Taking the Student out of Student Athlete

I love language. I studied language as an undergrad, and I find it fascinating the way it evolves. It likely stems from growing up with George Carlin on HBO – his rants on air travel and other euphemisms still kill me. My first communications professor I encountered as an undergrad stressed that effective, meaningful communication was concise communication.

And then he elaborated over the next 59 minutes.

Amongst his elaborative diatribes was the notion that extra words that do not further the message, almost always result in confusion, having the direct opposite impact the message was intended to send.

In honor of this professor, I’ll cut to the chase. Can we remove "student" from student-athlete? We are dealing with college sports, so they must be students, right?

Adding the word "student" may help some institutions assuage the feelings of guilt they have about passing students through their system who otherwise would not make it if they were not athletes, but at an institution such as the one that signs my check, I am fully confident that most of our athletes are students first. Those who aren’t weed themselves out rather quickly.

Many of them who do perform poorly in the classroom do so because they are student-Greeks, or more often than not, Greek-Students. That they are sometimes also athletes generally reflects more poorly on athletics than it does on the inter-Greek Council.

May my former professor excuse my digression.

Our drama students aren’t student-thespians. Our insect club does not consider its membership student-entomologists.

Putting the word student before the word athlete does little more than draw attention to the fact that at certain places at certain times, athletes were athletes, and not necessarily students. If this is still occurring, placing the word student beforehand is not going to solve the problem. Removing it from the phrase does not remove the kid from class, just as adding the word does not put a butt in a seat.

Other language I could do without:
First-Year Student: Freshmen and women (womyn), get over it. I want to hurl every time I come across a roster on the web with FY.

Not sports related but bugging me this morning nonetheless:
Person of Interest – Our current Administration has done more to harm language…. Sorry, different rant. This phrase was coined for the still unresolved anthrax attacks and its suspect, Steven Hatfill. Now every news channel uses it for the suspect in every case of a person who disappears. Let’s make this easier on everyone, there are suspects, victims, and sometimes witnesses.

In my world, a person of interest is generally a fan, sportswriter, or parent following one of our teams. I usually refer to them as fan, sportswriter, or parent, often substituting the word jerk for the first and third, and on occasion, the second.

There are many more, but putting them all out there would remove your incentive to share your own. What else should we eliminate SIDs? Let’s GIT-R-DUN.

The Rigors and Cure for Base-ketball Season

To most of the folks in the real world (that blurry place that exists off campus), Baseketball was just one of many goofy, easily forgettable movies. To those of us who breathe in the air on planet SID, it’s a real season, and we’re in the midst of it.

Some of us call it swretlaxtennis season, at other institutions it’s known as basketindoorsoftballgolf season. It’s kind of like that indefinable last few seconds between the last waking moment and first minute of sleep. It’s a punch drunk wooziness resulting from a football and basketball season that has raced by leaving the inevitable hangover that is spring in its wake. There is no amount of 4 a.m. Denny’s grease it seems, to sop up the metaphorical booze.

The tank is running low, the tires are running bald, but the finish line is in sight. The energy to post anything more eludes me.

The only cure for this hangover bordering on coma I can think of is found in a bag of clubs on a warm spring day, sans cell phone, email or any means of impersonal interpersonal communication. No mass communicating either. No communicating anything that doesn’t involve me lying about how many shots (golf or Jameson) proceeded my current, or isn’t otherwise related to the current journey around the circuit of silent relief.

Yup, that's really all I've got. I'm beat tired my SID bretheren and sistern. Beat tired.