National Collegiate Athletic Association |
CommentSeptember 14, 1998
Guest editorial -- NATA requests help on data collection
BY DENNY MILLER
For example, lawsuits against universities and their coaches, doctors, athletic trainers and other assistants allege these people (a) have been poorly trained, (b) have overseen too many players, (c) didn't have proper emergency plans, (d) didn't provide enough training or warm up, (e) used untested strategies, (f) didn't keep proper records, (g) didn't provide the right treatment or provide it fast enough, (h) didn't have the right health care providers on site, and so forth. However, as lawsuits begin to focus on the delivery of sports training and health care, new information about these practices is more readily available. This means more information about how medical coverage is best provided can be studied and applied to the nation of athletes, both student and professional, as a whole. Recent detailed sports injury data from the University of Iowa show not only that certain, perhaps unexpected, sports generate more injuries than others but that injury treatment and time spent on injury treatment may be significantly influenced by the sport. For example, a knee injury in a sprinter may take hours of an athletic trainer's time when the same injury in a football lineman may take minutes. These data have important implications for those responsible for designing and delivering sports health care coverage. At the same time, the growing number of lawsuits makes the penalties for failing to deliver adequate and appropriate medical coverage greater. The National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) has therefore established a task force to determine what appropriate medical coverage for intercollegiate athletics may be. This will enable those responsible for providing the medical coverage to make the right decisions, supply the right coverage, and avoid as many injuries and liability situations as possible. The NATA task force currently is collecting information in two concentrated areas. First, we are collecting information about current medical coverage practices. We would like information from any college, junior college or university or any college conference about on-site medical and allied staffing coverage of practices and games, both traditional and non-traditional. Even if this information is incomplete or sport-specific, we would like to see it. Second, the task force would like to collect information related to sports injury and sports liability. This information will enable the task force members to analyze what kind of medical coverage may be most appropriate at all levels of play (for example, Divisions I, II and III; NAIA, junior college), for all types of sports and in all sports settings (games vs. practices, regular vs. off-season). Again, the task force would like to collect information -- in any format, however limited or comprehensive. The task force requests (indeed begs) anyone who thinks they may have any information that would be useful to the task force to contact the NATA staff liaison, D. Ashley Dixon, at 2952 Stemmons Freeway, Suite 200, Dallas, Texas 75247. The telephone number is 214/637-6285, extension 154, and the fax number is 214/637-2206. The e-mail address is ashleyd@nata.org. Denny Miller is head athletic trainer at Purdue University. His address is Purdue University, Mackey Arena, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1790 (damiller@athletics.purdue.edu); the telephone number is 765/494-3245 and the fax number is 765/494-9899. Comment -- Caught in the tender trap of gambling
BY MELISSA ISAACSON This is how it happens. It's not a back alley on the West Side. It's a dorm football pool in Bloomington, Indiana, or Iowa City. It's a bet with fraternity brothers for five or 10 bucks. It's the first intoxicating sniff of independence and easy money. It's the suburban kid from the nice family learning for the first time what a parlay card is, and then discovering how much fun they are to play with little apparent risk involved. All three of your teams cover the point spread and it's a 6-1 payoff. For a $10 investment, that's 60 bucks. Couldn't be easier, except that you rarely win. It's that same kid eventually deciding that maybe he'd be better off on the other side. Earn a little extra cash, no one gets hurt. And maybe he doesn't. Or maybe he finds himself in deeper than he expected and can't find his way out. "I never gambled at all in high school," said one former Indiana University student from the North Shore. "But when I was a freshman, a guy from another fraternity started passing out these parlay cards and I played for very small amounts -- five or 10 dollars. Then those guys graduated and there was no local bookmaker anymore, so I thought I would do it on a small scale at my fraternity." He made a rule: no bets more than $25 a game. "I had a blast," he said. "And I had no trouble covering at first." At first. "It's a very common thing on every major campus," he said. Hidden danger It has, in fact, become almost a ritual of freshman life. Send your precious angel off to college convinced that he understands the perils of too much alcohol, of drug use, of unprotected sex, and you can feel relatively comforted, not for a second suspecting that a gambling addiction is just as dangerous and probably more likely. "College gambling, those parlay cards, are often the initiation into sports gambling, which is the biggest thing going," said Don Herion, head of the Cook County sheriff's organized-crime and vice unit. "And once they start, some people can't handle it." The former high-school athlete is often the most vulnerable. If he doesn't play college sports, he craves the action, figures he has more knowledge than the average mope because he's a jock, feels invulnerable in the insular world of the college campus. Misguided notion Brian Ballarini, the former Northwestern University and University of Colorado student who recently pleaded guilty to one count of using a telephone to further gambling activities -- plea-bargained down from more serious federal charges -- said he had never placed a bet in his life before he went to