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Why America Needs Alternative Models of Sports Development and Delivery

Sport is part of every man and woman’s heritage and its absence can never be compensated for.

—Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Movement

THE ESSENCE OF SPORTS

The phenomenon of sports throughout history has been a consistent subject of empirical and popular inquiry. Arguably, there is not a better quote than the one above to describe the importance of sports and sports participation in the world. As de Coubertin stated, sports are ubiquitous and will always be a part of our lives in some form. The former president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, once placed sports and sports development among the most important social phenomena of the twentieth century. He added that “sport has confirmed itself as a means of education, source of health and improved quality of life, an element of recreation and leisure occupation, first-rate entertainment, [and] factor of social communication” (quoted in Thoma and Chalip 2003, xi). As a researcher of sports and social phenomena in sports, as well as a lifelong participant and fan, I wholeheartedly agree with the pronouncements of de Coubertin and Samaranch. However, we also have to recognize that sports delivery and sports development are changing and, like anything else, need to evolve to keep up with shifts in the industry and with the current time. Sports development and delivery worldwide has changed dramatically with the availability of new technology, including fantasy and e-sports activities. Variations in sports participation and the subsequent impact on public health, in access to sports and recreation opportunities, along with the increasing financial cost of participation, to name a few issues, have also changed how we consume and participate in sports in ways we could never have imagined. The real questions now are how we are to understand the ways in which sports affect our lives, positively or negatively, and how we are to manage the future of sports and sports development in a rapidly changing world.

While the positives of sports and sports participation are many, it is clear that the system in which they take place is undergoing a significant evolution, specifically in the United States. As indicated in empirical and popular literature over the past century, sports occur in the context of large, complex organizations and processes that have constantly evolved into what Thoma and Chalip called, two decades ago, “this new world of international sport” (2003, 1). Today, this new world of sports involves globalization, television and other rights, licensing, sponsorships, and an increased flow of traditional and nontraditional content, such as e-sports, with all of this and more leading to unprecedented changes in sports and sports development as we know it. However, there are numerous problems, many of which this book defines and offers potential solutions for. Several issues are pushing us to the point of seriously discussing how we evolve American sports development. Several current problems and challenges in the American sports system are discussed in forthcoming chapters along with proposed solutions. There are obviously many issues that can be addressed, but for the purposes of this book, the problems addressed are primarily focused on economic issues, public health problems, education, and access to sports and recreation. Specific problems discussed include elite and competitive athletics within the educational space, a growing athletes’ rights movement that is even focusing on labor relations at the intercollegiate sports level, changes to the status and competitive level of primary and secondary school sports, legal challenges, legislative and other potential government intervention, public health issues, greater access to sports and recreational activities, and where to put “other” less commercially viable sports that are losing teams and opportunities as more money and resources are directed toward football and basketball.

Even with these many issues and problems that need to be corrected, numerous benefits and positives regarding sports and sports development continue to exist in the United States. At their core, some things regarding sports and even the sports industry have remained fairly constant through their history (more fully discussed in chapter 2). Whether it is a matter of elite, mass-participation, or recreational sports, it remains possible (and, if done correctly, even probable) that, through sports, one can learn how to move, use, and know one’s body, and that participation in sports can be a vital part of an active and healthy lifestyle. Sports can help one develop needed social and personal skills like discipline, confidence, leadership, teamwork, and organization. They can teach one to respect rules and authority and gain core values like tolerance, respect, and fair play. Additionally, organized sports can be a valuable augmentation to the educational and maturation processes. Learning how to cope with defeat as well as victory is an important life skill for both young and old to master. All of these life skills and more can be learned and enhanced via active sports participation throughout life.

To ensure the development of these skills and values, and to strengthen the understanding of a healthy lifestyle, it is of paramount importance for every member of society to have the ability to participate in sporting activities by way of widespread and ready access to sports facilities and sports participation. For many people, that means being able to play their favorite sports and exercise at the lowest price possible, regardless of their age, skills, and social background (Stiegelmayr 2015). Exploring how different countries use sports and provide access to sports participation, ostensibly to benefit society and the country at large, is a major focus of this book.

