T.J. Dougherty a former student and athlete at Cabrini College talked about teacher's and coaches favoritism of athletes. He talked about some of his friends being illegally recruited to go to big school such as Pin State, Stanford, and Harvard. T.J. was an active team member in soccer at his school and he noticed that many teachers let them slack off and gave them grades. As far as coaches go he said “they tried to bribe him into performing well on the team.” His coaches would give their players soccer equipment, free meals, clothes and even took them out to eat just to butter them up. As the rest of them took up the offers so did he. It was not until he noticed he would not study for test and would make a bad grade but the teacher would give him a good grade. He could not bear to see the students that had to study so hard all night just to make a B. It was then that he knew what he was doing was wrong. Unlike the others he chose to take school more seriously and began to get more into the books instead of soccer. He now knew that soccer was not more important then your education. This is when he came up with the theory of his paper for his English class “cheating gets you nowhere”. (Click on the Student's Papers link and then scroll down to click on T.J. Dougherty's paper)
This article touched me because I am one of those students that must study hard all night just to make a B. In my opinion athletes are treated differently and are unaware of what not having an education can lead you. Many athletes get big headed because they tend to be the talk of the school and many admire them. In my opinion if you don't have someone to lead you to the right path of not cheating and trying to always take the easy way out that will become a life long habit that will become harder to get rid of. I think as well as teaching the students about education and team sports they should also teach them that challenging your self will help you to succeed. Many have low self-esteem and tend to take the easy way out only because they don't challenge themselves and they fell that what they are doing is all they can be good at. Here is a question to all athletes, if you break a leg, or get injured in any kind of way what will you have to fall back on, and if teachers and coaches have the power to give you all those things don't they have the power to take it all away in just a split second?
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