National Collegiate Athletic Association |
CommentOctober 27, 1997
Guest editorial -- Standards needed to clarify who is a coach
BY LYNN KING, DRAKE UNIVERSITY
Would you leave your child in the care of a baby-sitter without first knowing the person's credentials and experience. Not likely. Would you let your child participate in school sports without first finding out about the credentials and experience of the coach? Parents do it every day and therein lies the problem. Most people assume that the person hired to coach a school team has experience and training and knows how to handle youngsters. Such an assumption is often wrong. Throughout the United States, coaching requirements at the grade-school and high-school levels are ill-defined, haphazard or nonexistent. Just who qualifies to coach varies state to state and, often, district to district. Frankly, many of our young athletes suffer because coaches aren't properly trained. From 1982 to 1995, high-school sporting events accounted for 78 deaths across the country, 186 permanently disabling injuries and 200 serious injuries such as neck and skull fractures, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In California, coaches at least must know cardiopulmonary resuscitation and some coaching techniques, plus a dollop of child psychology. In many other places, anyone who can blow a whistle can dictate how young people conduct themselves on the ballfields of America. In Massachusetts, there are no statewide standards. It's left to local districts to decide who runs the teams. In North Dakota, coaching requirements are nonexistent. Anybody can do it. Michigan requires only that coaches be 18 or older and not in high school. In Pennsylvania, the decision of who coaches the high-school basketball team is made by the town school board. In sports-crazy Texas, coaches must be full-time school employees in order to qualify. That means anyone on the payroll can double as a coach. In Vermont, the people who coach cheerleaders must attend seminars on cheerleading safety, while other coaches in the Green Mountain State are left to their own devices on how to run their teams. In many states, if a person holds a teaching certificate, coaching is considered a birthright. Nationwide, 28 states require that coaches receive some level of formal training. That's a 135 percent increase over 1987, but even those training standards are all over the map. There is no consistency. To bring out the best in our young athletes, we must establish minimum training standards that apply to all coaches. Such standards would reduce the risk of player injury, give athletes a stronger grounding in their sport of choice and ensure that young people learn about sportsmanship. When these same athletes enter college, they'll all share an understanding of what it means to play fair. Another benefit of mandatory minimum standards for coaches: prima donnas, a common blight on today's university and professional sports landscape, would be fewer because effective coaches would not allow such behavior to blossom past the first bud of adolescence. New York and Iowa offer the better models for the rest of the nation. In both states, physical education teachers can coach provided they have first-aid and CPR expertise, and they possess required coaching skills before the season begins. Certified teachers can coach if they have the same safety skills as physical education teachers and complete required coaching courses, which include coaching principles and philosophy, within three years of taking the position. In an age when regulation defines who we are as a nation, it's amazing that many states leave coaches free to do whatever they choose with our young people. What is even more amazing is that parents do not demand better coaching preparation. Too often, if the coach is producing a winning record, no one questions the methods used to get there. Winning should not be the sole measure of whether a coach is a success, but it may explain why so many of today's professional athletes behave badly. As they learned about victory, they were never taught what it means to be gracious or humble. Good coaches must teach skills and safety while instilling players with ethics, sportsmanship and a devotion to the team that's not in competition with the desire for individual achievement. It's a difficult job that requires an unusual degree of finesse and understanding, and a lot more training than is mandated today. Lynn King is director of intercollegiate athletics at Drake University. Comment -- New season opens in Title IX conference
BY LOUIS M. GUENIN According to press reports, the juggernaut known as the Department of Education's reading of Title IX, one whose offense Brown University spent years trying to defense, has recently followed an undefeated season with a bowl victory in the Supreme Court. Commentators have opined that colleges should now confine their gaze to the requirement (hereafter the "enrollment standard") that the ratio of male to female varsity athletes must equal the ratio of male to female undergraduates. As coaches know, reading press reports is no substitute for viewing film. For antidiscrimination laws, no substitute arises for close study of the statutes, regulations and judicial opinions. Such study reveals that the foregoing juggernaut's record comprises only junior varsity games in the 1993-94 season, that it has never appeared in a bowl, and that because of recently exposed weaknesses in its offense, it may not win another game on the judicial gridiron. The agency's offense employs multiple handoffs that disguise the ball. No glimpse of the enrollment standard is conveyed by Title IX, which prohibits discrimination "on the basis of sex" but does not mention athletics, nor by the implementing regulation signed in 1975 by Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Caspar Weinberger. That regulation made "equal athletic opportunity" obligatory. Only in a 1979 policy of the Office for Civil Rights -- a pronouncement that Weinberger this year repudiated as contrary to the law and regulation -- does the enrollment standard appear. The agency has