SPORTS DELIVERY AND SPORTS DEVELOPMENT MODELS AROUND THE WORLD

Throughout modern history and up to the present day, each country and/or culture has had its own systems and organizations for sports and sports development, whether in mass-participation, recreational, or elite sports. Two of the most popular and widespread sports development models are the European sports club model and the American model. Sports in European countries are largely organized through nonprofit, mainly local and grassroots clubs. This is in sharp contrast with most sports development in the United States, as its typical participants are either primary or secondary school athletes, along with those competing in college- and university-based sports.

Comparing and contrasting the European sports club model and the American education-based model, we can begin to ascertain whether other models might be developed in conjunction with or separate from our current way of governing sports. I do not propose in any way saving the almost exclusively education-based system we have in the United States. My argument starts from a baseline belief that the current model does not work and must be changed. Frankly, we should no longer entertain any debate that is grounded in saving the system. It is, I will say again, only a question of how. In other words, we must first recognize and admit that we have a problem; only then can this society finally and fully address the need for reform. I am not here to advocate killing off educationally based sports in America. Educationally housed sports can certainly be part of new approaches toward the evolution of sports governance and sports delivery in America. However, the stress on our education system with regard to sports participation and finance must be relieved, and soon.

As a nation, the United States must address such problems before the situation deteriorates beyond repair. If we want to continue to provide and enhance plentiful opportunities for as many people as possible in a wide variety of organized sports and recreational pursuits, preserving educational primacy along with improving public health, then I believe we simply must change how we do sports in this country. If we want to continue to develop elite athletes at local, regional, and national levels—in many sports, not just football and men’s basketball—who will excel at home and abroad, then we must change. The United States seems to be stuck in the past on this. Meanwhile, for its citizens, opportunities for better health and the personal growth that can be gained from sports are vanishing.

This book examines four potential and dramatic alternatives to the current model, including consideration of adopting portions of the sports club systems prevalent in Western and Eastern European countries, with a focus on Germany and the Netherlands. I spent fifteen months in Europe conducting research for this project as a Fulbright teaching and research scholar at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, in 2014–15. The research consisted of immersing myself in the system via empirical research, site visits, interviews, and focus groups to learn as much as possible about the European sports model and to ascertain if a similar model could be developed in part or in whole in the United States. I also had a front-row seat, figuratively and literally, observing how a local European sports club operates as my son Bradley competed for FSV (Fussball Sport Verband) Bayreuth on its C-level (under-sixteen) soccer team. Since most European sports club systems are similar, I made the choice to focus on Germany and the Netherlands, as they were the two countries I spent the most time in during my research sabbatical. As more fully discussed in chapter 5, most countries in the European Union have a basically similar approach to sports governance, delivery, and development.

This book also focuses on other potential models for elite, mass-participation, and recreational sports development in the United States. As sports choices decrease in a funding-challenged American educational system, and recreational opportunities outside that system become more expensive, it is increasingly apparent that more sports opportunities need to be developed outside the educational system for competitive, mass-participation, and general recreational exercise. The United States is not only suffering from an education funding crisis, made worse by its way of too frequently prioritizing sports over education. It is also suffering under the strain of its citizens becoming primarily sports spectators while maintaining very unhealthy and mostly inactive lifestyles, in turn impacting health care and the federal and state budgets devoted to it.

Where would the money and infrastructure come from for a dramatic shift in sports development in America? It’s a fair question, but one with realistic and measurable answers. This book covers the potential positive impact that an extreme paradigm shift, including a shift to models such as the ones being proposed, can have on public health in the United States. Any reorganization of how we do sports in the United States must take into account the overall health benefits to the population, not just competitive and commercial benefits. Other countries are outdoing America in offering widespread options in sports, whether it be for mass participation or elite development. Many scholars agree that opportunities in the United States are dwindling and that we should learn from countries like Germany, with its “Sports for All” movement, or Canada, where the government is promoting physical activity to enhance all of its citizens’ well-being.¹ Sports clubs around the world are supported in several ways, including through government subsidies (via taxes), membership dues, revenue from ticket sales and ancillary businesses, sponsorships, and donations. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, also draw on lottery and gambling proceeds to help fund their sports club systems.²

