Wreck sports

It’s 1:20 in the morning – do you know where your roommate is?\nMine’s clattering in the door with her lacrosse sticks, red-faced and exhausted after another club sports practice running from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. \nSenior Annie Banfich, like most other club sports athletes, is generally just fine with the inconvenient practice times and jumping through other necessary hoops to do athletics on top of an already demanding college lifestyle. In fact, when Annie’s not dealing with inconvenient practice times or attempting to scramble up the funds demanded by the club sports teams, she’s working on her honors English thesis, sending out resumes and holding down a part-time job.\nIU Athletics, meet the kids you’re screwing over. \nComplaints of overdramatic student outcries? Fine, let’s look at the issue pragmatically. Eight club sports teams are affected by what comes down to a usage fee for their 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., Monday through Thursday practice slot at the John Mellencamp Pavilion. They’re getting hit up for $500 a week, effective immediately, providing a decent shot of extra revenue for the Athletics Department.\nA lot of gain? Might sound like it – until one remembers all the other vast sources of revenue for IU Athletics. That huge scoreboard-video board in Assembly Hall, for example, makes money with every advertisement it scrolls. Corporate donations, alumni donor bases, higher ticket sales, large-scale advertising – the list goes on: Big Ten Athletics organizations are not in short supply of avenues for funding.\nAnd so, cost-benefit analysis? Is it really worth slamming a near-fatal blow to these club sports teams in exchange for such a relatively small benefit, one that could easily be gathered from these other sources?\nAnd in spite of the enormous outcry, there is one major point that hasn’t been talked about enough, one that, sadly, makes the situation more disappointing than even the livid public forums would have. The major point is the message sent regarding values of the University – or rather, the lack of value any non-revenue creating traditions have, regardless of their worth to the school as a whole. It blatantly informs our student athletes that they are a commodity: If you weren’t highlighted on last night’s SportsCenter, and you’re not rolling in ticket sales, then just pay up right now; your presence in IU Athletics is nothing but an expense, and it’s too costly for us to hack. \nSo does this behavior simply continue, with athletics taking money from those who don’t have it until somebody tells Rick Greenspan and co. that they’re beating up on kindergartners on a playground? Aside from the fact that they highlight the department’s total lack of class, the fees are not an efficient source of revenue from an economic perspective. \nThe effects of this aren’t receipts on a balance sheet; they’re kids, not unlike Annie, who make vast contributions to the overall energy on the IU campus. Expendable commodities?\nSwing and a miss, IU Athletics.