Returning from the Men's Frozen Four in Columbus, Ohio, I was moved to write about the joy and inspiration of college sports. The throng of 17,000-plus spectators on the campus of Ohio State University was filled with ice hockey aficionados, families and friends of the participants, and, yes, some pro scouts, but there was an unmistakable purity of purpose on the ice. I have often thought that collegiate hockey players genuinely love their sport more than any other athletes. They play every second with unmatched, unselfish passion and purpose. On display is the best part of college athletics.

Following the University of Denver has become a labor of love for me, my family and many thousands of Pioneer fans. Last year, Denver won its first national title in 35 years after surging from relative obscurity to a dramatic confrontation with Maine in the final. Denver won by a goal after withstanding a seemingly endless 90 seconds of Maine's six-on-three advantage at the end of the game. That 2003-04 season was traumatic in every way imaginable, and certainly left this year's team with the hugely improbable task of repeating. The Pioneers did, in fact, win it again, this time emerging from a No. 2 seed and beating North Dakota, 4-1, in the championship game.

Head coach George Gwozdecky and his assistants approach their responsibilities with diligence and intensity. Their success in the past several years has not been accidental, but represents the culmination of a building process done the right way. I first met George 15 years ago when he was the head men's hockey coach at Miami (Ohio). Even then I was astounded by his somewhat cerebral approach to the profession, using computer technology to collect data and break down the opposition's tendencies. He is the only collegiate hockey coach to have won national championships as a player (at Wisconsin), as an assistant coach (at Michigan State) and as a head coach.

It should have come as no surprise to me that George would consider the question of the leadership role of team captains as he analyzed the future of his hockey team. Several years ago, he and I were discussing problems of motivation with the team as a whole, including issues of personality and loss of concentration. We ultimately decided that we would attempt to create a formal leadership program for our hockey captains.

My role with the team had been as occasional motivational speaker in the locker room or counselor to an individual player regarding academics or personal problems. I also gathered the captains from time to time to provide a bit of encouragement and guidance. During the 2002-03 season, however, the team had gone into a serious swoon and seemed unable to elevate its level of play for both of the back-to-back weekend games that constitute the normal pattern in college hockey. As a result, the team, despite significant talent, disappointed itself, its fans and the coaching staff by the end of the season. George and I decided to take the counseling process to a much higher level for the next season, creating a program to train the captains to be leaders, empower them in stages throughout the season and do it in a way that created a sense of importance and tradition.

Of course, we recognized that these were young men who probably had neither prior leadership experience, nor any training in communication skills, much less the science of people management. Nevertheless, there was a strong tradition in hockey that the captains were individuals of exceptional character who provided leadership by example.

The life of an elite collegiate athlete is tremendously stressful because of the necessity to balance class work and exams with the incessant physical training, practice and required travel to remote locations for varsity contests. Particularly at an institution such as Denver, which has no flexibility regarding admissions standards for athletes and makes no accommodation for athletes in the classroom, this burden is weighty indeed. Modern student-athletes carry laptops as well as books and papers wherever they go.

Add to this the normal social strains we all feel between the ages of 18 and 25, and you have a significant challenge for any leadership objective. Many college coaches lament that their entire professional success is dependent upon the split-second performance of one 18-year-old who, under the most pressure-packed circumstances, must interact with other 18-year-olds in competition. When we undertook to introduce captains to some share of a coach's responsibility, we understood there would be limitations.

The first thing I told the captains was that I myself had been the captain of my college team (Williams College wrestling) and that I suspected I was of little value to the team and a very poor example of what a captain should be. In fact, I remember that I was almost entirely concerned with my own performance (and when I would next get a good meal). Of course, I worried about final exams, my girlfriend, my peer relationships on campus -- and I did a heck of a lot of growing up that year.

Our captains in 2003-04 were receptive to the notion of learning about leadership and assuming a more active role. None felt themselves to be particularly skilled at public speaking, and they all evidenced some fear at the prospect of having to communicate individually and with the group of fellow players. We spent the first sessions talking about communication, emphasizing the role of listening and observation as a first order of business. We characterized the role of captain not only as an honor but also a responsibility. Each captain expressed curiosity, amazement and trepidation, in that order, as we discussed their roles in the season to come. At the end of the evening, these very different human beings had been formed into a team within a team and given the actual authority to begin to communicate and solve problems.

During the course of the season, we assembled this group to discuss formal leadership principles such as communicating the expectation message, mental preparation, delegation of responsibility, and group and personal ethics, all leading to the overriding principle that a leader assumes responsibility for the performance of others and the outcome of the quest.

We were careful not to tread upon territory reserved for the coaches, namely game strategy, personnel choices or training regimen. Most importantly, we dealt with problems. As with other teams, there were individuals who were defiant, resentful, distracted or otherwise unmotivated. We knew that coaches could go only so far with such problems, but captains had the unique capacity to deal with those difficulties on a peer-to-peer basis. Always the principles of duty to the team and integrity of the captain's position was emphasized. In the course of the year, the captains became more willing to deal with hard issues and to risk friendships along the way.

