■William R. Sprouse(美)

　　(本文作者毕业于美国耶鲁大学，在校时是该校橄榄球队队员，上一学年度在中国地质大学教授英文)

　　美国大学瞄准小球星

　　Signing day for US college football comes in early February each year. That's when the nation's best high school prospects sign letters of intent formally announcing the collegeswheresthey'll be playing football the next year.

　　Most high schools in the US have their own football teams, and most major colleges do as well.swheresI grew up, in suburban southern New Jersey, the local high school powerhouse was Holy Spirit High School - the Spartans. They played their home games on Saturday afternoons at Bader Field in Atlantic City, and perennially beat up on (most of) the rest of South Jersey. The Fighting Clan of Vineland, the Millville Thunderbolts, the Mustangs of Mainland and the Vikings of Atlantic City all took aim each year at the HSHS team, and most years they missed the mark. Every year the Spartans sent a teammate or two off to play college ball. They wore gold helmets like Notre Dame, and I basically①worshipped them. Anyway, my dad was an assistant coach.

　　Most Saturdays from September to December the extended high school community convened at Bader Field or football fields like it to watch the game. Before kickoff, parents and grandparents milled and mingled and doddered and eventually sat down. Hordes of teens and preteens flirted, gossiped, roughhoused and munched concession stand food. The band played. Teachers appealed for order. Spectators arrayed②themselves in bleachers and spectated. Eventually The Star-Spangled Banner was performed and play began.

　　At the center of it all were a hundred or so adolescents, the local high school football teams, runningsintoseach other, running away from each other, throwing footballs, catching footballs, kicking footballs, tackling each other, blocking each other. After 48 minutes, one team won, both teams got yelled at, and then everyone went out for pizza. It was a wonderful pastime. Maybe the best players, or the biggest, those with the most potential, would catch the eye of scouts from the country's top college football programs, and for those select few, signing day in early February would suddenly become a day of some importance.

　　College sports in the US are a huge deal. Almost all major American universities have football, baseball, basketball and hockey③programs, and devote millions of dollars each year to sports. Most of them earn millions back as well, in television revenues, sponsorships, ticket sales and alumni donations. They also benefit indirectly from the added publicity they get via their teams. Big-name universities compete against each other in the most popular sports. Football games at Michigan or Nebraska regularly draw crowds of over 90,000. Basketball's national collegiate championship game is a TV spectacle on a par with any other sporting event in the US, save perhaps the Super Bowl itself. At any given time during fall or winter one can flip on one's TV set and see the top athletic programs - from schools like Michigan, UCLA, Duke and Stanford - battling in front of packed houses and national TV audiences.

　　The athletes themselves are recruited and provided with scholarships. College coaches identify promising teenagers and then gosintoshigh schools to convince the country's best players to attend their universities. There are strict rules about how coaches can recruit - no recruiting calls after 9 pm, only one official visit to a campus, a limit of dollars on dinner and entertainment - but they are often bent and sometimes ignored. Top college football programs offer scholarships to 20 or 30 players each year, and those student-athletes, when they arrive on campus, receive free housing, tuition, meals, books, etc.

　　In return, the players commit themselves to the program in their sport. Football players at top colleges work out two hours a day, four days a week from January to April to get bigger and faster for the next year. Then they have three weeks of spring practice, running around in helmets and shoulder pads, but no games. In summer, it's back to strength and agility training four days a week until mid-August, when camp convenes and preparation for the opening of the September-to-December season begins in earnest. During the season, practices last two or three hours a day from Tuesday to Friday. Most players also watch a daily 45 minutes of football games on film with their coaches. Saturday is game day. On Sundays, it's strength and agility training and more film watching. Mondays are an officially mandated day of rest.

　　The payoff? For the schools, it's publicity, prestige and sometimes the revenue that big-time sports can bring in. For the players, it's the free education, the campus stardom, the fulfillment of a childhood dream, the chance to breaksintospro sports.

　　But for those seriously in search of a liberal arts education,④the road is rocky and filled with early-morning workouts.