An NCAA Division 1 football player spends 50 to 60 hours a week practicing, until the season starts and it “eases” to 40 to 50 hours a week once the season, and classes, begin. College athletes spend more time training and playing their sport than they do actually studying or doing school related activities. Imagine trying to keep up with your schoolwork while devoting more hours in the sport than the typical American work week, without making a cent? These athletes attend class for 3-4 hours, like every other student on campus, but still have to fulfill their commitment and attend meetings and workouts after. This not only forces an athlete to wake up earlier but also leaves them physically exhausted. Since athletes are dedicating so much time and effort into their sports, they need to be looked at and considered as employees, not student athletes.

College athletes are taken advantage of and deserve to be compensated for their services while playing sports. These students are exploited and used to make money and out of everything that particular school makes, the athlete never given a penny of it. All of the hard work, blood, sweat and tears that they put into that program were all for free. All of the money they made for their school was all done for free. The term “student-athlete” is nothing more than a cover up that colleges use so that they do not have to pay any of their athletes. Yes, these players have received scholarships offered by these schools, but a college would not offer an athlete they did not believe would perform at the highest standards possible. So they are already sure that these players will perform at a high level therefore generating a large amount of money over the period of time that a particular athlete is involved in that sports program. Scholarships do help the athletes but that does not cover up the fact of how hard they are working and they still need to be paid for doing the things that they do to contribute to the athletic program, as well as the school.

Most NCAA athletes put in so much, work averaging 40 plus hours a week. The NCAA says that they cannot pay their athletes because they are students or the scholarship that most of these athletes received is enough. In reality these players need to be getting paid, going to school for free helps, but if you aren’t receiving any income you won’t be able to pay for necessities. Although it is wrong that the NCAA isn’t paying their athletes these players know that they are getting into, no one is forcing these players to join. The players who are going to play a sport in college have background in that specific sport and most have been training for years so they know how hard they have to push themselves during training. These players might not be getting paid now but if they continue to put in hard work they might be able to make it into the big leagues.

NCAA athletes need to be paid even though there is great points on why they shouldn’t be paid, these kids put all there time and effort and do more work than most of the students in the school. Most believe they do more work than professional athletes and put more into the schools than regular students achievements.