Grimit, Nicole (2014) "Effects of Student Athletics on Academic Performance," The Journal of

Undergraduate Research: Vol. 12 , Article 5.

The author of this article, Nicole Grimit, was a student at South Dakota State University where

she completed her Bachelor of Science degree in consumer affairs with a minor in business and

marketing. She was also a member of the swim team, holding five school records for South

Dakota State University. Grimit is now the assistant athletic director at Concordia University, St.

Paul. This article is a part of The Journal of Undergraduate Research, and it was put out by

Open Prairie: Open Public Research Access Institutional Repository and Information Exchange.

This article is peer reviewed and put together like a report being split into ten parts, the Abstract,

Introduction, Review of Literature, Methods, Results, Discussion, Limitations,

Acknowledgements, References, and the Appendix. In the abstract Grimit explains what the

article is about, stating that the study was to determine if participation in collegiate athletics is

beneficial to students. In the study done at South Dakota State University sixty-seven student-

athletes completed a survey. According to the survey, participation in athletics was “extremely

beneficial”. In the Introduction, Grimit gives the background of student-athletes and how there

are over 450,00 collegiate athletes in the United States (as of 2012). The review of literature goes

over other articles and students done about the same topic. She includes voices from both sides,

showing the negative and positive effects. Into the methods, Grimit starts to describe the survey

that she conducted. The survey was 16 questions and sixty-seven of the surveys were used for the

study. Two of the questions were general questions, while the other 14 were research questions

concerning the effects of participation in collegiate athletics. In the results portion of the article,

there were 14 bar graphs that showed the results for the 14 questions. For each question, the

trend leaned towards athletics being more beneficial than not, even though not everyone felt that
way. In the discussion part Grimit states, “At South Dakota State University, this survey found

that athletes do better in school than their peers” (52). Grimit still explains though how this isn’t

the case for all people, but that her study shows that student-athletes benefit from participation in

collegiate athletics.

“The concern over student athlete success has culminated into millions of dollars being spent at

universities for academic support of their athletes along with new NCAA regulations over

academic affairs, hours spent practicing, and days off” (39).

“Research indicates that there is a positive correlation between satisfaction with academic

support services and confidence in career direction and identification of life skills” (52).

“When these 70 athletes were asked to describe the effect of athletic involvement in their lives,

52 answered ‘best choice of their life’” (53).

This article was not bad to read, even though it was more of a report. I like the fact that there

were visuals in this article and the author used graphs to show the results of the study done. I also

like the fact of how the author had a section with the limitations of the study, providing what

some of the flaws could have been. This article deals with my inquiry question because it was a

study of my exact same question. It used information from actual college athletes. The bias of the

author though is that she was a college athlete herself and she probably had a good experience.