#suni lee

LIVE

tutyayilmazz:
chusovitina:
Hm it’s not a very tactful thing to say for Suni but I get it. NCAA gymnastics programs make it clear that they don’t see their athletes as students first at all. How many gymnasts join a team as a freshman saying they want to be pre-med or do engineering and by sophomore year every one of them is doing the same 3 degrees? Maybe it’s because health science is really that interesting, and maybe it’s because there are a couple of majors that are “student athlete approved” and able to accommodate them not having time to do much work during spring semester every year because of 20 hours of practice + traveling to a different state to compete every weekend. A lot of student athletes have come out and said that they were explicitly or implicitly told not to major in certain things (x) (x).
Comeaux: Many athletes in my research who wanted to pursue a rigorous major – one that would have big time demands – reported a nudge or a push to a less-challenging major. That’s the culture that exists in a number of Division I schools: Academic support is largely there to maintain playing eligibility.
Their athletic programs don’t give a shit about them as students, but they’re still supposed to pretend they’re in it for the education.
i genuinely didn’t know about the schools’ push in this, thank you for the links
there’s at least one school (blanking on which one) where they required all gymnasts to have the same major and take the exact same classes so they could easily schedule practices around them. It’s fucked but idk if I can really blame Suni for saying the quiet part out loud. It’s not like she’s uniquely dismissive of like…getting an education lol, it’s that the whole system is set up so that athletes literally do not have time in their day to prioritize schooling.

A few years ago I was watching a Big 10 meet and the commentators were talking about one of the Maryland gymnasts who had some crazy double major, like robotics and engineering or something? And they mentioned how Brett Nelligan allowed her to train at her own times because of her heavy course load. To me that was like, yeah of course. Gymnastics is more an individual sport so of course they shouldn’t have to train as a team. But the way the announcers were talking, this was really rare in college gym so Maryland winds up with a lot of gymnasts who don’t want to be gymnastics coaches for life because he’s so willing to work around class schedules and accept hard majors.

I mean good for him. But if you’re someone who’s like Suni who maybe isn’t super academic (and with the spotty homeschooling a lot of gymnasts had, probably a lot of them aren’t) you’re gonna choose a school for the gym team not the academics.

But still, I wish she hadn’t said it because it really is a slap in the face to everyone who is graduating from what is supposed to be an academic institution first and foremost with either a mountain of debt or burnt out from working to pay tuition or those who are close but not quite there for scholarship money.

Anyway, I hate being a college gym fan because I have eleventy billion problems with the entire athletic/academic system. But Suni is smart to use this as a couple years of “minor league” gymnastics.