All this time I really should have been...

blogging or otherwise recording the endless stories and anecdotes about student-athletes that people (especially - ESPECIALLY - educators) share with me when I tell them about my research. Aggregated, such a collection would be nothing less than remarkable for its overwhelming negativity and general resentment (sometimes implied sometimes quite explicit). "People" normally do not have positive perceptions of or sympathy for the athletic experiences of scholarship athletes on university campuses. Of course these perceptions and my mental recording of these perceptions necessarily needs qualification: when I talk about my study I usually reveal that it is of basketball players. Immediately, then, my interlocutor(s) assume a specific type of athlete (i.e. high-profile, revenue-generating and male).

For three or so years now I've been thinking about, reading about, writing about, observing, and interviewing for this project. But it's when I'm talking about it with others (usually informally and not when presenting) that I hear the anecdotes.

Other than chasing down subjects to do interviews and waking up for 6 a.m. conditioning and dealing with IRB and all the other less than glamorous shit that goes with ethnography, there's not a day goes by that my project doesn't still have my interest. I think - I *hope* - there's going to be a lot of people who will be interested to read both this study and its inevitable sequel(s)...