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Abstract

This study explored the relationship between the athletic identity and career maturity of women's basketball student-athletes. It specifically looked at the differences in athletic identity and career maturity based on the studentathlete's level of competition, race, year in school, socioeconomic status, and professional athletic career aspirations. A convenience sample of 209 women's basketball student-athletes from NCAA Divisions I, II, and III, as well as NAIA institutions participated in the study. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire along with the Career Maturity Inventory-Revised Attitude Scale and the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale. The findings suggest that within this sample of women's basketball student-athletes, stronger identification with the athletic role is associated with lower levels of career maturity. Results also indicated that NCAA Division I student-athletes had significantly higher levels of athletic identity and significantly lower levels of career maturity than Division II student-athletes. Likewise, women's basketball student-athletes that planned to pursue a professional basketball career (n = 76) displayed significantly higher levels of athletic identity and significantly lower levels of career maturity than those that did not (n = 133). As research suggests, less than 1% of women's basketball student-athletes will compete professionally (NCAA, 2017a). However, based on the findings of the current study, 36.4% (n = 76) of the women's basketball student-athletes sampled planned to pursue a professional basketball career upon graduating. The results of this study can assist individuals working with these student-athletes (e.g., coaches, counselors, professors) to intervene and ultimately assist women's basketball student-athletes with preparation for life after sports. Many statistics are used to measure the productivity of hitters in Major League Baseball, such as the number of home runs and the number of runs batted in a season. However, comparing the talent of individual players across time is difficult as rules and technologies change. In this paper, we propose applying a practice commonly utilized in the finance literature to compare the performance of individual stocks and other assets, namely, we "benchmark" the productivity of each player's performance to players in the same time period. Applying our benchmarking strategy to annual Major League Baseball data from 1871-2010, we find that Babe Ruth is the greatest hitter of all time.