argued that its policy offers alternatives to the enrollment standard. It urges that colleges may continually expand women's athletics or sponsor every team desired by women. Together the latter options are an old chestnut. Athletic directors know that neither is feasible. To imagine that the interpretation of Title IX has solidified would be akin to appraising a team to be in midseason form after a week of practice. The subject of equal athletic opportunity is one on which the Supreme Court and seven of 12 federal appellate circuits have never ruled. The five that have touched it have not resolved it. Contrary to reports that the Supreme Court approved the U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit's declination in Cohen v. Brown University to invalidate the agency policy, the Supreme Court did not hear the case. As it selects cases to review, the Court annually denies thousands of petitions for writs of certiorari -- in the October 1996 term, the Court granted 168 of 6,623 petitions -- and its routine declinations without comment, as in Brown, constitute no expression of any view on the merits. Four other circuits have decided cases touching on sex discrimination in athletics (all during 1993-94). Two reached only questions of civil procedure, and two applied the agency policy -- the Tenth Circuit ordering reinstatement of women's softball at Colorado State University, the Seventh Circuit finding that finances and competitive inferiority but not sex discrimination motivated the University of Illinois to terminate men's swimming -- without systematically considering whether the policy was valid. The Seventh Circuit furnished an inadvertent prophesy of the policy's invalidity when it reserved judgment whether the enrollment standard would be valid if the enrollment standard were to be the sole test of discrimination. The old chestnut disintegrated, that is precisely what the enrollment standard has become. A fallacy as policy The simplest objection to the enrollment standard, apparently not yet expressed to a court, is that it commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Suppose, for example, that a team has an inept passer. In such case its passing yardage will doubtless be low. The reverse inference, however, does not follow. From reading that a team's passing yardage is low, one cannot infer ineptitude of the quarterback. The receivers may be weak, the offense geared to the run, the blocking poor, and so on. Similarly if an athletic department is ill-disposed toward women's athletics, one will expect to discover that a lesser proportion of female students hold varsity spots than the proportion of men who do so. But from observing that a lesser proportion of female students hold varsity spots than the proportion of men who do so, one cannot infer sex discrimination. It may be that fewer women than men wish to compete. Against the enrollment standard what now looms as the decisive evidence was not addressed in the above-mentioned appellate decisions. It emerged at Brown's trial ended in December 1994, but even there came too late to turn the outcome. The evidence consisted of surveys of Brown students as well as national studies, all revealing that in grade and high school, in intramurals, and on college varsities, a smaller portion of female than male students wishes to compete. What rendered the evidence too late was that a First Circuit panel in 1993 had already reviewed the agency policy (on appeal by Brown from a preliminary injunction) and declined to invalidate it. That panel had merely presumed that men and women are equally interested in varsity play. Were that presumption true, then fortuitously the enrollment standard would map opportunities to interests. The agency might then parry criticism by declaring the enrollment standard a case of "no harm, no foul." One should have thought that the presumption of equal interests would have been dropped when evidence appeared of unequal interests. But by a 2-1 majority and despite a cogent dissent by the chief judge, a new panel of the First Circuit, which heard Brown's appeal from final judgment, concluded last year that it could not revisit the rulings of its 1993 panel. It invoked the judicial equivalent of the rule that the outcome of a completed game will not be reversed because of an officiating mistake. The result was to scuttle Brown's challenge to the enrollment standard. Binding only in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, Brown remains unpersuasive as a precedent because it relies upon a presumption now known false. With the presumption of equal interests now exploded, in future cases the "no harm, no foul" move will not avail. The enrollment standard therefore founders via the following fatal objections: because of lesser demand for women's varsity spots, the enrollment standard establishes preferences for women whereas neither Title IX nor (as explained below) the Fourteenth Amendment allows a preference for either sex; the enrollment standard violates an express proviso in Title IX against quotas; and the enrollment standard neglects the agency's own dictate that a college must accommodate student interests. In a case against Louisiana State University, the most recent encounter with equal athletic opportunity by a federal district court, the enrollment standard and the reasoning of Brown were explicitly rejected. Finding that LSU had not offered even intramural competition in women's fast pitch softball, Judge Rebecca Doherty found LSU culpable of discrimination. But she reached that conclusion without entertaining any dubious presumptions. She considered it apparent that interests vary, and for that reason, she ruled that the enrollment standard is neither necessary nor sufficient to defeat a charge of discrimination. Elsewhere in its regulations, the Department of Education has directed that college housing be apportioned between men and women according to demand. How could variation in demand have been ignored for athletics? The Brown majority illustrated how variation in interests has been misapprehended. The majority opinion first argued against using stereotypes -- apparently