The burdens were heavy, but the captains came to realize that a hockey team is no different from any other social organization. It has a complex social structure, a chain of command and a variety of skill sets distributed among its participants. It has mood swings from euphoria to bitter deflation. The hockey team had to deal with high expectations and the public nature of the results of their labors depicted on television and in the print media. Clearly, they were engaged in a process of social engineering that required courage and skill.

The 2003-04 captains rallied the team in moments of despair, creating a culture of resilience that enabled them to enter the NCAA tournament with a growing confidence, but as a distant underdog. Even so, it is the nature of hockey that a team playing its best at the end of the year can challenge for the title. With brilliant coaching, superb leadership from the captains and extraordinary play from a wonderful group of young men, that team battled its way through the bracket and won college hockey's greatest prize.

It was an entirely different challenge that met the 2004-05 team. Some would say that the monkey was off their back, having finally won an NCAA championship in the modern era. Not so indeed. Coach Gwozdecky and his staff would readily admit that there was much more pressure this past year because of the palpable expectation that the team would have another great season, perhaps winning the championship again.

This was to be a team that believed in itself from the outset and thus the captains were not required to assist in any dramatic turnaround. Unlike the prior season, there were no sinking spells of lost momentum, no major personality issues, and no doubt that the team belonged in the national tournament come April. The role of the captains, therefore, was to maintain focus and prevent overconfidence.

My most vivid memory of the season came in our captains' meeting the day before the first game of the regional against Bemidji State, the No. 15 seed in the tournament but a team that had the talent to surprise. Bemidji was in the same position Denver occupied a year earlier. In this meeting with the captains I was amazed by their maturity and insight. We discussed their mental preparation and their certain knowledge that the team had to be prodded into awareness that Bemidji could mount a challenge.

I asked each of the captains what they had learned this season about their role and how they reacted to the year-end pressure. To my amazement, they reported two major revelations during the course of the season. First, they had discovered that each of them had different leadership strengths. Therefore, they had divided responsibilities, with one in charge of locker room speeches, one taking responsibility for on-ice leadership and a third handling problems outside of practice and games.

Second, they recognized that each of the 28 players on the team was a distinct personality requiring a different motivational approach. As a result, they had again divided responsibilities so that the captain best able to communicate with a particular teammate did so. I commended them for their insight and explained that these were lessons that any successful business should apply.

As predicted, the Bemidji game was a major test, with Denver winning, 4-3, in overtime. It was by far the hardest game of the tournament for the Pioneers, who went on to beat New Hampshire, Colorado College and, finally, North Dakota, to win their second national title in two years.

Bart Giamatti, deceased former commissioner of Major League Baseball, and previously the president of Yale, often spoke about the purpose and meaning of sport. When I teach sports law, I always close with the following Giamatti wisdom from a speech he made to the Justinian Society in Chicago at ceremonies honoring him as their man of the year:

"Sport is about energy and action within rules, boundaries, codes; it has a vast body of internal law and regulations and officials to dispense judgment, if not justice, quickly and in public. Sports is to law what the subplot in a Shakespearean play is to the main plot -- the parody and the mirror image; the slightly caricatured but ultimately serious version of the main plot's high and mighty events."

I would extend the analogy to include the general moral and ethical climate of a society. Sport almost always reflects our culture's positive and negative attributes with vivid imagery and drama.

Denver Chancellor Dan Ritchie has frequently characterized the purpose of higher education to be the "sculpting" of the best citizens and future leaders of the world. Athletics plays an important part in such "whole person" education, and our experience with the captains' leadership program has amply demonstrated that we continue on the right track.

John D. Coombe is the vice-chancellor of intellectual property and events at the University of Denver.

Traits of successful team captains

Based on the leadership program at the Universiy of Denver, the following traits emerged that must be adopted by team captains for the team to succeed:

• Each captain must be able to put the issue of personal performance on the field or in the arena in a separate compartment from his or her role as captain. Sometimes the captain is a star athlete expected to deliver points or goals, and perhaps the accumulation of such scores is important for future career prospects. But to be an effective captain, one must constantly focus on the big picture, which means the performance of others in the context of team play.

* Each captain must be aware that the role of leader supersedes that of friend. Leadership is not a popularity contest, but rather an effort to be an inspiration and provide motivation for teammates. The hardest moments will occur when someone who is a friend needs counseling.

• Each captain must overcome personal fears of public speaking and one-on-one communication.

• In all sports, defeat is inevitable and, therefore, the leaders of this particular enterprise must be able to deal with it. Even more than that, the occasional poor performance of the captain or a teammate cannot cripple the captain. It's always necessary to move on to the next competition, learning the lessons of defeat and showing an unstoppable resilience.

• A leader must understand the basic principle of "recognition." All human beings are motivated by the desire for recognition and, thus, giving recognition -- whether in the form of a gesture, smile or spoken word -- is the key to getting the best out of any teammate.

• Trust is the reward for the captain. Treating teammates with a caring attitude and with unbiased consistency will go a long way toward opening the doors of communication.

• Finally, a captain must learn that leadership comes from the heart. It is, in essence, the giving of a piece of yourself to your teammates. A captain must sacrifice personal privacy and anonymity. That sacrifice is exactly what we need from leaders who later manage our businesses, towns, states and nation.