Scholars Argue for Moving Competitive Sports from Higher Education's Sidelines to the Midfield

Lindsey Wilson University panelists extol benefits of sport performance major.

by Duane Bonifer

COLUMBIA, Ky. (11/11/2025) — The time is right for colleges and universities to offer a major in sport performance.

That was the consensus of four scholars who are part of a national movement that promotes the power and potential of competitive sport to shape and create leaders. The quartet spoke at "The Educational Value of Sport," a public panel held Monday, Nov. 10, at Lindsey Wilson University.

The four speakers were members of the Sport Major Collective, a group of scholars who help colleges and universities transform the athlete experience into a rigorous form of academic study. Lindsey Wilson is among the colleges and universities considering adding an undergraduate major in sport performance.

"This is a real exciting moment in the history of American higher education," David Hollander, a clinical professor at New York University's Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, told a crowd in the Norma and Glen Hodge Center for Discipleship.

Hollander, the author of the book How Basketball Can Save the World: 13 Guiding Principles for Reimagining What's Possible, said that college students who play competitive sports often develop and nurture qualities and traits that make them attractive prospective employees to some of the nation's top firms and businesses.

"Study after study have shown that students who engage in athletics and sports develop those skills and habits of mind" that many businesses seek in employees, he said. "It's this kind of intellectual development that we are seizing on and saying, 'Let's circularize it, let's make it a major.'"

Returning to the roots

In many ways, creating an undergraduate major in sport performance is nothing more than reclaiming a place that competitive sports lost more than two centuries ago when American higher education leaders relegated athletics to the sidelines and as part of a school's extracurricular programming.

"Sports is an ancient cultural form, no different than art, music, dance or drama," said Hollander. "It's simply been left out. It simply hasn't been articulated. It simply hasn't been given the educational value or formalization that all these other wonderful and totally valid portals to the human condition have been given."

Sport management professor Erianne Weight said she realized that a fundamental rethinking of competitive sports' place in higher education was necessary after an experience she had more than 10 years ago at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she works.

"I asked the question, 'Can someone tell me the difference between an athlete and a musician on our campus at UNC?' And very quickly a full professor said, 'Yes, I can have an intelligent conversation with one and I can't with the other,'" said Weight, who was a student-athlete as an undergraduate at the University of Utah. "That moment is really my genesis for why I'm here today. I realized it was a lot deeper it was the organizational structure."

As Weight pointed out, a student musician who practices all day is often viewed as a dedicated scholar. But a student-athlete who practices their craft all day is often derisively viewed as a "dumb jock" or a "gym rat."

"Really, the only difference is the organizational structure and the way that society looks at these populations," she said.

Outlining the benefits

University of the Pacific (California) philosophy professor Lou Matz said that he realized the power of competitive sports after reading a journal article by the late Myles Brand, a philosopher who was president of Indiana University and later the NCAA. Brand argued that the many benefits of competitive sports include integrating theory and practice, as well as teaching athletes concepts about their sport that they then translate into action.

"Competitive sports also help athletes develop emotional competencies, social competencies and intelligences that aren't easily gained in the classroom -- including teamwork, learning to accept criticism, critical thinking under pressure, discipline and grit," said Matz, who played basketball in college and now teaches a course on the philosophy of sport.

Matz said that at its heart, competitive sports share many of the fundamental goals of a liberal arts education.

"Just as traditional higher education disciplines free the mind, help the mind move more easily against obstacles of ignorance, prejudice and social pressure, so too the physical movement, the complexity of physical movement in competitive sport liberates the body," said Matz. "There is a kind of liberation through movement."

Courtney Murray, an instructor of sport management at Campbellsville (Kentucky) University, said that awarding students academic credit for participation in competitive sports is similar to giving students academic credit for internships, participation in study-abroad programs or other off-campus experiences.

"You have this concrete experience, and you're given the opportunity to reflect and make meaning on what that experience meant," said Murray, who played softball in college. "Then you're given the opportunity to abstractly connect that experience to a theory, to data and to research. You're also given the opportunity to change by taking that feedback and actively experiment with your experience."

Hollander said that research suggests that a sport performance major could be popular with today's undergraduate students. Earlier this year, the Sport Major Collective surveyed more than 1,500 student-athletes who competed at schools with NCAA Division I, II or III programs. The overwhelming response was favorable toward exploring a sport performance major.

In addition to restoring competitive sport's place in education, however, Hollander said that a sport performance major also meets the new demands of the world economy.

"This is a world of change, this is a world of rapid change," he said. "The kind of skills that we need in a world of change is to learn how to learn, to solve new problems, to work well with others, to value and cultivate humanization in a rapidly dominant technological society."

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