Was Playing College Sports Worth It?

After a season of covering Utah Women’s Basketball a moment of reflection.

After her press conference with the media Wednesday, Utah Women’s Head Basketball Coach Lynne Roberts posed an interesting question, was this even worth it?

Should we have forced unpaid amateurs to bubble up for six months and play college sports? Was it worth saving an athletics department 15 million dollars?

Probably not. It probably didn’t do college athletes like Brynna Maxwell and Kemery Martin any good to go through this challenge. Sure you can say long term it might build toughness, but in the short term the effects on these young adults’ mental health were probably not worth it.

The team didn’t do well, only 5 wins on the season as a whole. For large swaths turnovers were an issue, shooting never went well, the team just struggled.

As Roberts put it earlier in the year, the plane never got off the ground. That kind of year makes you think, what can you take away from this? Nothing. Sometimes there are no lessons to be learned, sometimes in life, we have exercises in pointlessness, that describes this season.

An exercise in pointlessness, an exercise that took more than a few years off the lives of everyone involved.