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Locker Room Talk

November 4, 2016

I am greatly offended that politicians and pundits dragged sports into the trash pile of the 2016 presidential campaign. 

The vulgar, victimizing language we heard from a presidential candidate in a 10-year-old recording is NOT “locker room talk.” It is far worse than anything I ever heard in any locker room I was a part of as either player or coach. 

In fact, the expectation I had of school sports was that such talk would have caused coaches to disqualify the players involved or, if not, such talk would have caused administrators to dismiss the coaches in charge.

School sports locker rooms – like the fields, courts, pools, mats and other venues of play – are classrooms. While the volume may be turned up, in educational athletics, the content and vocabulary of the locker room must match the classroom. Anything less is unacceptable in the locker rooms of school-sponsored sports, and it ought to be unacceptable to the fans in the stands, people on the street and candidates for public office.

Not In School Sports

June 5, 2015

When those involved in high-profile major college sports offer advice to us in lower profile but perhaps higher principled school sports, we can quickly lose our patience.

Why, for example, would we ever listen to scheduling suggestions for high school basketball from the higher level that schedules games every day of the week, at any time of the week, anywhere on this continent or another?

These behaviors in major college basketball describe an athletic program that is orphaned from the academic mission of the colleges and universities to which they increasingly have become disconnected. We can’t let that happen to school sports.

Major college athletics is in an “arms war” of escalating costs for extravagant facilities and exorbitant coaches’ salaries. Blinded by their own ballooning budgets, college folks’ foolish suggestions for more frequent and distant high school games would increase the operational costs in the athletic departments of struggling and sometimes bankrupt school districts. We can’t let that happen in school sports.

Only when major college sports gets its house in much better order will any of its people earn the slightest right to suggest new policies and procedures for school sports. For now, much of what we see in high-profile college sports shows us what we should not do, not what we should do, in high school sports.