Student Athlete: Full Time Unpaid Labor

The 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympic Games took place months ago in dramatic fashion –  E. coli in the Seine River, a hijab ban for French athletes, transphobia, requisite doping allegations and controversies, and the racialized politics and spectacle of new Olympic sports such as breakdancing. It seems like a distant afterthought now, as Los Angeles gears up for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games amid the ongoing political and environmental crises sweeping the country. At the same time, the U.S. collegiate athletics season is in full force with March Madness on the horizon, National Football League playoffs and many other sports (hockey, basketball, golf, tennis, soccer, etc.) on fans’ minds. This may seem like business as usual except for one glaring new addition to the sports headlines: student-athlete Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) valuations. For example, Louisiana State University Women’s Basketball star Flau’Jae Johnson recently signed an unprecedented NIL deal with a women’s professional basketball league, Unrivaled, allowing Johnson to control the use of her own identity for profit. College athletics reporting may now include valuation numbers attached to student athletes, even before they’re eligible to play for professional teams. These headlines matter, and so does paying athletes for their work, but these headlines do not reflect the experiences of most student athletes who work for universities.

Anthropologists absolutely talk and think about sports, but all too rarely do we talk about our own engagement with sports, whether as spectator, fan, participant, “former athlete”, recreational athlete, or, in this case, student athlete. I started thinking about this essay long ago, and well before my name had an academic title behind it. My reflections about the embodied politics of paid labor alongside the unpaid performance labor that low-income student athletes – especially student athletes of color – experience is rooted in my own work as a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I student athlete for the duration of my college career. It was the hardest four-year job I’ve ever had. The work was internalized over the course of my college career but made legible through my training as an anthropologist; the labor was always reciprocal because swimming was how and why I was admitted to a four-year university in the first place, even as a non-scholarship athlete. My debt to the sport and to a particular athletics program took a form of bodily (and sometimes scholastic) sacrifice, and most significantly, economic detriment. The latter, because many student athletes experience economic hardship, and rather than working as a wage employee, find themselves working overtime on fields and courts, or in pools and other athletic facilities. Or in some cases, like my own, student athletes balance the work of athletics with wage labor on weekends and late nights. When I think retrospectively about many of the student athletes I came to know over a four-year period, their work is made alarmingly clear by an anthropological body of literature that illuminates sport at large, through colonial histories, race, gender, and nationalism (Besnier, Brownell, and Carter 2019) but equally through dialogue in the anthropology of work that posits sport as possibility and failure in precarious transnational migrant communities (Agergaard and Ungruhe 2016).

The sport itself matters here. I was a swimmer for the University of Pittsburgh. Many student athletes who compete in Olympic sports (e.g., gymnastics, swimming, track and field, volleyball and wrestling, to list a few) are hyperaware that their career ends after four years and it will never, except for quite literally a few people, be a lucrative endeavor beyond college. And apart from the few who go onto careers in coaching or sports administration, Olympic sport becomes a hobby, distant memory, or, in the case of myself, something to grapple with in terms of identity, economic precarity, and what constitutes embodied work in a system that intrinsically dichotomizes “professional” and “amateur” and questions who is allowed to monetarily benefit from sports performance.

I don’t remember anything about my first year of classes in college except for a challenging academic probation period and eligibility conversation with my coaches as the Cs and Ds rolled in. But I can effortlessly remember the first months of swimming with an exciting new (to me) emphasis on strength training, more running and “dryland training” than I had ever done in my life, and a schedule that inherently prioritized athletics. Even today, the waning summer months always signal a feeling of frantic preparation and excitement – excitement for a new academic year, a chance to change and grow, and do better. But the onset of a new academic year also reminds me of the toughest weeks in a college swimming calendar. In August, many Olympic sport student athletes are months away from their first competitions and coaches strive to bring us to our physical and mental breaking points. Although high school and club athletics is structured and unquestionably time consuming, for many student athletes, August marks the first time in their lives when they will attend school full time while also working an unpaid full-time job.

Those who have participated in organized athletics know that however physically demanding sports are, they are equally mentally and emotionally exhausting. Yet, we love every second of it; nothing in my life has ever felt as gratifying as this “work.” Unfortunately, for many student athletes, this work is uncompensated. There is a misconception about scholarship athletes – the “full ride” athlete is rare, and many athletes are on partial scholarships ranging from “books to full” (Wolverton 2016, n.p.). Dedicating my life to swimming for four years was a choice, but it was surely a choice rooted in power relationships, reciprocity, and the potential for performance-based financial support. I always felt like I owed my team something in exchange for the “privilege” of being at a university and the “opportunity” to athletically prove myself.

