I was reading Kevin Sherrington's column in the Dallas Morning News Sportspage today on a particular alumni for UConn and it got me to thinking. First thought was why haven't we heard someone complain before. He does mention a particular moment with University of Texas booster, but overall you don't really hear any complaints about bang for the buck from boosters and alumni in the news. I'm sure the ADs hear it pretty regularly, but in the news it seems to be rare. Eventually I am going to try and tie together two points, one about this money situation and another: are people inherently good?
An aside here, I grew up in Dallas and was around for the demise of SMU and the SWC. The notion of college athletes and money is not an uncommon topic around here. And supposedly this has gone on forever, everyone else does it so my college needs to do it to keep up. There is always talk that "something is going on", but noone really puts a finger on how much and shows proof and widespread abuse. Recently we had the Auburn quarterback situation and that made a bunch of noise, but frankly not much overall has been done as of yet. Some say Auburn may still face some penalties, but who knows.
Lets start with what is suppose to be happening. Young men and women graduate from high school receive scholarships to participate in sports for a college or university. The young men and women receive in value a four year degree and spend their extra curriculur time playing for their respective schools. Originally a pretty straight forward deal. Both the student and the school derive a benefit. As time wore on, athletics and of course especially football became big money makers for some schools. Being able to compete not on the field but in prestige became important to alumni, boosters so it became more important for administrations.
Thinking about this I thought well is the real problem the rules? If you change the rules and let people pay or give "gifts" basically you eliminate the problem. Then where does this land us. Probably with some serious descrepancies in competitive sports at the college level. A few large universities would win out pretty regularly because any kid with ambition would go where they could get value for their efforts. Oh yeah isn't the value in the four year education. Quite frankly it should be. And I am going to come back to this point and are people inherently good in a moment.
The real problem is the education system, not just for athletes, but for our society. Most people don't like hearing this, but we as a society have some serious issues and you can make the point that we are a morally bankrupt society. Or are we? This issue of college athletes and money is a great example of the divide in our country, not of the haves and the have nots( another issue to discuss someday), but of how much of our society can play by rules that benefit the larger whole.
We all love a winner. Winning is great. Ask any athlete or anyone successfull and they will tell you it feels good to be successful. Work hard receive the reward, all in all not a bad way to create expectations. As a society we have now come to the point where winning is too important. No one can gets excited by good play or good effort. Normally rational people can lose it emotionally if their team loses a game even if the loss was a fluke play or something. No credit goes to the fact that the team played well, you can see the effort every minute of the game. A terrible team can win and the win is over blown and then creates a set of expectations that are totally unrealistic. The education I am talking about is the education we give ourselves about the importance of winning.
Lets be real, I like to win, it hurts to lose, and even harder to rationalize losing even if I did everything right. Where did I learn this, is it engrained in my genetics or is it engrained in my pysche from my experiences in life. I am afraid it is in what I have been taught in society. If I am not at the top I am a failure. This seems to be the mantra our society teaches itself. So is this all of our society, no one can escape the inevitable crash and burn from never being able to be the one at the top?
Well here comes the are we inherently good or not thought. Actually if you look at college athletics you see thousands of young men and women who went to school on an atheletic scholarship and end up in regular careers, leave reasonable successful lives and are very happy about it. In fact so much so the NCAA created an advertising campaign around this thought. Many may go on to successful careers in some athletic endeavor, some never leave the glory become coaches somewhere and still try to win, but overall most come out emotionally intact and do well. Some even coach successfully and develop other young men and women to do the same. If you look at the large number of young men and women coming out of college most don't play in the pros so most benefit from the original scholarship they received.
So are we all bad or we all good. The answer is we can all be good, and funny thing it does go back to the rules. It is what we teach ourselves, what values we give ourselves as a society that do make the difference. The rules aren't whether a booster can contribute to the benefit of an individual athlete, the rules are whether we want to give our children the best opportunity to be successful. All of our children. There is way too much concentration of wealth in a small community within our society. This perpetuates the ongoing myth that you aren't anybody if you don't fit into this group. So others wanting to feel this success create their own set of rules to try and level the playing field. In reality the booster may not feel he or she is cheating by encouraging a young person to come to their school. There is no ethical delimna to make this effort. It is what is required to make their school successful. So the rules we need to change are how do we define success. Yes winning can be one of them, but only part of what defines success. Boosters don't sell their soul to the devil when they pay an athlete, but what they are doing is perpuating a system that doesn't benefit the child they are paying.So is this booster inherently bad, not really, they are surviving in our world.
Overall we are inherently good. Most kids do benefit from the scholarship with applied effort. It is the ones that don't benefit from the scholarship that are hurt, even if they win the national title in their sport. Only a few will go on to play pro sports and even a fewer will be successful in the pros. This concentration by our society to hold these people up to the highest level is what causes people to make mistakes. Should boosters be allowed to give money to certain kids to attend their school, well probably not, but you actually can make a good argument for them to be able to. You cannot change anything in a society overnight, but a concentrated effort by schools to put more emphasis on academic success wouldn't hurt us. Is this going to be easy, hell no. Until we learn that success encompasses more than winning a trophy we will continue to hurt ourselves and eventually even though we can be inherently good our actions (even if meant in good thought) will bring down the entire system whether it be college athletics or whatever.
So back to Mr Sherrington's column and what I consider to be more of the problem. He just re states what is already in the news, but never addresses the issue itself. He does give a moral to the story and also mentions having your soul involved hence my reference above. This to me is one reason why we cannot solve problems. Mr Sherrington only discusses what happened not what can be done to address the issue. He mentions that we shouldn't get mixed up with the booster and references a quote, but real solutions?
Yes we are inherently good, but doing good is very difficult. We make it that way. Actually following rules are pretty simple and even creating some decent ones to live by can be done. It is our expectations that we create that make it difficult. So if you want a solution start with having a talk with your child, whether they are two years old or forty two years old. What you learn about how you discuss expectations can change how you think for a long time.
"If you teach your child that only winning matters then you will teach your child to fail."
And finally going back to my first paragraph, really I am surprised we haven't heard more boosters blow up about wasting their money. This may be the tip of the iceberg, hopefully not.
(The quote above sounded familiar to me, but I couldn't find a reference from another source.Used google)
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