Research Sources: Collegiate Student-Athletes

For project 2 my proposed topic is collegiate student-athletes and what makes one based on my criteria. I picked this topic because I am one and it is something I'm obviously interested in collegiate athletics. I want to explore more into this subject because it's most likely I will learn more about athlete's role on a university campus and perhaps questions I have had. Also the reason I've chosen this topic is to find out the judgements other people may have on student athletes, and what kind of criteria they may have evaluated me by. The well emphasized idea of treating other Sun Devil's like a family and being a "good teammate" include many things besides just the thought of acting nicely towards each other. These things make up my criteria for making judgements of student-athletes at ASU, or evaluating, if you like. My criteria is created by a series of aspects of a Sun Devil's life, day, season or moment that makes them successful. Included in the criteria is: practice/prep, performance, academics and management, and support. In evaluating these topics I will identify how and where sports teams practice and prepare for their seasons, perform on game days, how they balance school and sport, and one of the most important ones, supporting of other teams and athletes.

My first source from the Hayden Library is a book called "Athlete's Game Plan for College and Career" written by Stephen Figler and Howard Figler. It is composed up of 252 pages and divided into 3 "Game Plans": Choosing a college, winning in college, and a successful career. I will probably mostly be using the second game plan to enforce my subjects of succeeding at ASU. I think through the 3 parts, it can be very useful to use the transition of the college experience from applying to graduating and even your life afterwards. This way I can use the past present and future to identify supporting evidence for my evaluation. In particular Part 2: Chapter 10 describes studying and coping skills, which will go perfectly along with finding balance in school work and sport. A cool thing I found while flipping through the book were a couple Athlete Profiles which were really interesting to read. They explained the aspects of a certain athletes collegiate career and were useful as supporting evidence for my project.

My second source I found is also a book from Hayden called Sociology of Sport: Perspectives written by Susan L. Greendorfer and Andrew Yiannakis. Has 191 pages also composed into 3 parts: Sociology of sport as a field study, Sport, Social Progresses, and Social Roles, and Sport and Social institutions. I will mostly be using the last part because it relates with universities and sport policies. What I find interesting about this book is the different perspectives given about sport that I have never thought about before. In skimming it I learned about the impact alumni have on sports teams and funding them financially. I don't think I will use this book a lot for my project just because there isn't too much about athletes versus the the broader view of the sports themselves.

My third source is a scholarly article written by Robyn Holmes, Marilyn McNeil, Patti Adorna and Jill Procaccino called Collegiate Student Athletes' Preferences and Perceptions Regarding Peer Relationships. It's a journal article of 14 pages and is basically what I'm after in terms of finding out more about how student athletes function and why we judge them based on certain social standards. In reading the article it was interesting to read some of the ways leadership on a team is evaluated and they explained some studies that were performed to discover how student athletes acted compared to other peers. Also the article itself was an evaluation mostly about leadership within teams and it will be very beneficial for me to see how they use evidence from studies and teams to support their conclusions and criteria on judging student-athlete perceptions.