Story by Chapel Fowler.
Photos by Nathan Klima.
Like many a sports historian, Victoria Jackson has opinions.
She’s praised the U.S. Women’s National Team’s fight for equal pay through a federal lawsuit; written in support of Colin Kaepernick and athlete activism; and likened the NCAA concept of amateurism to 21st-century Jim Crow.
Unlike many a sports historian, she’s also a former NCAA champion and professional runner, whose direct experience as a student-athlete at North Carolina and Arizona State has added to years of research in the realm of big-time college sports.
In other words: when Jackson writes a new column for the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, appears on a podcast or launches into a thread on her aptly named Twitter account, @HistoryRunner, people listen.
Over the last two years, she’s quickly made a name for herself among hundreds as a “public intellectual,” as her colleague Brooks Simpson, an ASU Foundation professor of history, put it. Healthy or not, Jackson joked, she’s thinking about and engaging with the issues at hand every day.
Her confidence to make such arguments, she said, stems from a combination of her own athletic career plus a pure, unadulterated love of history and the archival research that comes with it. But the Jackson of now isn’t the Jackson of old.
In Chapel Hill and Tempe, Ariz., alike, she can cite turning points on a journey of awareness that led her to a major realization: her picture-perfect stint as a student-athlete was rooted in her privilege. And now, as a clinical assistant professor at ASU, she’s working eventually create a system where everyone in college athletics gets that experience.
“The way it’s supposed to work shouldn’t be the exception to the rule,” she said. “It should be the rule.”
‘Extremely well balanced’
It’s been 20 years since Jackson first stepped onto on UNC’s campus.
That recruiting trip, during her senior year at Lake Forest High School in Illinois, was just about perfect. She especially clicked with Michael Whittlesey, North Carolina’s distance coach, who held a Ph.D. and still taught courses on the side at UNC.
The feeling was mutual. Whittlesey always tried to recruit well rounded athletes. Jackson, a state champion distance runner on the track and a self-described math nerd, honor roll student and class president off it, unsurprisingly fit the bill.
“Extremely well balanced,” said Whittlesey, who now coaches at Kansas.
20 yrs ago I took my recruiting trip @UNCTrack_Field. Coach was so excited to show us what would be the new XC course, he got his car stuck in the mud
— Victoria Jackson (@HistoryRunner) October 3, 2019
This a.m. I ran that course, & this pm joined @mttandrews & @jonweiler on their pod
Filled w/ gratitude 4 this place & its people pic.twitter.com/fkwTkGUYsL
In reflecting on her four years at UNC, Jackson comes back to one point: privilege. It’s less to rag on herself or anyone else and more to think critically about college sports, who they benefit and why.
As a non-revenue athlete, she got the ideal experience: practicing no more than 20 hours a week, running for an academically supportive coach in Whittlesey and having enough time for coursework. But she’s since argued those perks came at the educational detriment of others.
This is where her 21st-century Jim Crow argument comes in. In a 2018 L.A. Times op-ed, she leaned on facts to explain it.
To begin: the majority of men’s basketball and football athletes, especially at Power Five schools, are black. Men’s basketball and football teams generate the most revenue for their schools’ athletic departments, but those teams’ athletes graduate at a lower rate than all athletes, all black males and all students at their universities. And, given the NCAA’s amateurism policy, they get none of the profit they produce.
In comparison, the majority of Olympic sport athletes, on teams such as lacrosse, tennis, field hockey and cross country/track and field, are white. And Jackson, going off her personal experience, argued those athletes often have more relaxed practice and travel schedules — which free up time for academics and the chance to “go pro” in something other than their sport. Graduation rates, again, support that.
“Unlike college athletes who bring in revenue, nonrevenue athletes get to earn quality degrees,” she wrote. “We are the beneficiaries of college athletics. Meanwhile, the professionalism required of big-time college football and basketball athletes leaves no time for the “student” part of the student-athlete equation.”
In an interview, she noted the “egregious case of athletic-academic fraud” taking place throughout her UNC career as another indicator that revenue athletes’ education isn’t valued as much as their on-field talent. That, she wrote, “contributes to the undervaluing of black lives in American society and our institutions.”
