Opinion: U Sports deserves more attention
Canadian university sports are in the shadow of the NCAA
I’ll be honest. Before I arrived at university, I never watched a U Sports game.
It wasn’t because I didn’t care about Canadian collegiate sports; it just wasn’t accessible. The big three Canadian sports broadcasters, TSN, Sportsnet and CBC, cover championship games, but beyond that, their coverage is sparse. It’s great to cover the championships, but without regular coverage, audiences lose hearing individual stories about athletes’ personalities and brilliance.
Sports publications, like Prsvre, and some student-run publications have done their best to fill in the gaps, but they simply don’t have the national audience. Student athlete stories aren’t being told in Canadian homes nationwide, leading to U Sports being overshadowed by the billion-dollar monster of the NCAA.
It’s just not comparable. In 2023-24, more than one million people streamed U Sports championships on CBC Sports and Radio-Canada combined. Twenty-four million viewers tuned into the NCAA women’s basketball championship game that year alone. Every single game of March Madness is broadcast on TSN. Some college athletes in the United States make millions of dollars and are marketed as the next big stars of their sport. The University of Arkansas’ Darius Acuff Jr. just became the first college hooper to sign a deal for his own signature shoe.
American college stars have become larger than life.
High schoolers are portrayed as the next face of their sport’s professional league by ESPN and Slam Magazine before they even step foot on a college campus.
Meanwhile, at Dalhousie University, I’ve watched athletes leave for the greener pastures of the NCAA. And even I’m a hypocrite for running a March Madness article in this issue, but listen to what former Dal basketball player Nginyu Ngala, who now plays for the University of Kansas, has to say about his experience playing in the NCAA:
“You get escorted by police officers. The highways get shut down, the streets get shut down, all for you to get to wherever you need to go, whether it’s practice or game day.”
The issue is that there’s no clear transition to the big leagues for U Sports players. Sure, some Canadian university alumni have made it to the NHL, like Logan Thompson or Joel Ward, but it’s not the sure thing that the NCAA has become. Fans aren’t latching on to players, knowing one day they’ll be on their favourite NHL or NBA team.
U Sports competitions are thrilling, especially at the national level, like the most recent men’s hockey University Cup. People packed out the Scotiabank Centre, creating an electric atmosphere that would leave any hockey fan on the edge of their seat. That type of tournament and energy deserves to be plastered everywhere in Canada.
It leaves hope that U Sports will one day get the platform it deserves. There are still diehards out there who have been watching for a long time.
But it’s also a breath of fresh air compared to the increasingly professional nature of the NCAA. U.S. name, image and likeness (NIL) policies, which now allow college athletes to pursue personal sponsorship deals, have created a polarizing debate surrounding the management of collegiate sport financials. NIL policies allow student athletes to get paid, but U Sports has yet to be swallowed by the movement, and it’s hard to say if it will.
In U Sports, student athletes are playing for their schools and to keep their scholarships. They put emotion and hard work into their sports, and they deserve to be marketed across Canada.
