Should College Athletes Be Paid for Playing

College and professional sports associations have many players on their rosters. Most people on college teams are looking to advance their careers into the pros. In professional sports associations like the NFL, the MLS, or the MLB players make a contract with the team that they are participating or playing with. When a player signs a contract this means that they are agreeing to play their hardest or participate as much as they can to get money in return for their efforts. So let’s say that you were a football player in the NFL. You would sign a contract with the team you are playing with. What this contract would basically say is if I play for you then you have to pay me a certain amount of money. These teams can either accept this contract and agree to pay this player that amount of money or it can be vice versa where the player is agreeing to play for the team if they get a certain amount of money.

Most professional athlete’s contracts consist of a lot of money. Most contracts, in fact almost all contracts of professional athletes are worth more than $1,000,000 a year. So that would mean that each individual NFL team gives their players a total of about $45 million. Which would mean that the NFL association in general gives players a total $1 billion and $440 million a year. You think that is a big number now wait until you hear how much college players are paid. College players make a total of zero dollars a year from playing collegiate sports.

Many people ponder over why college players don’t get paid to play and many think that they should. I do not think that collegiate athletes should get paid to play for their college. There is an average of about 600 athletes at most colleges, so that means if a college were to pay their athletes even as little as $1,000 a year to play they would spend $600,000 worth of money a year on college athletes. That means that colleges would spend more money paying athletes than they would spending money on research, hospital services, and institutional support combined. When you get to the point when you are in college playing sports most people, in fact nearly everyone has probably found something they are passionate in.

If you are a passionate collegiate athlete then you should want to play the sport no matter if you get paid for it or not. So if collegiate athletes love the sport so much then why do they need to get paid to play it. The main point is collegiate athletes should not get paid because it majorly increases the annual money usage of colleges, it could make collegiate athletes less passionate about the sport they play, and it could possibly cause future problems if the better players on the team get paid more than the not so good players on the team.

There are multiple sites that can back up my belief on why collegiate athletes shouldn’t get paid. One of those sites is ”Listland.com”. This site states multiple reasons on why collegiate athletes should not get paid. The first reason is that colleges simply just cannot afford to pay their athletes. Although many people believe that many college sports associations have tons of money coming into the program, but the truth is most of the money coming into the program is going right back out.

For example, in 2015 Auburn University installed the newest edition, 11,000 square foot screen in their stadium. It costed the university $13.9 million to install this giant screen into their stadium. So if colleges can hardly bring in enough money to keep the athletic program going then how are they going to bring in enough money to pay all of their players as well. Another reason collegiate athletes shouldn’t get paid is because for every single high school student that dreams of playing in college, only about seven percent of those students actually get to go on and do it, and only two percent of them go on to play at division 1 schools. What does that mean to you? To me, that means that playing sports in college is a privilege.

Some college athletes need to recognize that the opportunity that they have to play as an athlete at a college is something that millions of people dream of never accomplish. Playing sports in college should be done for the love of the game. You don’t ever want it to turn into a so called job or chore. When a player is too worried about,”Oh if I don’t play today then I am not going to get paid” then eventually that person is going to lose their fame or passion for the game. Most people see playing sports in college as their childhood dream coming true. For most people that dream wasn’t to get paid a lot of money or to get rich by it. It was to play the thing they loved most in college, and when you bring money into the situation all of that goes down the drain. If you go to the professional league, yeah I get it you’re going to need to have a job and get paid to provide for your family, but in college it is all about the heart of the game. Feeling the pride of walking through campus after winning a big game, and feeling the pure agony of being defeated.

Another point that is made by this site to back up my belief is that elite athletes that attend schools such as Ohio State, Alabama, Florida State, Duke, UConn, Kentucky, etc. already get almost all of their college tuition paid for. Just because they aren’t getting paid annually to play that does not mean that they do not get perks for playing. Elite athletes get nearly their whole entire college tuition paid off because they play for the college sports association. “COLLEGEdata.com” states that the average tuition fee for state residents attending a public college is $9,650. The average tuition for out of state residents attending public colleges is $24,930. This means that elite players that get their college tuition nearly free save somewhere from about $10,000 to $25,000. Elite players also get perks in addition to their nearly free college tuition fee, this could cause a bit of drama between these elite players and average players because the elite players may have gotten a free tuition along with some perks with it as the average players would of had to pay for their own tuition.

According to “medium.com” another reason why college athletes shouldn’t get paid is because sports program at a college gets paid then every other sports program at the school is going to want to get paid too. So let’s say they a college was going to start paying the college football players an annual salary. What about the boys or girls volleyball and soccer teams. It isn’t fair they they are just excluded from the money because they don’t accumulate and bring in as much money as the “big picture” sports like basketball and football.

There are many reasons why college players either don’t deserve to be paid or should not be paid. College is a time for fun, exploration, and learning. Almost like high school but with more freedom. It is where you have to start getting serious about what you want to do with you life but it still allows you to have fun and do what you love. For a lot of people that think they want to do forever is play sports. College is the perfect opportunity for some people to really start their career as an athlete. It is to be taken seriously but it is also to be enjoyed. Paying players in college to play is only going to make things more complicated. Use college as a time to play the sport you love not worry about how much you are getting paid to do something you want to do.

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