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A Map for Getting Lost

April 21, 2014

“It’s just another step in the wrong direction.”

That’s the brief response I’ve been giving to the frequent questions I’m receiving from people wanting to hear my opinion about unionizing college athletes.

When I’m pressed to elaborate, I provide these antecedents:

  • Establishing the “athletic scholarship” – allowing athlete performance or potential to replace financial need as the basis for grants in aid.
  • Removing intercollegiate coaches from the requirement that they be tenure track faculty members of the university.
  • Removing the budget for the intercollegiate athletic department from the overall budget of the university.
  • Splitting NCAA governance into divisions so that the more educationally-based programs of the smaller colleges could no longer keep the larger, educational-lost intercollegiate programs in check.

Certainly it has been the escalating and then exploding revenues of broadcast media that helped to ignite, or inflame the impact of, these developments over the past 50+ years.

Treating intercollegiate athletes as employees is a natural but still misguided next step on this road in the wrong direction. It provides a map to where interscholastic sports must not go.

Software Development

August 8, 2014

In his book The Sports Gene, author David Epstein causes the reader to think about athletic performance as software more than hardware; and I believe this is even more important for us to consider in educational athletics.

In school sports, at least in most situations, we still believe that opportunity is for everybody, regardless of gene pool or body type. High school sports teams often have an eclectic mix-and-match look that defies each sport’s stereotype on other levels.

In school sports, coaches don’t select and sculpt the body type as much as welcome what comes to them and work to develop skills to overcome inherent shortcomings.

In school sports, we focus on the software more than the hardware on other levels as well.

We are concerned with character development more than physical development, on principles more than physiques. It’s the operating system we focus on, much more than the hardware.

We also judge success differently – more on intangibles than tangibles, more on heart and mind than trophies and medals.