How college athletes are "trained"

■ Reporter Chen Bin

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are in full swing. The achievements of the ice and snow athletes have made the people of the whole country proud, and the colleges and universities they attend have also cheered for their students through social media.

"If we roughly estimate, at least 80% of the high-level athletes in the country are college students." Wang Jiahong, chief expert of soochow University's Soochow Think Tank and director of the Key Research Base of Sports And Social Sciences of the State General Administration of Sport, told China Science Daily.

Master in college

Ren Ziwei, a mainlander who won the gold medal in the men's 1,000m in short track speed skating, is currently a graduate student at Beijing Sport University. Fan Kexin, Wu Dajing, Qu Chunyu, Zhang Yuting and other speed skating team members are also Ren Ziwei's college classmates.

At this Winter Olympics, the university with this honor is not only Beijing Sport University. Another short track speed skating team member, Sun Long, is a 2018 undergraduate student at Northeast Normal University. On the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics, shortly after the announcement of the list of mainland athletes, Soochow University introduced three suzhou university students who were successfully selected for the athlete list - Guo Dan, a 2020 graduate student of the school's Sports College, Wu Zhitao, a graduate student of the class of 2021, and Du Jiani, a graduate of the class of 2021.

Among the women's football teams that have just won great honors for the country, Zhang Linyan, the youngest member of this national team, is a 2020 undergraduate student of Beijing Normal University, and her alumni also include national team teammates Wang Shuang and Gao Chen. At Jiangsu Normal University, thousands of miles away from Beijing Normal University, five women's football team members, including Wang Xiaoxue, who "blocked the gun hole" with his body in the final, were all students of the school.

At last year's Summer Olympic Games, more famous universities brushed the screen to "claim" the lively situation of the champion, I believe that everyone has not forgotten.

It is worth mentioning that there are also some differences in the time of entering the university, athletes in different sports. For example, female gymnasts, due to their early age, basically choose to enter university after retirement. Taking the women's gymnastics team that won gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games as an example, almost all 6 team members of that year chose to enter colleges and universities after retiring.

Athletes in some sports will choose to enter the university at the active stage. According to Wu Xu, coach of the badminton team of Beijing Jiaotong University, in the field of badminton, more than 90% of the active high-level athletes are college students. "This is because the golden age of badminton is roughly between the ages of eighteen and nineteen and twenty-three or four, which coincides with the time spent studying for college students."

The above two admission periods also represent the two main forms of high-level athletes entering colleges and universities. Talking about the ratio of active athletes to retired athletes among all college athletes, Wang Jiahong gave a number, "about four or six open."

Learn how time is guaranteed

During the Winter Olympics, the news that Ren Ziwei wanted to turn in his homework after winning the championship and the class teacher moved him out of the homework group for fear of affecting the game made many people smile. This also reflects the sense of identity of these national athletes for their "college student" identity.

"Whether it is for sports students, general college athletes, or 'national hand' level athletes, in our management of them, we have always implemented the concept of being the first person, learning second, and playing third." Wu Xu said that in training, the first thing to ensure is their study time.

According to him, compared with the average student, the cultural foundation level of athletes and college students is often weaker, but their will quality is stronger than the former. "We can't deny that individual players neglect knowledge learning, and even have the phenomenon of not graduating normally, but the vast majority of athletes are very hardworking."

In terms of professional choices during their studies, athletes usually choose majors related to their sports, such as sports training majors or physical education majors. However, there are exceptions, such as Beijing Jiaotong University does not have a special sports major, so many athletes choose to major in law.

According to Wang Jiahong's recollection, Chen Yanqing, the women's 58 kg champion at the Beijing Olympic Games, applied for the physical education major when she entered Soochow University, but she chose to transfer to the business administration major halfway through. "At that time, we were worried about whether her cultural class grades would keep up, but she went to class with ordinary students and her grades did not fall."

Of course, because athletes need to invest a lot of energy in training, schools will also take measures such as using training to offset some credits and extend the number of years of study to help them graduate successfully.

Wang Jiahong told China Science News that for college athletes, different schools will also develop different training programs. "For example, if students have competition tasks, they usually study in half a day and train in half a day. However, there are also schools that choose to let athletes complete credits and then carry out relatively intensive training. If it comes to the athlete's competition cycle, the school will send teachers to the training base to "send teachers to the door" to ensure that they can complete the course.

For another example, Nanjing University of Technology in Jiangsu Province, which implements the "provincial team school-run" model in the baseball and softball project, that is, the province's baseball and softball team is built in Nanjing University of Technology, and the team members eat, live and train on campus. Athletes in some schools adopt the model of training in training teams and going back to school. "In short, the training model is different, but it is necessary to benefit the training and learning of students as the ultimate goal." Wang Jiahong said.

Trends in the development of top athletes

Just before the Winter Olympics, the University of Hong Kong announced the launch of the "Top Athlete Admission Scheme" for the first time. The special feature of the program is that academic performance such as public examinations and intramural examinations is not the main consideration, but the sports achievements of athletes as the primary admission selection criteria.

In Wang Jiahong's view, this largely represents the cultivation trend of top athletes in the mainland in the future. "For a long time, the training path of the mainland's top athletes has mainly relied on various sports schools sponsored by the National Sports Commission. However, in order to establish a more perfect system for the cultivation of excellent reserve talents in the training of high-level sports competition talents in the mainland, the integration model of sports and education should be tilted towards schools. Wu Xu also deeply believed in this.

"Although most of the top athletes in China have the status of a 'college student', almost all of them are admitted to the university after achieving certain results, and very few people really enter the ranks of top athletes from colleges and universities." However, Wu Xu said bluntly that this has a lot to do with the sports that athletes are engaged in.

"For example, in fields such as athletics and basketball, there are now many college students who study, train, and eventually enter the professional arena." He said. However, in sports such as badminton and table tennis, which are relatively skilled, it is difficult to cultivate top players because the top players train for too long every day, which is difficult to guarantee within the university.

"Still, these problems are not difficult to overcome if universities are sufficiently supportive." But in the current evaluation system of colleges and universities, is 'cultivating a national team athlete' a thing for colleges and universities to be proud of, and is it worth investing enough energy in colleges and universities with limited total 'plates'? This is a question worth thinking about. Wu Xu said.

Source: China Science Daily