Sports Law Professor Glenn Wong Laments the Cutting of Athletic Programs, Explains Why It’s Happening

The vast majority of all organized sports, girls or boys, are conduits for teaching teamwork, discipline, goal setting, and responsibility. They start, as examples, at the T-ball and Peewee football levels and continue through middle school, high school, and college. The benefits of character-building cannot be over-emphasized. Many an athlete will testify to sports essentially preparing him or her for life’s journey.

With such positive results, one would think that sports programs at the college level would be expanding. Just the opposite is occurring though, even with the abundance of revenues that are being generated.

Glenn Wong, sports law professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, recently penned an article in USA Today in which he wrote this “is a complex question with no easy answers.”

He went on to point to two factors:

First, “institutional priorities (are being) constrained by an ever-widening revenue gap between many of the top schools and all others.”

Second, “Power 5 schools can and do pour the money back into their football and basketball programs, investing in everything from facilities to support, strength and conditioning, and coaching staffs. Again, this is in their best financial interests, as the revenue-generating opportunities in football and basketball are significantly higher than those presented by other sports.”

Wong’s complete article can be found at – https://usat.ly/2phUXAH