While proposing any tax increase may seem foolhardy and a nonstarter in the United States, as a country we can actually save money by promoting and achieving better public health through increased access to and participation in sports. This means paying it forward and focusing on prevention, with benefits more on the back end, but it is critical for everyone to have skin in the game, including the government. A tax subsidy could be something the public gets behind, if it can reduce overall health-care costs and save money in the long run. Combining this with entrepreneurial spirit, public and private partnerships, and good old American ingenuity and creativity, we can enable and sustain the funding and infrastructure for newer, more accessible models of sports development and delivery.

THE ORGANIZATION OF SPORTS

Sports have been a part of society for most of the history of human civilization. People all over the world have been engaging in physical exercise for millennia, mostly through work but also through games and athletic events. In the Western tradition, organized competitive sports date back to 776 BCE, when the first Olympic Games were held in Olympia, Greece. Some twenty-five hundred years later, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, games that had been largely unsupervised and unregulated were recognized as being beneficial for members of the working class (Gerdy 2002, xiii–xiv). From their origins in unstructured play and loosely organized events based in communities and schools, increasingly organized sports competitions were gradually established via host organizations, schools, or rudimentary sports clubs in a variety of countries. Throughout this period and into the early twentieth century, several sports spread across the globe, often introduced by young participants who had learned of the games in other countries (especially England) or who made up rules on their own. In general, this type of recreation was viewed as a healthy outlet for students, while being a needed respite from the rigors of academics. It was also a healthy physical and recreational outlet for workers, one that could potentially enable higher productivity in the rigorous and demanding factory jobs that dominated this time period (Gerdy 2002; Coakley 2014; Frei 2015).

AMATEURISM AND PROFESSIONALISM IN EARLY SPORTS DEVELOPMENT

In the early days of sports development in the United States, the difference between a professional athlete and a nonprofessional athlete was not as obvious at it may seem, but it was determined to be an important distinction for those participating in school-based sports and later helped define the separation of education and professionalism. In the early stages of college sports contests in America, it was not unusual for nonstudents to be allowed to participate in college sports contests. This use of “ringers” to gain a competitive advantage was frowned upon by university hierarchies, and to university administrators a different definition was needed to ensure that games were played only between actual enrolled students (Crowley 2006; Falla 1981; Gaul 2015). The primary role of a school-based athlete, at least in theory, was being a student first and foremost. Those athletes were not allowed to receive any compensation or anything that would resemble a tangible benefit for their efforts lest they become less focused on their studies and no different from the ringers and nonstudents that institutions were attempting to eliminate. Sports in the schools were designed to be an avocation and not a vocation. One could play professionally and earn money for one’s sports skills, but school-based sports and most international competitions clung to the notion of amateurism and playing for the love of the game.

The term “amateurism” was not initially established as a mechanism to have athletes participate in sports for no compensation, but actually was developed to separate the working class from the upper class and maintain that social separation in all areas of life, including recreation. In short, the rich wanted to play their own games, separate from the working class, and due to this segregation of participation different sports began to develop within the different social and economic classes. Sports such as tennis, golf, and polo were “white-collar games,” while the blue-collar working set participated in sports that did not require much if any money or upper social class status to play, like baseball and football which would later become more commercialized and monetarily beneficial.³ In 1916, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) defined an amateur as “one who participates in competitive physical sports only for the pleasure, and the physical, mental, moral and social benefits derived therefrom” (Sack and Zimbalist 2013, 3). This was the beginning of the definition of amateurism moving away from the original British intent and fully separating school-based sports from professional sports in the United States. Bylaw 12.01.1 in the NCAA manual states that “only an amateur student-athlete is eligible for intercollegiate athletics participation in a particular sport” (NCAA 2014, 57). This requirement has really not changed for over a hundred years, but the sports development model we now see in America has changed exponentially. The same tenet of amateurism still applies to scholastic sports, for the most part—indeed, the concept of amateurism has remained fairly stagnant—but the environment and status of sports in America have changed drastically.

