In revenue college sports, the coach is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. At many institutions with major football programs, the football coach is often the highest paid public official in the state.
The pressure to win means universities with top programs invest millions into ensuring they have the best state-of-the-art facilities and training staffs.
Jean Boyd, senior associate athletic director for student athlete development at Arizona State University, said Thursday at the Black Student Athlete Conference, sponsored by The University of Texas at Austin’s African American Male Research Initiative, that a lot of time and effort goes into supporting facilities, which simultaneously detracts from the focus on nurturing the student-athletes. Less than 5 percent of athletic officials’ time is spent thinking about the student-athlete, Boyd said.
With so much on the line — the coach’s own salary and job security, and the need to win to maintain the reputation of the institution and the expectations of boosters, alumni donors and corporate sponsors — the coach is under immense pressure to win at any cost. That cost, unfortunately, often is the education and well-being of the student-athletes under their tutelage.
William Rhoden, in his 2006 book, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, talked about the concept of “the conveyor belt,” which is a machine through which athletes are pushed to support the programs at the expense of their selves. In the book, Rhoden discussed that the ultimate goal of the conveyor belt is less to ready Black student-athletes to play at the collegiate level than it is to deliver them with the right mentality: don’t challenge the existing power structure.
On any campus, the existing power structure is the athletics department, most notably the coach. And, from the beginning, athletes are taught not to rear against or challenge the coach for any reason if they hope to be successful at the collegiate level.
