Why The College Athletes Define Their Subculture

The first thing we had asked each person within the two subcultures to do was to define their subculture, and we found a split with the complexity of the answers. Most of the respondents who were a part of the athletic subculture, simply gave us a simple definition of an athlete, someone who is a member of a sports team here at the University of Tampa, and we had others who expanded more on this. Some respondents said an athlete is someone who is a strong competitor and who has athletic talent and ability. We even had some responses include that athletes are born with an innate drive to compete on not only a physical level, but a mental level as well. Few people had expressed that a person’s own competitive nature was a quality that separated athletes from non-athletes entirely, meaning that athletes are far more competitive and that this comes natural to them.
When asking the nonathletes to define their subculture, we found that the answers we received were fairly similar to each other. We did find, though, that it was harder for the non-athletes to define their subculture than the athletes. This is likely because these individuals have never identified themselves as non-athletes. These people are involved in so many other organizations and clubs on campus and have numerous other identities, that they did not think they had become a part of a subculture just by not participating in sports.
Non-athletes seemed to have distinct individual factors that affected their relationship with athletic qualities, with the most common characteristic being a lack of drive towards a competitive nature. Athletes were “people” and non-athletes were “a person”, which is interesting because not all athletes are the same, just like not all non-athletes are the