“I can actually point to athletes who were promised what I got, paid for what I got but then didn’t get the educational experience I enjoyed,” Jackson said.
‘Not the typical story’
Given all the student-athlete struggles of recent — an offensive lineman denied immediate eligibility when he transferred to be closer to his sick mother; a kicker ruled ineligible for monetizing videos on his personal YouTube channel; and another every month, it seems — Jackson remains cognizant that hers was truly the exact opposite.
“I’ve just been so fortunate,” she said. “And again, I feel a responsibility to work so other athletes don’t experience the horror stories we hear about so often.”
At North Carolina, she began a solid young running career alongside future Olympians Shalane Flanagan and Alice Schmidt. But it coincided with anorexia and depression — disorders she’d grappled with since she was 9.
So ahead of her junior year, Jackson, Whittlesey and the coaching staff agreed on a medical release. Jackson would keep her full-ride athletic scholarship as a junior and senior while functioning as a standard undergrad. It wouldn’t count against the team’s limit on such scholarships, either.
With more academic flexibility, she signed up for a few history classes on a whim and was immediately hooked on the researching, synthesizing and constant thinking of the discipline that’s since become her livelihood.
She changed her major and honed in on graduate school at Arizona State, a perfect program for her intended field of study, Native American history. While in Tempe, she also ran for the Sun Devils’ cross country/track and field programs and another accommodating coach in Louie Quintana.
Her college athletic career culminated in 2006, when she won an individual NCAA title in the women’s 10,000-meter run. After that race, she turned professional and signed with Nike. When she returned to ASU in 2009 to finish her Ph.D., she knew, conceptually, she wanted to study college sports and eventually teach sports history.
But in 2011, one magazine article changed everything.
As Jackson read “The Shame of College Sports,” UNC alumnus Taylor Branch’s lengthy, heralded NCAA exposé published in The Atlantic, something clicked. Branch wasn’t a sports guy; he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights scholar.
But he’d taken his deep knowledge of that field and flipped it on big-time college sports with groundbreaking results — a “technicolor illustration” of the issues at hand, Jackson said.
Suddenly, she saw a stronger link between her studies — at the time, the failures of racial and educational desegregation in the United States — and college sports. The exact institutions that had defined her life and others’, for better or worse.
“That’s not to say I wasn’t aware of it before then,” she said, “but that’s when I was like, ‘I can study this and write about it and eventually speak about it.’ That was really the turning point for me.”
‘How to make it better’
How, exactly, does one avoid Twitter vitriol and use the platform for productive dialogue? To Jackson, it’s all about engaging.
The results, so far, have been surprisingly positive. When the News & Observer investigative reporter Dan Kane shared a few of Jackson’s op-eds, she drew the ire of North Carolina fans who have long disagreed with Kane’s reporting on the school’s athletic-academic scandal. But when Jackson started a civil conversation, many ended up in agreeance with her.
“She has a really good way of presenting her arguments with authority,” said Jonathan Weiler, a UNC global studies professor. “She’s obviously well informed — but not in a way that’s antagonistic … She makes it about ‘we.’ She doesn’t make it about ‘us versus them.’”
To Weiler, that patience and accessibility is reflective of something larger: Jackson’s “non-hot take impulse.” Her work isn’t meant to make a splash or rile anyone up. It’s earnest, comprehensive and directed at tangible improvement.
And as she’s moved up the university ranks — her assistant clinical professor position is new as of July — the field reporting aspect of her job hasn’t stopped. Jackson is using a $20,000 grant from ASU’s Global Sport Institute to travel the country and research a book proposal on racial injustice in college sports.
On a trip to Chapel Hill this month, she worked through campus library archives and myriad meetings, spoke to a class at Duke and did interviews for this story, the “Agony of Defeat” podcast Weiler co-hosts and WUNC Radio, among other obligations.
Such visits, Jackson said, are crucial to a historian. After all, there’s no better way to examine national trends than hitting the local level.
So she’ll keep traveling, researching, writing and speaking — and, as NCAA reform becomes as much of a national conversation as it is her academic passion, growing in recognition because of it.
“Although it might seem as if I’m super critical of college sports, critical doesn’t mean negative,” she said. “Critical means thinking about what this is and how to make it better.”