overlooking that Brown had urged nothing beyond what data reveal. The majority then speculated that the lesser scale of women's intercollegiate athletics might explain the lesser athletic interests of young girls. If true, that would furnish no reason to ignore the interests of enrolled women. Could one argue that, in the hope of inducing greater interest in future generations, colleges should deliberately overshoot observed female interests? Given that women's programs are already substantial, it is not clear what marginal effect on society could be expected from such a move. In any case, that argument for expansion collapses without an explanation why colleges, who face seemingly endless demands for their scarce resources, should be used as publicity vehicles to induce participation in sports, especially outside their walls. It seems unreasonable to say that a college that declines to serve as such a vehicle commits "discrimination." Primary and secondary schools -- to which Title IX and like policies have been applied and which reach vastly more students than college varsities comprise -- do present an effective opportunity to induce interest in the lifelong enjoyment of athletics. The policy's demise foreshadowed Every major athletic conference falls within the appellate circuits whose precedents foretell invalidation of the agency policy or that have yet to consider it. The circuits that have yet to rule on the agency policy and the conferences they embrace include the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Eleventh (the Atlantic Coast, most of the Southeastern, and parts of the Big Ten, Big Twelve and Western Athletic), and the Ninth (the Pacific 10 and the remainder of the Western Athletic). The Sixth and Seventh Circuits, which embrace the Mid-American Conference and the rest of the Big Ten, have already recognized that a sex-based classification must be strictly scrutinized as would a racial one, which is to say that even if "benign," such a preference will be deemed to deny "the equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment unless the preference serves an important governmental objective. The Supreme Court made this clear as to race when it reversed the Tenth Circuit subsequent to the Colorado State case, and as to sex in a case against Virginia Military Institute. Following the former precedent, the Fifth Circuit has invalidated racial preferences in admissions; given the latter precedent, it could scarcely reach a different result about the sex preference that the agency policy effects. California's much publicized new constitutional amendment bans preferences by race or sex, and the Ninth Circuit has recently validated the amendment by observing that to ban preferences by race or sex is effectively to reiterate the equal protection clause. Federal courts appear impelled to invalidate the enrollment standard as a denial of equal protection because Congress has articulated no governmental objective that the enrollment standard serves. Congress revealed no intent in Title IX to expand any athletic program; it did disavow quotas about any activity. A place for new ideas Colleges need not wait to be sued. Any college or conference may request a declaratory judgment from a federal district court to the effect that, first, the enrollment standard does not define discrimination, and second, a given array of teams or method of selecting them does not violate Title IX. For the first conclusion, there may be adduced all the foregoing reasons, including the premise that a fallacy cannot stand. A college would enable the second by describing what it has done or proposes to do. The effort to seek a declaratory judgment may be slight, and the long-term relief great, compared to the wrenching effect of terminating popular men's teams and of increasing budgets in pursuit of an arbitrary ratio. Capturing 'equal opportunity' What array of teams should a college propose? The agency policy, temporarily ascendant in the absence of effectively presented alternatives, is the work of a prosecutorial office. That office queried one athletic department why it failed to provide racquet presses for the tennis team and why it furnished smaller basketballs to the women's team. The nation's arenas of competition and crucibles of thought and action about social justice are more likely sources for policies of equal athletic opportunity. But colleges must propose policies. And they must do so in more public arenas. I suggest three alternatives. In the first, a college would define competitive access, computed separately for each sex, as the number of positions on subsidized varsities divided by the number of aspirants thereto, and then field teams so as roughly to equate male and female competitive access. In the foregoing I refer to subsidized varsities because we may assume that a college will sponsor any self-sustaining team. Since self-sustaining teams consume no net resources, it is among subsidized teams that a college must divide the subsidy pie, a pie that comprises the profits of self-sustaining teams plus any subvention from general funds. To treat part of the expense budget of a self-sustaining team as if it were part of the subsidy pie would not only be confused but shortsighted. If cutting a self-sustaining team's expenses causes it to slip, the effect may ramify, in the entertainment market in which the team operates, into a multiplied revenue loss. That would shrink the subsidy pie and by threatening their existence, hurt nonrevenue teams the most. Where interest in football and basketball is high, the exclusion of self-sustaining teams from the computation of competitive access will generate a higher value thereof, thus assuring more spots for women, than would their inclusion. Support for equal competitive access to subsidized varsities, though not phrased as such, has already been broached in Chief Judge Juan Torruella's dissent in Brown. In the second alternative, a college defines normalized interest in each sport as the number of varsity aspirants divided by the standard roster size. (The quotient assures that sports in which rosters are large will