| The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) requires that Division I (D-I) institutions provide general academic counseling, tutoring, and life skills programs for student-athletes. The specific problem addressed in this study was that in spite of sophisticated academic support systems in place at NCAA D-I institutions, the academic performance of student-athletes is often inferior to that of non-athletes. The purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to identify techniques that could be employed by academic support advisors to improve the academic performance of student-athletes. Six research questions were developed to examine perceptions of academic support advisors and student-athletes. Open-ended, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 student-athletes and 4 academic support advisors at a private university in the northeast United States that participates in NCAA D-I athletics. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed by the researcher and an inductive pattern matching technique was used to analyze the collected data. As was anticipated, several themes emerged from the responses of both student-athletes and academic support advisors. The results of this study found that (a) the primary techniques utilized by academic support staff -- academic coaching, study hall, and tutoring -- were effective in assisting student-athletes in meeting their academic objectives, (b) a positive attitude of a student-athlete's coach towards academics was perceived by both student-athletes and academic support advisors to be an important factor in improving the academic performance of student-athletes, and (c) student-athletes and academic support advisors believe the objective of academic support services, for student-athletes, is foster academic excellence. Academic support staff are recommended to continue to engage student-athletes with academic coaching, mandatory study hall, and academic tutoring. University administrators are encouraged to allocate sufficient resources to academic support services to assist staff in providing developmental and proactive advising to student-athletes, and to consider the attitudes of coaches, towards academics, when making employment decisions. Future research examining academic support services, for student-athletes, should comprise increasing the sample to include multiple institutions, including student-athletes who participate in football in the sample, and recruiting researchers to conduct face-to-face interviews with student-athletes and academic support advisors who are strangers to the participants. |
