Ask Division III coaches, athletics administrators and conference commissioners what constitutes teachable moments in college sports, and not many will say technical fouls, red cards and ejections. But an effort funded by a Division III initiatives grant in 2003-04 will make such examples of unsportsmanlike behavior the curriculum for the entire class of Division III conferences.

Chuck Mitrano, commissioner of the Empire 8, applied for and received a Division III initiatives grant for this year that will have all Division III conferences track conduct fouls in 17 sports (football, baseball, softball, wrestling, field hockey, and men's and women's basketball, volleyball, soccer, water polo, ice hockey and lacrosse). Mitrano will provide forms for all conference offices and institutions competing as independents to complete and return after the fall, winter and spring sports seasons.

The goals are three-fold. Primarily, the effort is designed to raise awareness among Division III constituents about student-athlete and coach conduct. Mitrano believes that collection and dissemination of such data will prompt individuals to want to improve on that data from year to year and actively address behavior. Second, it will provide tangible data that conferences and institutions can use to compare themselves against, which also should spur a competitive desire to improve. Third, Mitrano hopes the initiative will exist well beyond its one-year grant life to perhaps even being administered permanently on an Association-wide basis by the NCAA.

"This is important because for the first time it will give Division III some tangible data on athlete and coach conduct," Mitrano said. "This should force schools to take an introspective look at the issue."

Though the whole sportsmanship issue is nothing new, tying data to it is. In many ways, sportsmanship is not a quantifiable behavior, but Mitrano's study at least will track instances in which behavior has been defined with a consequence.

For example, the study will require conferences to track technical fouls in basketball, yellow and red cards in soccer, ejections in baseball and softball, flagrant and unnecessary roughness fouls in football, game-misconduct violations in ice hockey and serious violations in other sports. Conferences will send forms to Mitrano after each season, and he will compile a master sheet that will include the total number of conduct fouls per conference, average number of fouls per member of the conference, and average number of conduct fouls per member institution sponsoring the sport. Each master sheet also will be personalized by conference.

"For example," Mitrano said, "the Empire 8 will receive a master sheet that identifies the Empire 8 by name but the other conferences anonymously, such as conference A, B or C. This allows each conference office and its membership to readily identify its data and compare it to fellow members without knowing the identity of those members.

"To maximize its effectiveness, membership will be encouraged to share the data with their student-athletes, coaching staffs, officiating assignors, CEOs and other relevant members. At the end of the year, there will be 17 master sheets and a strong start to what could be an invaluable tool for future years."

Teachable moments

Mitrano said the Empire 8 has done similar studies for its own membership.

"It has spurred coaches to stress to student-athletes that sportsmanship is something we value," he said. "It has prompted coaches to pull aside student-athletes who have violated sportsmanship rules and talk about why it happened and how to properly conduct themselves. It has been a tremendous benefit for the Empire 8. It's become our top priority."

Mitrano said the effort should enjoy a similar impact on other conferences, even if commissioners use the data only at the end of the year to serve as a baseline for the next year. Mitrano hopes, though, that his peers will use the results more actively. In other words, don't wait for the report to come out before trying to curb the behavior.

"You can get a technical foul in basketball for hanging on the rim, but you can also get one for elbowing someone in the throat," Mitrano said. "Those are two different acts. If you find there is an athlete who is doing the latter frequently, that would be a situation you'd want to address. If you're able to track these conduct issues as they happen, it's more of a teachable moment and one in which you can adjust behavior."

"When the report comes out and you have a coach who has an inordinate number of technical fouls, that catches the attention of not only the athletics director, but the FAR and the CEO. Even though as a conference we don't have a prescribed action that takes place, I would suspect there's a little bit of intervention going on at the school," Karner said.

Though some people might be surprised this effort is being launched in Division III -- a group not usually associated with the overall problems of intercollegiate athletics -- Mitrano said he and his colleagues agree that sportsmanship issues are as prevalent in the nonscholarship division as they are in Division I -- they're just not televised as much.

"Those incidents certainly are serious problems," Karner said, "but the national discussions tend to ignore the fact that we all have sportsmanship issues. Maybe we don't have people tearing down goalposts and maybe Divisions II and III issues are not always as visible (because of television), but we have problems like anyone else."

Mitrano said the fact that Division III commissioners have a collective concern means they'll be more likely to take the tracking system seriously.

"My job as commissioner is to protect the integrity of our conference. Conduct-related issues strike at the very heart of the integrity of a conference. I think it would be the case for the division as well."

John Biddescombe, who chairs the Division III Initiatives Task Force, said the Empire 8 study is a good example of the kind of collaborative effort the grant program was meant to fund.

"It's an appropriate proposal for two reasons," said Biddescombe, athletics director at Wesleyan University (Connecticut). "First, it addresses sportsmanship, which is an area that is important to Division III -- and the NCAA -- and secondly, the information obtained in this and the process used to obtain it will become a model for other conferences to adopt in the future."

As for the chances of success of the Empire 8 proposal, Mitrano and Karner are confident that the efforts of their conferences so far, and the division-wide effort to come will move the sportsmanship needle -- if not by identifying what constitutes good sportsmanship, at least by identifying what constitutes bad sportsmanship.

"You can sometimes influence behavior just with the knowledge that it's being monitored," Karner said. "As a coach, I'd be a little more conscious of what I was doing if I knew people were paying attention to it. This tracking effort probably won't eliminate the problem, but I think it will over time prove to be a rather effective deterrent."

"How they react to adversity is a key to their educational process in intercollegiate athletics. Too often in the spirit of competition and winning at any cost, we lose sight of that. But as a conference and as a division, we have to realize that is our role as educators."