In simple terms, amateurism in sports means participation as an avocation rather than a profession, and not getting compensation for playing a sport or using one’s “athletics skill (directly or indirectly) for pay in any form in that sport.”⁴ This definition has been expanded over the years to include preventing athletes from capitalizing on their commercial utility, such as endorsement opportunities, to the level of receiving any benefit, no matter how small, such as a free meal, as a violation of their amateur status. Amateurism eventually evolved into an ideal that many supported as a way to separate educationally based sports and Olympic sports from the perceived scourge of money and professionalism.

In this sense, amateurism’s last stand is taking place in the sports development educational model of the United States, as it really does not exist anywhere else in the world. The Olympic Games long ago dropped the façade of amateurism in its competitions starting in 1988, against immense resistance.⁵ Many thought that bringing in professional athletes to the Olympics would stain their purity and even that they would eventually cease to exist, yet it is virtually nondebatable that the Olympic Games are now as popular as ever, even while using overtly and well-compensated professional athletes. The feared demise of the games did not happen, and television rights and sponsorship fees are at record highs (Zimbalist 1999).

As a society, we continue to cling to the notion of playing for the love of the game in American educationally based sports, but ultimately it does not seem that the public would mind if college athletes became overtly professional, as they just want to watch the games.⁶ That might be an inaccurate view on my part, but it doesn’t seem to be, as the games themselves are what attract the fans specifically at colleges, universities, and primary and secondary schools. We are cheering for the names on the front of the jersey—the institutions—and for the names on the back of the jerseys chiefly as representatives of the institutions that hold our loyalty. Consequently, if we were watching sports where the participants were real students, competing as an avocation, we would likely be just as happy and cheer the same way as we do under the quasi-professional athletic model that exists today in the upper reaches of the American educational system. Regardless of where we end up with sports development in America, it is clear that this “educational ideal” is dying, because we simply are not doing what we claim and are often not providing athletes the education that is cited as being so valuable to them. Meanwhile, college athletes—and, to a lesser extent, other amateur athletes—are restricted, in many ways unlike any other American citizens, from monetizing their economic utility when it is at its peak earning potential. I predict that, if so many continue to profit from college athletics, but not the athlete labor themselves, the current model in America will ultimately cease to exist in theory or practice.

EDUCATION

The United States is often touted as having the best education system in the world, yet the facts tell a surprisingly different story. This is especially clear when it comes to America’s rank as opposed to other countries in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education. STEM jobs are growing at a faster rate than non-STEM jobs in America, but the US education system is not producing a sufficient number of graduates in the field (Rosen 2013). American students are far below many of their foreign counterparts in math and science performance. Losing in this important education race cannot be entirely blamed on the overemphasis of athletics and their place within the US educational model, but the athletic-centric model does have an impact, and its role in undermining education at all levels can no longer be ignored.

In their groundbreaking book The Game of Life, Shulman and Bowen (2001) found that college athletes participating in all types of sports tend to underperform academically and that this is even more pronounced in higher-profile sports like football, basketball, and ice hockey, most notably in the NCAA’s lower divisions. While the more notorious academic issues are usually at the top Division I level, this study showed that even the more participatory and allegedly less athletically competitive levels in college sports also show numerous academic deficiencies. Meanwhile, this has not changed in the top division, as the most recently reported NCAA trends show lower graduation rates in high-profile sports: consistently, high-profile academic scandals almost always involve high-profile sports.⁷

The cost of increased spending on athletic programs at all levels of education in America has put severe stress on many institutions in their efforts to deliver effective academics. America’s overall health and well-being are dependent on educational leadership that can help promote an educated and skilled citizenry. Can removing or reducing the stress on our academic infrastructure caused by an emphasis on competitive athletics increase academic primacy and effectiveness? This book offers that it can and will, but in order to remove or reduce that stress we must provide sports development opportunities outside the educational system.

