opinion
‘SOME KIND OF BUBBLE’
This was a sport stripped of its festive veneer, leaving the rough, unvarnished reality of brute labor without pay and endless reminders that “the NCAA can do whatever it wants.”
Dr. Johanna Mellis is an Assistant Professor at Ursinus College where she teaches World/Global history, European history, Oral History, and Sport history. She is a former D1 swimmer and swim coach, and her research focuses on athletes and authoritarian sport especially during the Cold War in Communist Hungary compared to the US. She and her co-hosts of The End of Sport podcast have co-written pieces for The Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Guardian, Jacobin., and many other outlets.