The Effects of Academic Clustering and Anxiety on College Athletes Performance
Corey Darnell Rolling
Northern Illinois University

The Effects of Academic Clustering and Anxiety on College Athletes Performance
Significance of Problem
In the past 30 years, college athletics has grown into a big business. With sponsorships from top tier athletic brands and broadcasting deals with major television station such as American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television station. The ability to recruit the best of the best athletes has resulted in millions of dollars of revenue for the university. Universities like Arkansas, Ole Miss and LSU, are identified by their athletic programs solely. Although these universities may have top …show more content…
This conceptual idea were documented by Renick in 1974, which states that “football and basketball players were being clustered into particular majors(Renick, 1974). The first academic study of academic clustering was followed up by Case, Greer & Brown in 1987 (Case, et al., 1987). Academic clustering occurs in all sports, but are more prevalent in basketball and football. In relation to athletic sports, football has had the most players to participate in a single major. The redundancy of enrolling athletes in the same major are high. It is not uncommon for athletes to share the same interest in majors, but it is an issues when these athletes are push towards particular major. The NCAA has created sanctions and rules to govern these athletic teams, to make sure they are meeting universities and NCAA standards. Manipulation of these rules and sanctions occurs all the time. For example, switching majors of a starting player who was ineligible to play in the previous game. To avoid issues with athletes eligibility, coaches and advisers per sway athletes into “friendly majors”. Fountain and Finely analyzed official media guides of Division I teams and members of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conference. With-in these majors, the coaches, advisers and athletes creating a “path of least resistance” (Fountain & Finley, 2009). Fountain and Finely identified …show more content…
Academic clustering occurs when 25% or more of an athletic team shares a single academic major (Fountain & Finely, 2011). Research on academic clustering has focused on analyzing the amount of student-athletes with-in any given major. In addition, a higher percentage of minority athletes were shown to be in academic clustered majors. There is an absence of research on the effects of academic clustering and athletic performance/anxiety. Based on the inverted-U model, when performance is high and arousal/anxiety is low, the overall performance will remain high. In relation to arousal/anxiety, stress and other outside factors are eliminated to ensure optimal performance. This limited factors are related to this arousal/anxiety is academics. In this study, college football players within academic clustered majors will have their anxiety levels evaluated to determine a relationship with athletic performance. Following the inverted-U model, I propose the use of academic clustering allows student-athletes performance and anxiety to be at the 50:50 mark. Their level of arousal/anxiety will match their level of performance, which will result in optimal athletic