I idea of the Panopticon is a genius idea of controlling people in prison. The idea of having someone watching you is going to stop people from doing things. In sports they create a different idea of a Panopitcon to keep people "hungry" and to work hard when nobody is around. Coaches and motivators tend to control players by motivation of competition. What I mean is that they will compare us to our teammates who we are competing against for playing time but also every other player out in the world. Coaches will use tactics such as asking basketball players how many shots they shot today? After hearing the answer, a coach will then ask a basketball player how many shots the kids on our team shot, then kids from the next county, then the whole state, then the whole country and then the whole world. So as a an athlete our Panopticon is the threat of how hard another athlete in this world is working and we should out work them if we want to be better them. This Panopticon is what motivates young athletes to work hard even when they don't want to. At the end of each day I ask myself if I got better today? Then I ask my self if I out worked the pitcher at Tampa University and at the University of Florida. This Panopticon created in sports also helps to govern athletes from using drugs, hanging with the wrong people, and also missing out on a lot of social events because of getting necessary sleep or having an athlete's body recover.
"The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men" (Foucalt, 99).
For sports in my life and others the Panopticon used to help reach our very unlikely goal of playing professional sports. "If you want to play professional sports then you must do 'this.'" It could be looked at as a way to keep kids the right path which I guess is not that bad of a thing.
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