HOW DIFFERENT SPORTS DEVELOPMENT AND SPORTS DELIVERY SYSTEMS WORK FOR THE ELITE ATHLETE

Both the US and European systems can produce elite athletes who go on to very prominent athletic careers. How athletes navigate through the two systems is different, yet many of the outcomes are the same. For example, Dennis Schröder and Jabari Parker are young, talented basketball players who each ultimately made it to the National Basketball Association (NBA), for the Atlanta Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks, respectively, but came from entirely different sports development and educational backgrounds.⁸ Schröder started his career in the German sports club system, whereas Parker was a product of the American educationally based model.

Parker played basketball at all levels of the education system in Chicago, Illinois, most notably at Simeon Career Academy, a public high school in the city’s South Side neighborhood that has long been noted for its ability to produce elite basketball talents such as Parker, Nick Anderson, Ben Wilson, and Derrick Rose, to name a few.⁹ Parker only played one year of college basketball as what is now commonly called a “one and done” player—usually a highly elite prospect who will play college basketball for one year to make it to nineteen, the minimum age to declare for the NBA draft. This minimum was instituted in 2005, ostensibly to prevent high school players going directly to the NBA, as was increasingly being done by influential young superstars like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. The thought behind the rule was allegedly to encourage, if not mandate, that elite basketball athletes go to college even if only for one year, in order to have some exposure to higher education before jumping to the NBA. What cannot be ignored is that this is also a prime year of athletic development and maturity for many athletes. Theoretically, this NBA rule was governed by the most recent collective bargaining agreement between the National Basketball Players Association (the NBA players’ union) and the owners. While that is technically correct, it is hard not to notice the monetary and competitive benefits for both the NCAA and NBA to having a rule like this. The NCAA gets superstars, if only for a year, and the NBA gets players one year older and one year better after playing in a very good and competitive development system.

Incidentally, this basketball development system is both cost-free to the NBA and a massive revenue source for the NCAA, considering that almost 96 percent of the NCAA’s national office budget comes from television and corporate sponsorship revenues generated from the hugely popular NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, also known as “March Madness.”¹⁰ How the absurdity of a rule like this impacts elite sports development and what little integrity may remain in American educationally based sports, while at the same time preventing an athlete like Parker from being able to maximize his earning potential, is discussed more fully in later chapters. In my opinion, rules like this are a major example of why our current systems need to be changed, to evolve, and to provide more choices for both the elite athlete and our citizenry.

Schröder, on the other hand, developed his skills through the German club sports system, not in his local school system, on a path similar to what is offered elsewhere in Europe and in other countries. Identified as a potential elite athlete shortly after taking up basketball at a young age, he moved from the mass-participation sports clubs in the area around his hometown of Braunschweig, Germany, to the elite developmental basketball teams that serve as feeders for the top divisions of Bundesliga basketball. As an elite athlete he was able to focus on basketball at a time when his skills were at their peak. He still attended school while working his way up through the feeder clubs, and advanced schooling was often provided on-site at his clubs (a very common arrangement in Europe for higher-level clubs). Thus, education was still an important part of his total development package. For Schröder, the main difference from the US model was that he was not constrained by arbitrary academic standards that could have limited his ability to compete, or that could have led him into a substandard educational experience just to maintain his eligibility. In European systems, success (or failure) in academics is really up to the individual. There is no motivation on the part of either players or teams to violate academic standards because academic eligibility is not a requirement—nor is it needed, as the bulk of the sports development system lies completely outside formal educational borders.

Schröder eventually played his way to the top club basketball team in Braunschweig, the Bundesliga first division Phantoms, before being drafted in the first round of the 2013 NBA draft, the same as Parker. While Schröder did not attend college in the United States or university in Europe, he was still able to reach the highest level of professional basketball competition in the NBA. If Schröder wants to attend college at some point in his life, he can certainly do it after his playing career is over. In the meantime, the separation of club sports from the German secondary school and university systems was not an inhibitor to his education.

