Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy in Student Athletes and The Supply and
Demand Side of Occupational Segregation: The Case of an Intercollegiate Athletic Department.
It provided two different views on academic support, one of which focuses on who gets
employed on the academic support staff and the other view is on the tutelage they provide for
their student athletes. The article that focused employment was not very informative for finding
anything that related to having an education that was mainly provided by athletics, it showed the
struggles and how employment is racially biased. Once again all of these studies are skewed
because there are limited participants but having said that and looking at our own support staff
the numbers coincide. There are more Caucasians on staff than any other but the one thing that
discredits the theory is that the person in charge of everything (she actually just took the same
position with the University of Iowa) was an African American woman. I understand this is only
one school but there are many schools out there that went unsampled and they looked at one
school with 14 representatives. The second article about decision-making showed what we
thought to believe initially, that as a student ages the decisions he or she makes have more
thought out and life relevant. When they are freshman they make choices that derail them and
make it tougher for them and by the time the get to the end of their degree they know how to

make better choices for themselves from both dealing with the academic support staff and
through life experience.
THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF PROBLEM
Intrinsic motivation and life lessons are two things that I believe got me to where I am
today. I have not made a huge impact on life yet but I do like where the path is heading. One of
the problems that follows with lack of opportunity for these young student athletes to excel is
that many of the people that went through the same struggle are no longer around to help those
who need it a pep talk. Those who are motivated internally have a desire and will to get through
anything and those are the ones that we need to come back and nurture those who are now in the
same position they once were. Personally if I were to go to Chicago and try and motivate many
of these kids they would look at me and the message would go in one ear and out the other,
simply because I did not have the same upbringing. So if those who were once from
impoverished, run down, overpopulated, etc. were to come back and help mentor these young
student athletes it would be one of many steps that have to be taken to get us on the right path.
Once we do get these people to come back to their roots they can share their own personal life
lessons and share some of the luxuries they can provide for them and their family it may be able
to help turn around one troubled individuals life.
MODEL/DESIGN FOR TESTING ARGUMENT
The model that comes to mind for me would be to get companies that are experiencing
success and/or have a respect level in the region come in and speak to the students. It would be
like a career day but its with people that graduated from that school or are known in the area that
have experienced success. The measure for success can be gauged by those at the school because

there is no set bar that has to be passed to say you have experienced success. It would be ideal
for all those who come back to have been a student athlete in college and somehow incorporate
that into their story but to start everyone is open to it. With that being said, the catch would be to
have everyone come and speak willingly with no added benefit but a clear conscience but as I
mentioned before those people are few and far between. One thing that could be instituted with
this would be a monetary payout or tax break given to the company and individual that complies
with the stipulations. Then for the company at the end of the year who has the most community
service trying to educate and mold todays youth they can receive an overall prize; whether it be
tax breaks, free gas, or free muffins for a year just as long as there is some sort of competition to
help motivate each company and the individuals at the companies.

Bibliography
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Richman, E.L. & Shaffer, D.R. (2000) If you let me play sports: How might sport participation
influence the self-esteem of adolescent females? Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24, 189-199
Richardson Jr., Joseph B. (2012) Beyond the Playing Field: Coaches as Social Capital for InnerCity Adolescent African-American Males Springer Science+Business Media 16,171-194
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