Quincy Monday

In this, the very first episode of Earning Our Stripes, I interviewed the runner up in the 2022 NCAA wrestling tournament at 157 pounds; Quincy Monday. We talk about how Quincy balances his time between athletics and academics at Princeton, his journey to college athletics, and his approach to this season. Give it a listen!

What we Talked About and Why It Matters

Over the course of the first episode Quincy and I covered a number of issues that speak directly to the difficulties of balancing athletic and academic commitments. Chiefly, we discussed the implications of compliance confusion. As an NCAA athlete the ability to play, translating the time poured into practice to performance, depends on maintaining your eligibility. The minute you agree to comply with the NCAA you are informed that it is your duty to maintain your eligibility. There is a myriad of rules and in order to keep playing you must never breach any of them. As Quincy and I discussed this fact we shared with each other the worries that many student athletes feel; that you may inadvertently do something wrong and have your student athlete status striped away. Adherence to the NCAA’s rules pertaining to eligibility can be underscored by Foucault’s idea that “discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (Foucault 1995, 138) While I do not wish to assert that being confused about athletic eligibility is something that all student athletes struggle with, I do wish to make the point that confusion whilst being mandatorily compliant with the system can limit the political autonomy of the athlete.

On a similar note, I found it particularly disheartening to hear Quincy say ““I feel like I’m in a disadvantage a lot in classes.” The disadvantage he is talking about here is in comparison to Non-Student athletes at Princeton who do not have enforced hours of practice to attend. At Princeton the hours between 4:20pm-7:20pm are set aside for athletic practice with no academic classes allowed to be scheduled. This of course means that student athletes shouldn’t ever have to miss a class they either want or are required to take for practice. However, it also means that non-student athletes are able to use this time to complete work and attend scheduled office hours that athletes are not. Again, not every student athlete finds this to present much difficulty, however, it means that athletes only begin to turn to their work after dinner time. For both Quincy and myself our years as underclassmen often meant staying up to complete our work until the small hours of the morning. For Quincy, his dedication to excel within the classroom and without lead him to attempt to do all the work that was handed to him, and as a result spend multiple days a week surviving on a mere 5-6 hours of sleep. In short, it was difficult for him to reconcile the demands of academia and athletics without both suffering as a result. Looking back at Foster’s work I could compare the culture of panopticonics employed in the athletic department of the pseudonym university athletic department, and student athlete struggles with sleep/work balance at Princeton. Comparing the two suggests that the technique is employed to ensure that athletes do not have the capacity to pick and choose which realm they want to prioritise. (Foster 2003)

Sources

Foster, Kevin Michael. 2003. “Panopticonics: The Control and Surveillance of Black Female Athletes in a Collegiate Athletic Program.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 34, no. 3 : 300–323. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3196002.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books. pages 135-170