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VTHokie2000

Joined: 01/01/2005 Posts: 33818
Likes: 12458


Again you are only looking at it from the athletic department's perspecitve


You have to take a step back and look at it from the entire school's perspective. I indirectly mention exposure for the non-revenue sports in my paragraph talking about exposure for the school:

Also keep in mind that schools want to recruit "the best and brightest students" in academics. Since majority of the non-revenue sports don't have a professional league that pay well, students who play these sports are truly student-athletes and will go pro in something else. If you want to see VT continue to become a top academic institution in the world, then sponsoring as many sports as possible can be a good/great academic recruiting tool especially for foreign students.

Logically the school uses the exposure (doesn't necessarily have to be on TV) gained from non-revenue sports to recruit students to apply to the school. For example I knew in HS (1992-1996) that Oklahoma State and Iowa have probably the most historic wrestling programs in the NCAA long before the networks started televising meets and championships. Also, that BYU and Cal have historic rugby programs. Likewise, I learned about Johns Hopkins because of its lacrosse program long before the networks started televising lacrosse games. Even though I either never got to see a televised match on TV or in some cases the exposure was very limited, I obtained this information by either word of mouth or reading a sports article. Now that conferences have their own networks, they have an opportunity to televise a wider range of sports to help fill the content. FWIW whenever the networks were televising Olympic trials, it wasn't uncommon for the announcers to mention the athlete's school. It is how I learned about Stanford's swimming, diving, and water polo programs.

For individual sports, a country doesn't necessarily need colleges to help train their athletes. However for the team sports; the choices are either high schools, colleges, or professional leagues. Even though there are some professional leagues out there that allow the athlete to make enough money to survive on, remember that the club owns the rights to the athlete. There have been a couple times (especially in ice hockey and soccer) where the club didn't allow a player to compete in the Olympics because they didn't want to risk the player getting injured.

(In response to this post by chuckd4vt)

Posted: 03/03/2016 at 6:53PM



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Current Thread:
 
  
What is the next step? -- Guy LeDouche 03/01/2016 11:46AM
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