A couple months ago Annie Murphy Paul wrote about new research demonstrating that the “stereotype threat”— the negative effect that stereotypes about low academic performance can have on people— can affect the performance of student athletes:
Conscious that they may be regarded by professors or other students as “dumb jocks,” they do less well on a challenging test when they’re reminded of their student-athlete identity beforehand.
The study, published in a recent issue of the journal Economic Inquiry, was conducted by Prof. Thomas Dee of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Professor Dee gave a group of undergraduates — some athletes and some not — a test made up of questions from the Graduate Record Examination (G.R.E.), the admissions test for graduate school. Just before tackling the questions from the G.R.E., the students completed a questionnaire that asked whether they belonged to a sports team, what sport they played and whether they had experienced scheduling conflicts between athletics and academic activities like course meetings and laboratory sessions. (A control group received no questions about athletics, instead answering questions about the dining services on campus.)
Student-athletes who were reminded of their identity as members of a sports team did significantly worse on the test than student-athletes who were not so reminded, and the effect was stronger for male students than for female students.
Stereotype threat is never a good thing, but in the course of my research I’ve been struck at just how backward we normally get the relationship between athletic and intellectual ability.
Growing up, I saw high school athletics as antithetical to good academic performance: I saw coaches as not so bright (though as a know-it-all teenager I saw most adults as not so bright), and the culture of sports demanded caring about your play more than your grades. I had the stereotype threat in reverse: I would fail a fitness test because I was a nerd.
But while you can argue that the culture of sports— or specific programs and particular coaches— may turn athletics and scholarship as binary opposites, it’s absolutely not the case that this is a natural state of affairs.
Indeed, if anything the opposite is true: being in good physical shape, and exercising regularly and vigorous, contributes to one’s intellectual capacity. And some of history’s smartest people were pretty serious about being in shape. Thomas Jefferson declared that you should “Give about two of them [hours] every day to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong.”
There are legions of accomplished scientists who were also great athletes. Alan Turing’s best times as a long-distance runner compared with those of Olympic medalists. Quantum physicist Neils Bohr played football for the Danish professional club Akademisk Boldklub Gladsaxe. Not only did his brother Harald (a mathematician) play for ABG, he also won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympics. Britton Chance, a pioneer in biophysics who helped invent nuclear magnetic resonance (NRM) imaging, won a gold medal in sailing at the 1952 Helsinki summer games.
And I know of at least one important example that’s a mirror-image of today’s vision of athletes vs. academics. In nineteenth-century Cambridge, a whole cult grew up around dual excellence in the classroom and playing fields.
The university’s highest-ranked students (the “Wranglers”) spent years preparing for the grueling Tripos, a set of nine exams taken over five days that required both intellectual ability and physical stamina.
Wranglers became noted athletes and hikers, often leading college rowing and cricket clubs, to have an outlet from the pressures of studying, and to build their resilience. As historian Andy Warwick put it, they believed that “hard study was most efficiently and safely accomplished when interspersed with periods of more leisurely activity and recreation.”
Among this crew, rowing was especially popular, because it taught you how to deliver a consistent, “machine-like regularity of performance” whether on the river or in the classroom. Not only did they see exercise as the “complement of hard study,” Warwick says; students tried out “different regimes of working, exercising and sleeping until they found what they believed to be the most productive combination.”
While the Wranglers’ obsession with science and sport has been forgotten by all by a few specialists, their legacy lives on in our language. Because serious students prepared for the Tripos not just by studying on their own, but by working with tutors. The best of these saw to students’ mental and physical well-being, set out their courses of study, and passed on tricks to help them improve their problem-solving ability.
Indeed, it was said that great tutors guided their students like a coachman leading horses along well-set paths.
Hence the term “coach” came to describe someone who oversees training.
In other words, the modern term “coach” has its origins in exam preparation; only later does it come to mean someone who prepares you for athletic rather than academic contests.