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game doesn’t mean it all With the NCAA finals over, players and coaches can rest easy for a few months knowing that they don’t have to deal with the stress and rigor of the college basketball life for a little while. For die-hard fans, it will be a long wait until the first tip-off next fall. My roommate is already showing symptoms of withdrawal. At the end of Monday’s game, the commentators made comments about how the Maryland team had reached the pinnacle of college basketball by winning an NCAA championship. So what about all the other teams who didn’t finish on top? Is all of their hard work for naught? The media has come to define players by their championships, which in turn influences much of the public to do the same. At the beginning of the season, we know that over 99 percent of all college basketball players will not be a part of a national championship. Why then, do we insist on judging players on this one criterion, as though all of their other accomplishments are just secondary actions? College basketball players deserve to be looked on as champions merely for participating. There is no doubt that a national championship is a tremendous honor, but there is so much more to a basketball season than winning the final game. Often we hear stories about how a certain great player accomplished many things, except he or she didn’t win a national championship. The media will then portray the career of this player almost as incomplete, because fate didn’t fall in their direction in the NCAA tournament. For those of us who don’t play college basketball, should we feel incomplete because we have not won a national championship? After all, have you ever won a national championship? A state championship, even? Our society is so success oriented, we often forget what is really important in life. Though college athletes take a lot of flack about how they don’t have to go to class to get good grades, keep in mind that they are essentially working a full time job which is extremely taxing on their bodies. These athletes are forced to learn about how far they can push themselves, and it takes a strong person, both mentally and physically, to deal with the rigors they endure on a daily basis. It is detrimental to our society to simply judge people on whether or not they have won a championship. We would be better off if we judged college athletes on a little bit more human terms. Teams like the Indiana Hooisers, who most people never thought would make it as far as they did, still lost in the end, but they are not losers. They are champions because they pushed themselves to the ultimate level of success they could achieve. Though they may not be listed in the history books as national champions, they are still winners, and no spectator or TV commentator can take that away. Jeff
Dennis is a junior sociology major from Gail. |
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TCU Daily Skiff © 2002 |
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