Amani always loved playing basketball. But somewhere along the way, as she progressed in her career toward the college level, her love began to fade. Now at 23-years-old, she is coaching middle school girls at a high school in her hometown. As she describes the joy of watching her girls make their first shot or their first smooth bounce pass, her eyes light up as if remembering why she loves the game.
When she talks about when her love of the game started to slip away, she focuses on the difficulties of playing college women’s basketball. For the staggering majority of college level female basketball players, that will be the highlight of their careers. “WNBA salary is basically equal to an office job,” she explains. Prior to her Freshman year, she got injured. This put her at a disadvantage, which only added to the challenges of being away from home, attending school in a different state.
After the injury, Amani decided to leave her alma mater and pursue coaching back in New York City, where she is from. Amani wanted a different path for herself. Her face turns grim when she talks about grueling practice hours. “I started losing my love for basketball. On top of that there was no time to be able to work or other activities.” This experience led to her conviction that college level women’s basketball players should be paid for the long hours they put in toward their career.
She responded confidently, “Their justification for not paying college athletes is that they’re students first and then athletes. But the reality is that they’re athletes first and then students.” College athletics departments often sign student athletes up for courses that are easy to pass to ensure they will be training in the gym at 5am, with sleep-through classes before ending the night back under the basket.
The prospect of paying college athletes in the US is a contested topic. For colleges, paying athletes on a salary is contradictory to the concept of a student-athlete. They argue that elite student-athletes receive academic scholarships, which is their compensation. Amani’s counter-argument is that student-athletes’ academic rigor often does not match what is required for a post-graduate career and the result is, they find themselves without a job and a mediocre career. The emphasis, in her experience, was on basketball, not education.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) own statistics report that 99% of college athletes who attend Division I schools with a dream of joining the professional league, don’t make it to the professional league. The numbers are even lower for female athletes, who have significantly fewer opportunities to play professionally than men.
Opponents of student-athlete compensation are quick to point out that even if student-athletes received $100,000 salaries, taxes would take such a bite that players would wish they had taken full academic scholarships, which aren’t taxed. A TIME Magazine article featuring University of Kentucky’s scholar-athlete John Thelin, makes this point in explicit detail.
Supporters of student-athlete compensation responded to this premise, asking why students couldn’t be compensated in other ways, like sponsorships or monthly stipends? As Amani points out, “Child actors get paid, so college players should too.”
