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Should College Athletes Be Paid Athletes?

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?Sports have always been a large and very influential part of my life. I come from a line of college and professional level athletes so I grew up heavily influenced by those people. My grandfather and my dad both set out from the time I was born to condition me to admire the dedication and hard work that athletes put into their craft. My dad decided that I was destined to be a Georgia Bulldog just like he was and by the time I was seven I could throw a football in a perfect spiral. He also taught me many lessons behind the importance of sports. It wasn’t only about the fame that came from your name, but how you accomplished it. Only the athletes that dedicated every ounce of sweat and blood to their sport could make an impact on the field and in turn, make an impact on the audiences that would soon gather to watch them play. The amount of time that I put into learning how to throw a football was lengthy and I could only imagine the amount of effort one must put in to play at a higher, collegiate level of the game. My dad expressed to me that playing for a team was like a job. You had to be there and do your duty for the team, or else the entire institution would collapse in upon itself because every piece to the puzzle was important. It made complete sense. What would a football team be without their quarterback? How could a touchdown be scored if the running back or the receiver were not there to drive it into the end zone? I then thought to myself, what an amazing career it would be to work as one on a field doing something I love the most. But there was one catch: no one gets a salary. A recent study stated that the NCAA (The National Collegiate Athletic Association) obtained over $11 billion in revenue and received a net profit of $71 million dollars: a colossal amount of money, more than I can wrap my mind around. “the NCAA last year signed a 14-year, $11 billion TV contract just to televise the basketball tournament.”(Gazette). Yet none of it went to

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