Ask the expert: How sports are a gateway to understanding society

Each February the Super Bowl marks one of the year’s biggest championships in American professional sports, bringing a climactic end to another football season. While your favorite professional or collegiate sports team may not play year-round, sports can be an evergreen vehicle for educating and understanding society.

In the classroom of Bryan Ellis, an assistant professor in the Center for Integrative Studies in Social Science at Michigan State University’s College of Social Science, students explore the social science of sports. They examine athletics as a cultural institution, as well as discuss how issues of power, identity and politics reveal the deeper forces that shape the world beyond the scoreboard.

Here, Ellis answers questions about how sports are a powerful microcosm of society and how he instructs students to think critically about culture, power and identity.

What was the inspiration for this course?

In my youth, I was a student-athlete. I played basketball at the University of Montana. During my adolescence, I was a competitive track and field athlete. I was particularly good at the 800-meter dash. Also, my father was a high school basketball coach. That is to say that for most of my youth, I was passionate about sports, and I identified as an athlete.

During my first week in graduate school, my research methodology professor wanted to know my research topic. I didn’t have one and had never thought about the question. After consulting with my mentor, he encouraged me to study sports. He also introduced me to the works of the pioneering sports sociologist, Harry Edwards, who was instrumental in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics protest.

With my decision to research and study sports, I found supportive faculty members in my program. I wrote my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on the subject. When I started teaching, one of my deans asked me to offer a unique seminar for a general education course for undergraduate students. Seven years ago, I designed a course on the critical study of sports — and I have been teaching it ever since.

How did your experience as a collegiate athlete inform the course?

In the classroom, I recall my personal experiences playing sports, so that the conversations aren’t remote and abstract. I also have students think about their experiences playing or watching sports. It is a delicate balance because you are trying not to ‘toot your own horn’ while drawing meaningful personal connections to the course material.

One of the strengths of the social sciences is that the content we cover is familiar and relatable since we all exist in society — and that is also one of the challenges because we all bring our past experiences and deeply held beliefs into the classroom. Given the subject matter, we need not minimize and suppress our personal experiences. It is an asset to teaching.

What role does social science play in uncovering cultural, economic and political forces behind sports?

I often tell students on the first day of class that if they don’t like sports, there is no reason to worry. Any lack of sports knowledge will not negatively affect their understanding or performance in class. Students are shocked to find out that I am not a sports fanatic.

Studying sports is akin to the study of any institution in society. As sociologists can study family, education, corrections, poverty and homelessness, we can also study sports as an institution of society. Essentially, we use the research and theoretical tools of the discipline of sociology to understand the social, cultural and political patterns in the world of sports.

An axiom of the sub-specialty is the notion that ‘sports are a microcosm of society.’ In other words, sports are not an aberration or different genera but are a part of the larger whole. This is the message I convey to students throughout the semester.

As an example, let’s take Name, Image and Likeness, or NIL, deals in intercollegiate sports. Rather than think about NIL as an exclusive collegiate problem, I point out to students that the reason NIL emerged is not because the NCAA has changed its mind about its treatment of amateur student-athletes, but that NIL has come about as the result of a few lawsuits and NCAA settlements. In other words, the NCAA, as an American institution, was challenged by former student-athletes in the court of law. Because the verdicts were in favor of former student-athletes, the NCAA has had to make substantial changes to its guidelines and policies.

How does the course connect to contemporary issues?

We begin our class by talking about Colin Kaepernick. I ask students if they think sports are political. I get a range of answers. While the Kaepernick movement happened in 2016, it still resonates with students today. It was the last sports movement that moved beyond the sports pages to make the front-page cover story. Since I talk about gender inequality and sports, I also discuss the sports controversy surrounding trans athletes and sports competition, which is still unresolved today and politically debated.

While I want the content to be relevant to contemporary conversations, I don’t want to overemphasize news headlines and trends. I mostly bring up these subjects in the context of sports research and sociological theory — to show students how different concepts, theories and research help us to understand these issues better. More than anything, I want students to stay curious and not fall into simplistic understandings of these topics that are complex and nuanced.

Sports as “the toy department of human affairs” is an interesting phrase. How do you challenge students to think beyond that idea in this course?

I love that phrase. I stole it from Harry Edwards, who I previously mentioned. If you were to ask the average athlete and sports fan, ‘How do you see sports?’ I surmise that most of them would answer, ‘Sports are simply fun and games.’ According to this view of ‘jockocracy,’ sports are an escape from the real world. This is what Harry Edwards meant. We don’t take the study of sports seriously.

When I was working on my dissertation research at the Library of Congress, I sparked a conversation with another doctoral student who was there to work on her research. She was conducting research on the military and veterans. When she asked me about my studies, I felt embarrassed, like an impostor. I thought compared to her serious topic that my research was meaningless. When I responded to her question, she indicated that she didn’t know much about my topic. The sociology of sports is a niche sub-specialty in sociology.

What do you hope students take away from this course?

I hope students learn to think critically and deeply about the way sports reflect our society, culture and history. I hope that after students successfully pass my class, they will leave the notion that ‘sports are the toy department of human affairs’ behind. I hope that if someone were to suggest to a student who has taken my class that sports are simply fun and games, that they would respond by saying, ‘I don’t know about that. I think it is a lot deeper.’