Ballers, Not Shot Callers: Embodied Athletic Capital, Surveillance, and Unequal Exchange

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 20: Race, Migration, and Work

Abstract

Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with current and former NCAA Division I college athletes, this paper theorizes how athletic departments produce “embodied athletic capital” through everyday surveillance, discipline, and institutionalized care. Building on scholarship on college sport as an extractive labor regime and on race/racism in sport, I show how control operates through temporal monopolization, team insularity, surveillance-heavy academic support, and discretionary punishment, often normalized by athletes as “just part of sports.” Basketball players, in particular, describe the most intensive punishment and monitoring, revealing how the sport ethic can operate differentially across sports and institutional contexts.

The paper’s key contribution is to show that embodied athletic capital is not simply accumulated; it is differentially valued as racialized and gendered currency. It has high use value within college sport, where it helps athletes navigate surveillance, perform coachability, and manage the risk of exclusion. But its exchange value beyond sport is uneven. Its exchange value depends not only on program context (autonomy vs. non-autonomy) but on whose bodies produce it. Black women college athletes may develop similar levels embodied athletic capital through the same disciplinary mechanisms, yet this capital carries differential weight depending on the sport’s racial and gendered context and the athlete’s capacity to perform institutional expectations. This asymmetry is compounded in non-autonomy contexts, where athletes may face similarly intensive control as in autonomy contexts but fewer opportunities to convert embodied athletic capital into durable educational, economic, or post-college returns. The findings reposition “support” as a key site through which organizational control is produced, internalized, and differentially valued.

Author

• Atalanta Copeman-Papas, University of California-Irvine