Project examines athletic, academic data

Author: Jaime Fuller

Middlebury College, through its involvement in the College Sports Project, is now undertaking a five-year long data collection and analysis project to determine if there is a negative correlation between athletics and academic performance. John Emerson, dean of Planning, is the principal investigator for the project, which will collect information concerning gender, ethnicity, SAT scores, GPA, high school ranking and all athletic-related information.

The College plans to implement this goal through its involvement in the College Sports Project (CSP). On the CSP Web site, the group describes its mission as "a focused and intentional effort to encourageÖcolleges and universities to work intentionally and collaboratively in attempting to align athletic programs with educational missions." The CSP represents over 130 institutions in the NCAA Division III, including all 11 NESCAC colleges.

According to Emerson, student-athletes often have lower GPAs than their counterparts who have equally demanding extracurricular schedules.

"Past studies have documented growing differences between students who are intercollegiate athletes and those who are not," Emerson wrote in an e-mail. "But some groups of athletes do as well as or better than their peers who are not on teams. We don't yet understand the differences very well."

Administrators' fears about growing differences in the goals of the academic and athletic departments can be reinforced by students' personal experiences. Middlebury requires equally demanding and rigorous athletic and academic commitments from students, and occasionally students have to choose one over the other, according to Frank Sweeney '11. Sweeny ran into this conundrum at the beginning of this year when he ultimately had to forego playing on the football team because of the time constraints his pre-med academic track entails.

"It's not the coach's fault, it's not the team's fault, it's just [that] there [are] only so many hours in a day," Sweeney said. "If you want to be a devoted student and have a social life too, there is little time to fit athletics in."

Noah Mease '11 is involved in the Mountain Ayres, the College Choir, Quidditch, Radio Drama and building sets for the theater department. He empathized with athletes trying to find a balance in extracurricular activities.

"Sports make it harder to get work done," Mease said. "But participating in other activities has the same effect."

The CSP has already collected data about all students who enrolled in the participating colleges in the 2005-2006 academic year and it plans to collect data about the Class of 2011 late this fall. The study will document information about these students until they graduate.

According to Emerson, the College considers this project an important part of its plan to "establish the institution as one with a global focus, while strengthening its core mission as an undergraduate liberal arts college."

"All the participating colleges want to maintain a good balance between their academic missions and their intercollegiate athletics programs," Emerson wrote. "One of the goals of our conference is to have student athletes who are 'representative' of the rest of the student body."

Although this project is still in its infancy and the participating colleges will not completely understand the collected data until the close of the study in five years, the CSP will release its first report at the end of the month. The competitive and rigorous collegiate athletic program is one of the hallmarks of the Middlebury experience, and the CSP data will determine if athletics and academics can coexist harmoniously, without deteriorating the success of either element.