These two players present similar outcomes for two elite players from two different systems, with this one specific difference: one sports development system is embedded in the education system, with specific academic requirements needed to compete, and the other is separate and distinct from the educational model. Both systems have their benefits along with their negative points. In many ways, it is difficult to say which model is better for producing elite athletes or for presenting athletic, exercise, and entertainment opportunities to the masses. There could be a healthy debate, if one were forced to make an absolute choice between one or the other, but that is not the focus of this book. Instead, I intend to explore several alternative sports delivery models for both elite athletes and citizens in the United States, both inside and outside the current educationally based model.

LACK OF OPTIONS

Currently, American sports development is essentially governed by an educational system that is highly restrictive for the athlete but beneficial to many others. Many athletes, most notably in football and men’s basketball, are virtually forced into this model to maximize their development and potential advancement to the big-money world of professional sports. While there are some alternative paths in other sports, such as baseball and hockey, educationally based sports are still the primary “feeder” system for participation at higher levels. This has helped create a situation where a few organizations and people—highly paid coaches, conference offices, television networks, corporate partners—control the narrative for many athletes in the United States, keeping them essentially powerless and limited as to the best choices for their own academic and athletic future. If, instead, more sports development options were available, it would expose higher education to the market forces of choice and competition. This could initiate a revolution driven by the needs of the athlete, who would be able to decide what option is better for him or her, just as the needs of consumers drive the progress of every other industry in a free-market economy. It would also allow colleges to pull back from the insanity of the ongoing facilities and personnel “arms race” we have under the current intercollegiate athletic system, at the expense of educational primacy.

Parker and Schröder are just two of the thousands of examples that demonstrate that both systems can produce elite athletes. The difference lies in the degree of direct connection to education, and how we define, at various levels, academic eligibility to compete in sports. In theory, the American system, with its combination of participating in sports while getting an education, sounds like a perfect match. Unfortunately, the academic component has been abused and often outright ignored at all levels of our education-based sports system virtually since its inception (Falla 1981; Ridpath 2002). In short, the goals of scholastic sports often do not mesh with the goals of academia, most notably when substandard academic performance might keep superstar athletes off the court and field. When those two worlds collide, it is often sports priorities that win out—but it does not have to be that way. There is room for both sets of priorities in a new world of American sports development. The current stress our education system is under from an ever-growing and increasingly expensive athletic-industrial complex cannot and does not need to go on. There are better ways to define sports development in America while preserving educational primacy.

VANISHING SPORTS AND PARTICIPATION OPPORTUNITIES

Both elite athletes and nonelite sports participants need more choices, because opportunities for both are deteriorating under the current model. For example, opportunities for mass participation in sports have been dwindling at many levels of our education system. Wrestling, men’s gymnastics, and swimming have been hit especially hard as revenue and energy are focused on the more commercially popular sports, which seem to be more valued from the youth level all the way to university campuses. A survey conducted by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association in 2014 found that 26 million children ages 6 to 17 played team sports, a 4 percent drop from 2009. Recognizing the somewhat disturbing trend of sports specialization by many athletes who are focused more and more on one sport year round, the total number of different sports played within the same age group had plunged by nearly 10 percent (Rosenwald 2015).

It is time for a dramatic change in how we do sports in America. Although some European clubs are pointing to issues such as financial problems that could threaten their survival, the American college model has many more acute issues and is drowning in scandals and debt, while the primary and secondary levels of education are being squeezed financially and are dropping opportunities for sports and physical education. It is imperative that all these systems be analyzed more closely to see if there might be a better way to maintain sports as an integral part of the culture without losing the benefits.

IS IT REALLY ABOUT EDUCATION?

The current athletic model in the United States is often justified because of the perception that it provides access to education and even an impetus to continue one’s education at a college or university. Social mobility through the combination of sports and education is often mentioned as a primary benefit for minorities and other disadvantaged groups. In other words, it can be argued somewhat successfully that athletics can allow potentially significant access to educational opportunity for some who may have not had that opportunity without participating in sports. The ultimate vehicle for social mobility is education, but while using athletics as a way to attain that educational promise sounds appealing on paper, it does not always provide the social mobility and brighter future that are promised. It is a truism that, first and foremost, individuals have to take personal responsibility for their own education. However, many athletes find their educational options limited and/or controlled in order to ensure their academic eligibility, with an emphasis on more time for training rather than access to a bona fide education. This becomes a trap: athletes know they have to be eligible to compete and that others may be counting on them, not just to win games but even to be a family’s potential lottery ticket out of poverty should they make it into the professional ranks—as unlikely as that is.¹¹