not score higher in interest by that fact alone.) Or a college may define normalized interest as a weighted sum of that quotient and the number of those who want to watch, though not play, a sport. The college then ranks sports, regardless of sex, according to normalized interest. Proceeding down the ordering, it fields teams until the subsidy pie is committed. When any self-sustaining team is encountered in the ordering, it is fielded, for it will augment the subsidy pie. In the third approach, after considering all relevant factors in team selection -- ranging from relative costs to competitiveness to regional weather -- a college presents to the community, in a survey or ballot, several alternative allocations of funds among various sports, academic needs, and other programs, and then rests its choice on the responses. Many other creative ideas are possible. Though it may seem innocuous to say, as does the agency policy, that any men's team must be matched by a women's team when there is interest, that rule can compel both inefficiency and defiance of majority wishes. Where demand for women's hockey is barely sufficient to sustain a team, a college ought not be compelled to mimic its men's program if a majority of women might prefer that the college use the funds for improved housing or better lab facilities. The logic of expenses Another policy defect relates to the circumstance that in most sports, to fill a roster requires that coaches split scholarships and use walkons. Since doing so reduces scholarship expense per athlete, in women's sports there arises an incentive to curtail roster sizes lest the college violate the agency rule that female and male scholarship expenditures per athlete must generally be equal. The blame for this counterproductive incentive lies not with NCAA rules but with the agency rule. The solution is again to confine attention to subsidized teams. Only those teams divide a community scholarship pie. Self-sustaining teams pay for their scholarships. Rather than drawing on the pie, they contribute to it. Should profits in football nonetheless be redistributed by reducing its scale? Football's scholarship bound has already been successively reduced while the risk of injury remains the same. Consequently teams have been forced to reduce scrimmaging, especially in the spring when seniors are gone and freshmen have not arrived, and to use more freshmen in games. Any notion of scaling down football also runs contrary to mutual self-interest. A pivotal factor in highly competitive markets is the extreme sensitivity of success to program expenditures. When a team is favored by accidents of the entertainment market with being a self-sustaining subsidizer of others, it is in everyone's interest to budget the expenses of the subsidizer according to the market in which it competes. Looking at the complete picture, for one team to live high on the hog while another scrambles is not per se unjust. Even the most egalitarian theories of justice approve large disparities in income and wealth between investment bankers and laborers. The rationale is that often an inequality works to the overall benefit, as viewed by a majority of its members, of the relevant social position disfavored by the particular inequality. Greater welfare for the least advantaged can thereby be achieved than would occur under equality. Tennis players traveling in vans have long understood why the football team travels by chartered plane. Consensus A majority of men and women are likely to agree that respect for the aspirations of everyone in a college community requires that scarce resources be meted out evenhandedly in proportion to relative demand. In the long run, women's athletics will be best secured by anchoring opportunities to relative demand. Competition is not new. Men's club teams for decades have sought, some successfully and some not, to demonstrate interest sufficient to gain varsity status at their respective colleges. The risk associated with policies loosed from the mooring of relative demand is a backlash, of which there are already indications, such as that against affirmative action. The way to avert such calamities is not by asking the word "discrimination" to do more work than it can, but by discussions in which we seek a broad consensus about what justice requires. As respect for individual interests is an indispensable part of many conceptions of justice, we should expect to foster diverse consequences of diverse interests. Louis M. Guenin, J.D., is lecturer on ethics in science in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School. His research concerns distributive justice. Opinions -- College athletics is the best, except for excessive passion
Joe Roberson, former athletics director "There is nothing better than a Saturday afternoon football game in Ann Arbor. For me to watch the Michigan band come out on the field and play the 'M Fanfare' is about as good as it gets. I love intercollegiate athletics....I hate the passion that surrounds intercollegiate athletics." Discussing commercialism, particularly a Nike equipment contract with Michigan that he approved: "Before we did this, basketball and football got the best of everything and nonrevenue-producing sports did the best they could....The issue isn't commercialism. I think athletics departments should be self-supporting. The issue is: How much control do you give up to be commercial? "Nike hasn't called and told us when to start our games. Athletes don't miss classes because of Nike. If intercollegiate athletics has sold its soul, it wasn't to shoe and apparel companies. They sold it a long time ago, to television."
Black coaches
Greg Blache, assistant football coach "All we're looking for is an even playing field, not any quotas. If it's 10 yards for a first down for (white coaches), all we want is 10 yards for us. But it's a double standard. "(Black coaches) are not as acceptable to the media. We have to go under a different microscope. So consequently, people and owners become a little more reluctant to give us serious consideration. You're not just an NFL coach or a college coach. You're a black coach."
|