Meet the Author, Jonathan Whitcomb

I am a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, and I am pursuing degrees in Anthropology and English.  I recently decided to conduct a comparative research analysis that compares and contrasts the experience of a high school athlete with that of an NCAA student athlete.  I was born and raised in Mequon, Wisconsin, and I have been a competitive swimmer since the age of five.  The youngest in a family of five boys, I was encouraged to swim competitively by my older brothers, all of whom were swimmers.  I swam for four years at Homestead High School, and I currently swim for the University of Notre Dame.  Because of my substantial involvement in both high school and college athletics, I wanted to explore the similarities and differences between the experiences of athletes competing at these different levels.  However, I felt that my personal experiences as a swimmer may be a source of bias if I focused my study on the sport of swimming.  Therefore, I used the sport of track and field as a lens with which to view the high school and college experience of different individual athletes.

---