These scenarios are damaging the academic primacy of our educational system. For example, it is easy to deduce that if a school’s major football star is needed to compete in a very important game, but he is not academically eligible under standards set by the governing organization (e.g., a state high school activities association or an intercollegiate athletics governing body such as the NCAA), things may be done to “game the system” to ensure that the star player is able to play, at the expense of educational integrity. Sadly, I can say that I did this myself during my time as an athletic administrator and coach at several NCAA Division I universities. I tried to rationalize any effort I made to keep an athlete eligible by saying that this young man or woman would go back to a very dark place, and that we were doing them a great favor by keeping them on the field or court. In reality, I was doing the school and fans a favor. I was not helping the athlete develop as a person nor was I doing anything to assist in his or her actual social mobility. I was only concerned about the here and now: we needed that player to give us a better chance to win. Now I realize the error of my ways, and it is a major motivation for writing this book.

The conflict between sports and academics is very real, and it is only getting worse. The NCAA’s vice president for enforcement, Jon Duncan, announced in early 2015 that the governing body was investigating twenty serious cases of academic fraud (Wolverton 2015). This came on the heels of a major scandal at a premier public institution, the University of North Carolina, where it was uncovered by the Raleigh News and Observer and some impressive reporting by investigative reporter Dan Kane that a high percentage of men’s basketball and football athletes were kept academically eligible through a series of bogus, almost nonexistent classes in its Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Other details showed direct knowledge and involvement of athletic department personnel, faculty, and staff in grade changes, plagiarism, and the covering up of the scandal for up to eighteen years.¹² This is one of our public ivies and an institution which prided itself on doing things “the right way.” If North Carolina is doing this to keep its athletic machine afloat, it does make one wonder what others schools may or may not be doing to keep their athletes on the field.

Academic scandals and improprieties regarding athletic eligibility are not just the domain of intercollegiate athletics. Unfortunately, this has been happening not only at the commercialized level of NCAA Division I sports, but at the high school and youth sports levels. Middle and high schools are not immune to the desire to keep athletes on the field no matter what the cost, and scandals have damaged school-based sports in America for many years. A recent example is the private, football powerhouse Bellevue High School in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. It was alleged that the remarkable success of the school’s football program, considered one of the nation’s elite high school programs, having produced several NCAA Division I players, depended on players who weren’t actually Bellevue High students. As strange as that may sound, according to the Seattle Times it appears that up to seventeen of the athletes became eligible to play “by traveling to a Bellevue office park for classes at an obscure, 40-student private school: The Academic Institute, Inc.,” which many Bellevue faculty stated did not adhere to basic educational standards. The high tuition to this storefront school was often picked up by the coaching staff or wealthy boosters (Liebeskind and Baker 2015). This is just one of many examples of high school programs rivaling their college counterparts as to how far some institutions of learning will go in abandoning their educational mission to gain a few wins.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANGE

Father Theodore Hesburgh, the well-respected former president of the University of Notre Dame, summed it up very well when discussing what the United States is up against concerning its educationally based sports development model, specifically in higher education. He stated, “Many have concluded that little can be done to rein in the arms race or to curb the rampant excesses of the market. As we stated in the 2001 Knight Commission Report: ‘Worse, some predict that failure to reform from within will lead to a collapse of the current intercollegiate athletics system’” (Splitt 2003, vii).¹³

I agree with Father Hesburgh and I will even take it further. If the intercollegiate athletics system as we know it does collapse, and we are not prepared for the change or a change occurs that we as passionate followers of college sports do not want, it will dramatically impact what happens in primary and secondary school sports, along with other currently available youth sports options. It is my hope that the alternative models and concepts outlined in the ensuing chapters can be built upon to prevent such a disaster, and to preserve and enhance sporting opportunities at all levels in America.