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NCAA News Archive - 2007
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Unsporting conduct - Division II puts on its game face
Stakeholders collaborate at special session to improve game environment
Stakeholders collaborate at special session to improve game environment
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By Gary T. Brown
The NCAA News
The NCAA News
ARLINGTON, Virginia — Nowhere is the sportsmanship effort more important than in Division II, which has placed a premium on community relationships as part of its persona. If athletics is the institution’s front door to the community in Division II, the environment inside had better be family friendly so visitors will want to return.
That was the thrust of a special session July 22 that involved constituents ranging from coaches and administrators to pep band directors and parents on how to create more positive competition environments that encourage repeat attendance from new fans and supporters.
What emerged was a renewed reliance upon student-athletes, coaches and administrators as influential resources, and a commitment to engage presidents, conference commissioners and chairs of league presidential bodies to pledge their support in a division-wide effort to align game environments with what Division II schools say they represent.
Session moderator and Mars Hill College Athletics Director Dave Riggins said the session accomplished two goals: to identify practices that would lead to short-term improvement and to begin changing the culture so a checklist is no longer necessary.
“We’ve allowed things to be said and done at our sporting events that we would never find acceptable anywhere else,” said Riggins, who chairs the Division II Identity Subcommittee that sponsored the session. “This session asked participants to approach the game-environment issue as if Division II were staging an open house and our athletics events were the front rooms. It’s time to take back our game environments and make them what we want.”
Why now? That’s easy, Riggins said. Division II’s strategic platform identifies sportsmanship among its attributes, and its extensive community-engagement initiative positions the university as a “town square.” Those factors make it imperative for athletics competitions to reflect what Division II stands for.
Why Division II? “Because Division II is accustomed to taking risks,” Riggins said, referring to the division’s bold identity campaign, its ambitious national championships festivals and its suspension of competitive-equity concerns to allow schools to strengthen community bonds. “We’re taking a bit of a risk with our emphasis on game environment, too, but it’s a battle worth fighting.”
Hostile vs. hospitable
It’s a calculated risk, but involving so many constituents may pay off in a collaborative approach that accelerates success. Game environment, Riggins said, is much more than the player and coach categories people tend to think of when they hear the term “sportsmanship.” Riggins said the subcommittee wants to examine the role of everyone who participates in a Division II athletics event.
That includes student-athletes, coaches, administrators, faculty, game officials, parents, band directors, cheerleaders and conference officers — all of which were represented at the session. And those people took on challenging issues, such as how to keep game environments positive without making them dull, how to change behavior without compromising the home-team advantage, and how to keep the game environment from falling apart when the AD leaves the facility.
“There’s a fine line between a hostile environment and a hospitable one,” said Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference Commissioner Dan Mara. “How do we keep people involved without crossing that line?”
Student-athletes admitted they would prefer a hostile game environment to no crowd at all. But if the goal is to eliminate or curtail the hostility, the players advised the administrators to be reasonable in their approach.
Jimmy Evans, a former basketball student-athlete at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, said he wants fans, not fanatics. “But it’s not church, either,” he said. “There has to be a middle ground.”
Virginia Union University basketball coach Dave Robbins said his players don’t mind at least a little hostility, since they play better on the road. “They like loud crowds, and they don’t mind fans being against them,” he said. “We have a saying in fact that the sound we like to hear most is that of complete silence.”
While student-athletes may tolerate or even support an edgy environment, Evans said, Division II should consider the family fan base that might not appreciate fans’ off-color chants.
“With the DII community focus, those hostile crowds — maybe players don’t have a problem, but families with young children do. Since we want to attract those families to build attendance, what they see and hear becomes pretty important,” Evans said.
Bentley College volleyball student-athlete and Student-Athlete Advisory Committee Vice Chair Carey Demos agreed to an extent, especially for sports that rely on community support for whatever crowd they can get. But even she was reluctant to make the environment too antiseptic. When Riggins asked her to choose between a game environment based on supporting the home team or opposing the visitors, Demos found some middle ground. “I thought Division II was about balance,” she quipped.
Perhaps the single suggestion that garnered the most enthusiasm was to have a respected student-athlete, coach or administrator encourage proper behavior in remarks to the crowd preceding any contest. Some thought having young fan calling for a positive game environment might be even more effective.
Teachable moments
Session participants noted other approaches that could mitigate bad behavior without sterilizing the competitive atmosphere. Many thought that student-athletes, who understand sportsmanship better than most other stakeholders, can influence game environments, both on the fields and courts and with the behavior of their peers in the stands. Owen Hannah, coordinator of officials for the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, suggested dressing game-management staff (including student-athletes from the host institution’s other varsity teams) in bright shirts to establish an oversight presence. He said game officials in particular like to be able to see clearly whom they can rely upon for help.
