Daily Profile Alex Hunt and Stu Douglass

This man (or woman, its a messageboard so I don't know) speaks the truth.  I don't care if football is the only sport you enjoy watching if you support Michigan than you support all of Michigan, revenue sport or not.  Whether that be taking pride in academics or the softball team a true Michigan fan supports every bit of it.  To me if all you support is the football team and are willing to sacrifice other sports at Michigan to not even gain a competitive advantage well then to me you would qualify as a fairweather fan, not someone supports Michigan, just someone who supports a winning football team.

I met a decent amount of non-revenue athletes during my years at Michigan and most of them were really impressie people.  A couple were in my major and not only earned significantly  higher GPAs than I did, but ended up winning a national championship along the way.  And I have ton of respect for all of them.  Not to rag on the revenue sport athletes, at all, but they tend to have what are widely considered to be relatively easy majors.  There are exceptions, of course, and very few, if any, majors at Michgan are truly "easy" but it's there.  Non-revenue athletes tend to have more varied majors and they perform great in them.  While dealing with practicing (in most cases I know) the NCAA alloted 20 hours, the extra "voluntary" practice time, work-out sessions, team meetings, travel and everything else.  And they do this for a sport that they know pretty much doesn't exist professionaly, or is very small (at least in the US), knowing that they're much more likely to play in front of 109 fans then 109,901 fans, knowing they get little to no exposure on TV, the news, whatever else, knowing that even if they won a NCAA title, most Michigan fans would gladly trade it for just one more football victory.  And they still go out there and bust their butts to perform well for Michigan and for themselves.  Most of them are very dedicated and most of the non-revenue sprts are really good.  And remember, most scholarships outside of football and basketball are NOT full scholarships, in a lot of sports a 1/2 scholarship is reserved for the absolute best of the best.  Revenue sport athletes, in almost cases, do a lot of the same things and obviously it's not really their fault that their sport is higher-profile, but non-revenue sport athletes do a lot of good things and deserve their moment in the spotlight a little bit, too.

Thanks for posting! Hope the people who hated on Stu get a chance to read this so they can at least try to understand what he went through!

A very honest, introspective, longitudinal profile of two fine UM student-athletes (or, as Stu states, "athlete-students").    Best of luck to both Alex and Stu in their post-UM endeavors.  Thanks for representing us so well.  

Is there a way to read the article as one page, instead of having to click on nine different pages?