story by Susan Fishman
Collegiate athletes are required to excel both academically and athletically throughout their college careers.
To maintain their eligibility, they face conflicting demands and pressures, such as maintaining a minimum grade point average while also engaging in intense and time-consuming athletic training and competition.
So what does it take for these students to manage these dual roles simultaneously?
To find out, Allison Smith, College of Education & Human Development assistant professor of sport administration and a former collegiate athlete herself, conducted a study with Jeongwon Choi, assistant professor of sport management and sport management program coordinator at Georgian Court University. Their goal was to understand collegiate athletes’ motivational perspectives and patterns that allow them to succeed despite these dueling pressures.
The researchers interviewed 10 non-revenue-generating athletes who competed at the NCAA Division I level in a variety of sports. This helped ensure a balanced representation of gender and academic class demographics.
The interview included demographic and core questions about collegiate athletes’ motivations based on Self Determination Theory (SDT). This theory focuses on the degree to which someone’s behavior is self-motivated and self-determined toward their psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence.
For this study, researchers focused on three levels of motivation: intrinsic, extrinsic and amotivation. While intrinsic motivation refers to doing an activity for the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself, extrinsic motivation indicates an activity done to attain external rewards. Amotivation refers to lacking motivation altogether.
Three meaningful themes emerged from the interview data: a.) support, resources and challenges for collegiate athletes, b.) athletic identity influences unbalanced motivation and c.) importance of culture, coaches’ leadership and environment.
The study’s results, published in the Journal of Athlete Development and Experience, confirm previous research that has found collegiate athletes’ athletic identity causes them to have unbalanced motivational levels that center more around athletic goals and pursuits than academic ones.
However, the findings also showed that once athletes were in their major of choice, they became more intrinsically motivated as they began to enjoy the coursework and planning for their future careers.
Additionally, athletes were satisfied with their support offerings and resources at their schools. Previous research showed mixed results in this area.
“This work helps negate some of the stereotypes that surround collegiate athletes, disproving that they don’t care or invest in school/academics,” notes Smith. “In fact, they do care but need to ensure their major and coursework is aligned with their future goals. This is assisted by coaches, team culture and leadership that invest in the athletes in both identities they manage while in college (academic and athletic).”