My first semester of college revolved around approximately 30-35 hours of training and other team commitments per week. Although the NCAA restricts student-athletes to 20 hours of practice per week, anything over 20 hours is considered “optional.” For comparison, a team practice or activity is as optional as a graduate school seminar or showing up to teach an assigned class. When the actual season began, weekends disappeared as I found myself sleeping and studying on buses to Syracuse or Notre Dame, or an especially long University of Virginia and Virginia Tech dual meet weekend. I missed some Thursday classes, I missed many Friday classes, but foremost on my mind was money. I was financially strapped in a way that, as I soon discovered, many of my peers were not. I was out of money by the third or fourth week of the semester and struggling to stretch my meal plans through the weekend. My savings from working night shifts in a fast-food establishment during high school dissipated and I was routinely out of cash, overdrawing my checking account, signing up for paid psychology experiments on campus, and stealing food from the cafeteria to stash bananas and bread in my dorm room for weekends when my meal plan would run out. By my second year of college, not much had changed, except I was used to the sleep deprivation, routine 35 hours of athletic work, and I had added a lifeguarding job after practice in the afternoon and all weekend, often starting immediately after Saturday morning practices. My grades plateaued as I got the hang of college note taking and learned how to access library computers and printers, but my required student athlete “study hours” often replaced meals or meant that I had to cut lifeguarding hours. Not once did I think of my minimum-wage lifeguarding or academic work as a job; swimming was always my full-time job and priority. In hindsight, I wasn’t the only one doing this across the hundreds of student athletes at my university; I wish I had the acumen at the time to make sense of the intersections of race, class, food and housing insecurity, and everyday experiences of precarity and obligation that I witnessed and sometimes experienced myself.¹

Again, it’s important to note here that my work as a student athlete is very different from the work of hyper-visualized “big-time” athletes (Canada forthcoming) and industries that shape NCAA football and basketball. I’m writing this during an especially murky time, when NIL cases and the 2021 NCAA v. Alston United States Supreme Court case are redefining the very nature of “work” and “play” for young adult student athletes in legal and cultural contexts. Although we don’t yet know how NIL will impact college athletics, we know that the athletes receiving lucrative NIL deals and “valuations” do not make up most student athletes who work for and perform on behalf of their universities. But for the many student athletes who do not have generational wealth, savings or a safety net to pull from, we would be even more housing and food insecure without collegiate athletics. In this way, swimming came to feel like a form of mutual aid for me, providing access to college in the first place, structure and discipline, free shoes and training gear, jackets for the winter, unlimited Gatorade and protein milks, and easy access to athletic trainers and doctors. It was also hard work and work.

I don’t know where I would be without my experience as a student athlete but I’m sure I wouldn’t be a university professor of anthropology and I’m nearly certain I wouldn’t have gone to college at all if it wasn’t for athletics. I wasn’t an anthropology major, nor was I academically inclined for the first few semesters of college, but working as a student athlete ultimately shaped who I am and how I think critically about systematic inequalities. And it’s my training as an anthropologist that contributes to my nuanced understanding of structural racism, labor, academic opportunities for the student athlete figure, and what this looks like across “money-making” sports versus traditional Olympic sports.

Sarah G. Grant is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Cal State Fullerton. Her recent research explores our human entanglements with the environment, neoliberalism, and non-humans through birding communities, urban bird habitats, and machine-learning citizen science applications.

References

Agergaard, Sine and Ungruhe, Christian. 2016. “Ambivalent Precarity: Career Trajectories and Temporalities in Highly Skilled Sports Labor Migration from West Africa to Northern Europe.” Anthropology of Work Review, 37: 67-78.

Canada, Tracie. 2025. Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football. Oakland: University of California Press.

_____. 2022. “Plantation Logics at the NFL Combine.” Anthropology News. September 14. Available: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/plantation-logics-at-the-nfl-combine/

Foster, Kevin Michael. 2003. “Panopticonics: The Control and Surveillance of Black Female Athletes in a Collegiate Athletic Program.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 34: 300-323.

Sehlikoğlu, Sertaç. 2014. “Sport.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, February 10. Available: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/sport. 

Wolverton, Brad. 2016. “The Myth of Sports Scholarship.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. November 20. Available: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-myth-of-the-sports-scholarship/

Yearwood, Gabby. 2018. “Playing without Power: Black Male NCAA Student-Athletes Living with Structural Racism.” Transforming Anthropology, 26: 18-35.