college. His gambling career began, he said, while he was recuperating from a career-ending knee injury sustained during football practice. "Like many other students, I began gambling because I found it fun and exciting," Ballarini said in a statement released by his lawyers. "Unfortunately, I allowed it to take over my life." Herion, who once testified in the case of a Downstate bookmaker who took bets only on high-school games, said the misguided notion that "somehow this is a part of American life" is part of the problem. Herion becomes enraged when he hears people wonder what the big deal is and claim that illegal gambling is a "victimless crime." "That's a joke," he said. "The fact is, it's a dangerous thing and there are victims out there. Your family are victims when you blow their tuition money, when you start extorting money from them, when you cheat them. It gets into all kinds of bad things." Out of control The bad things happen when the bets aren't the sure thing they seemed to be. And when that innocent frat-house bookmaking grows out of control. "Just because you go to college doesn't mean you get any breaks from the bad guys," Herion said. "I know college kids who have been beaten when they couldn't pay off bets. Now what are you going to do? Are you going to steal or start selling dope? Or are you going to start booking yourself? If you can fix a game with a player, you're going to try anything. And if, God help you, you get lucky, there's no going back." The bad guys aren't as far away as one might think. When the former Indiana student became a college graduate with working clients and those clients' friends, the stakes naturally got higher. "It just grew and grew until one point where it pretty much got out of hand and I had a lot more action than I was comfortable with," he said. Fortunately, he was able to close up shop in time. "If your operation becomes big enough," he said, "organized crime will contact you and you either join them or you're put out of business." One Chicago-area student at a prestigious Washington, D.C., school said avoiding a gambling habit may be tougher than fueling one. "I could walk into any dorm or fraternity on campus and get a bet down if I wanted," he said. That's how it happens. Copyright 1998, The Chicago Tribune. Reprinted with permission.
Opinions -- Money talks when the subject is corporate signage
Rick Wright, sportswriter "Is signage in college athletics a bad thing? To many, yes. Corporate involvement in college athletics still seems an intrusion into the amateur arena. "When college bowl games started attaching corporate sponsors' names to their own, resulting in combinations like the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Fedex Orange Bowl and the Plymouth (now Culligan) Holiday Bowl, the public reaction was one of distaste. "The news media bucked the trend, too, often refusing to use the name of the sponsor except in the final paragraph of a story. "Maybe that's what led to straight corporate takeovers like the Outback, Carquest and Insight.com bowls. Now try and leave out the sponsor, you media wretches. "This season, only five of 22 scheduled bowl games don't have corporate sponsors attached to their names. Even the Rose Bowl, the most hallowed of postseason college football contests, officially is the Rose Bowl Presented by AT&T. "Sure, it makes you wince. But it also seems likely that many of those bowl games wouldn't exist without corporate support -- and it's only common sense that those corporate sponsors expect plenty of exposure in return for their money. "Meanwhile, Rudy Davalos (University of New Mexico director of athletics) came to Albuquerque in 1992 -- determined to mine the corporate sector. Davalos says corporate contributions were at about $90,000 a year when he arrived. This season, he says, they might reach $2 million.... "'I never want to hear anybody gripe about signage, or what we put on the floor,' Davalos said. 'We commercialize the heck out of it. All across the country, (college athletics programs) are having to do this to survive.' "If you've been reading the signage on the wall, you know what Davalos says is true. College athletics is a business, not a game. The Pit is a basketball arena, not the Sistine Chapel. "And signage, in the Pit as well as in the dictionary, is here to stay."
Mark Kidd, Host Communications "They're already spending nearly three times the cost of the sponsorship fee on tie-ins commercials, merchandising, in-store promotions and the like. The economics don't sound good. And I'll guarantee you, most people couldn't tell you the name of the sponsors of any of the smaller bowls. But then there's a super success story like Tostitos. Who knew much about them before the Fiesta?"
Gender equity
Tyrone Willingham, football coach "There is no question we need to produce more opportunities for women. As I understand it, if we produce more revenue, we are better able to provide opportunities. "I don't think we have to destroy everything to get equality.... "In my opinion, we are headed toward hurting all sports. Because if you reduce football scholarships, you reduce the product. If you reduce the product, what do advertisers buy into? "That hurts women's teams. That hurts men's teams."
Donna A. Lopiano, executive director "Football has the largest budget and the highest standard of living of all men's sports, and has been the member of the sports family least willing to accept a small cutback in their very high standard of living. "If football does not agree to free up funds to help schools achieve Title IX compliance, then not only will women's sports be victims but so will other non-revenue men's sports . . . because football insists on an unreasonable standard of living."
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In the '70s and '80s, as companies -- and their equipment -- became more sophisticated and were able to defend themselves more effectively, sports-related lawsuits began to focus on situations in which there was an alleged failure to warn. Now, in the '90s, as lawsuits in this area have become less successful, sports lawyers have begun to look to flaws in the delivery of sports health care and training.