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Lots of folks are talking about bonkers team rules at the collegiate level (thanks for the excellent journalism, @TheIntercollege!), so here’s a noncomprehensive list of wild/invasive rues I’ve been held to in my five years as a college athlete.
1.) Fines for missing tutoring appointments are totally a thing which is insane, considering that college athletes are unpaid. I worked part-time as a research assistant in undergrad (for $7.25 an hour) and I was always scared of missing appointments and forfeiting that cash.
2.) Lots of athletes are held to strict hygiene/appearance standards. We had a rule against face/naval piercings and hoop earrings, which is pretty tame compared to other rules mandating a “neat/professional appearance” (which almost always have racist undertones—no dreads, etc.)
2a.) A quick glimpse at hiring practices in the NCAA reveals why racist appearance rules are so common. Most NCAA coaches are white and they’re allowed to police their (mostly Black) athletes’ appearances as they see fit (bc the NCAA doesn’t regulate team rules).
2b.) Appearance rules can also be gendered. I remember mandatory team weigh-ins where women would be policed for our weight much more than the men. Coaches would threaten to sit us out if we didn’t hit a certain weight and assign us unhealthy diets or risk losing a scholarship.
2c.) Most coaches of women’s teams in the NCAA are men. So the regulation/control over women’s bodies is extremely problematic, especially considering that they can lead to eating disorders, injuries and mental health issues in women, even years after they stop competing.
3.) Relationship rules are absolutely a thing. My team didn’t have any formal rules against relationships, but a coach got really mad at me my when I started dating a guy bc she thought he’d be a distraction from track (but not from my schoolwork).
3a.) I’ve talked to athletes from other schools and they’ve told me that their coaches didn’t allow romantic relationships period.
4.) There are also unwritten rules. One time, I was rehabbing in the training room and my coach called me on my cell phone. I stepped outside of the training room to take the call. Came back inside, and my trainer refused to treat me bc I apparently violated a rule.
4a.) My trainer said that cell phone use in the training room wasn’t allowed. That rule wasn’t anywhere in writing, and athletes were always on their phones in the training room. But my trainer sent me home that day without treatment bc I supposedly violated a rule.
4b.) Let me reiterate: I was denied medical treatment by my trainer for violating an unwritten and loosely enforced rule. For taking a phone call from my coach.
5.) Punishments for violating a team rule vary by institution, but my coach’s punishment of choice was dawn patrol (aka: really early morning workouts designed to make us feel pain, rather than enhance our athletic performance).
5a.) Here’s how dawn patrol usually worked. Let’s say an athlete was late for practice one morning. That athlete would have to show up an hour early the next day and roll around on the infield of the track for an hour.
5b.) Why? Because when you continuously roll around on your stomach for that long, it invokes motion sickness and makes you throw up. That’s what our coaches told us—it was a punishment designed to cause us pain (and then we had to practice directly afterward).
5c.) Years after I graduated, I casually mentioned dawn patrol to my dad (a former Army Captain). He got really quiet and then told me “That’s a barbaric form of punishment, Katie.” I thought it wasn’t that big of a deal bc my coaches thought it was okay.
5d.) Another option for dawn patrol was a team workout, and these usually happened when a group of athletes was continuously caught breaking the rules. We would meet in the weight room at 5:00 AM and run through drills until we threw up or collapsed.
5e.) But here’s the kicker: the athletes who actually broke the rules weren’t allowed to participate. They were only allowed to watch their teammates suffer for their irresponsibility. Which, from a psychological standpoint, is really, really messed up.
I could go on, but the fact of the matter is that athletes are under way too much coach control thanks to the way NCAA policy works. I mentioned earlier that there are no NCAA policies that regulate team rules. That means coaches can (and do) essentially write whatever they want.
I’ve argued to folks that this strips a lot of basic rights and freedoms from college athletes and puts them in a separate class of students. But the NCAA continuously says that college athletes should be treated like non-athlete students.
My follow-up question is: How can college athletes be treated the same as regular students when they operate under a vastly different set of rules? They are clearly living very different lives than their non-athlete peers. That makes them uniquely vulnerable to abuses of power.
The nature of overly strict team rules only highlights the fact that college athletes need extra protection. The NCAA’s negligence in regulating team rules combined with its strict discipline in other areas (like NIL and scholarship policies) sets athletes up for abuse.
If the NCAA truly wanted to treat college athletes as regular students, the Association would regulate coaches, not athletes. Because it’s clear that plenty of coaches want to control their athletes in ways that are borderline inhumane and arguably illegal.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a detailed FOIA rundown of insane team rules courtesy of @DanielLibit and @LurkCyphers, which should be mandatory reading for any college sports fan: https://theintercollegiate.com/must-let-head-coach-know/