Participants also agreed that coaches play a significant role as teachers. However, that notion led participants to ponder whether coaches are actually trained that way.
Tim Flannery, an assistant director at the National Federation of State High School Associations, said just 8 percent of interscholastic coaches receive any formal training that links athletics participation to its educational foundation.
He presented an initiative that targets coaches as teachers of life skills, including sportsmanship. The Web-based program, called “Fundamentals of Coaching,” is a student-centered curriculum for high school coaches that supports the NFHS academic mission. Thirty-six states already use it.
The course includes “teachable moments” for coaches to draw from as they lead their teams. Flannery said the program re-emphasizes why sport is part of education.
“The priority of sport is to teach young people life lessons,” Flannery said. “Winning is a byproduct, not the primary goal. Sports in and of themselves are not positive or negative. It’s a wonderful place to learn something positive if presented and structured properly by the coach.”
In one teachable moment, a basketball team has just lost a game because of a technical foul, and the coach in a postgame rant calls out the offending player and demands he tell his team what he said to the official to warrant the call. The player says he would rather not say, but when prodded by the coach to at least reveal where he got the idea of addressing an official in that manner, the player says, “I learned it from you, coach.”
Flannery said the video course emphasizes the coach as the role model and the influence he or she has on the student-athletes for the rest of their lives. “You’re in this to win, but never put winning ahead of allowing the student-athlete to learn something positive,” he said.
Next steps
Division II officials plan to develop an interactive education toolkit in the spring after the broader Division II membership gets a chance to discuss the issue at the 2008 Convention.
Also, Pfeiffer University President Charles Ambrose encouraged taking the discussion to the presidential level, perhaps in a joint meeting of Division II Presidents Council members and chairs of conference presidential bodies.
“As with the development of the strategic-positioning platform and the national championships festivals, the game-environment issue is one that requires presidential buy-in,” Ambrose said. “The game environment is difficult for ADs and other administrators to manage on their own and will take a level of presidential engagement to be successful. If we can get to the point at which presidents call their peers about a coach or a game situation that reflected poorly upon their institution, that will prompt change more than any other action.”
Officials also are considering a partnership with the NFHS, since the Fundamentals of Coaching program shares so many messages with intercollegiate coaches and focusing on relinking education with the athletics enterprise.
That was the thrust of a special session July 22 that involved constituents ranging from coaches and administrators to pep band directors and parents on how to create more positive competition environments that encourage repeat attendance from new fans and supporters.
What emerged was a renewed reliance upon student-athletes, coaches and administrators as influential resources, and a commitment to engage presidents, conference commissioners and chairs of league presidential bodies to pledge their support in a division-wide effort to align game environments with what Division II schools say they represent.
Session moderator and Mars Hill College Athletics Director Dave Riggins said the session accomplished two goals: to identify practices that would lead to short-term improvement and to begin changing the culture so a checklist is no longer necessary.
“We’ve allowed things to be said and done at our sporting events that we would never find acceptable anywhere else,” said Riggins, who chairs the Division II Identity Subcommittee that sponsored the session. “This session asked participants to approach the game-environment issue as if Division II were staging an open house and our athletics events were the front rooms. It’s time to take back our game environments and make them what we want.”
Why now? That’s easy, Riggins said. Division II’s strategic platform identifies sportsmanship among its attributes, and its extensive community-engagement initiative positions the university as a “town square.” Those factors make it imperative for athletics competitions to reflect what Division II stands for.
Why Division II? “Because Division II is accustomed to taking risks,” Riggins said, referring to the division’s bold identity campaign, its ambitious national championships festivals and its suspension of competitive-equity concerns to allow schools to strengthen community bonds. “We’re taking a bit of a risk with our emphasis on game environment, too, but it’s a battle worth fighting.”
Hostile vs. hospitable
It’s a calculated risk, but involving so many constituents may pay off in a collaborative approach that accelerates success. Game environment, Riggins said, is much more than the player and coach categories people tend to think of when they hear the term “sportsmanship.” Riggins said the subcommittee wants to examine the role of everyone who participates in a Division II athletics event.
That includes student-athletes, coaches, administrators, faculty, game officials, parents, band directors, cheerleaders and conference officers — all of which were represented at the session. And those people took on challenging issues, such as how to keep game environments positive without making them dull, how to change behavior without compromising the home-team advantage, and how to keep the game environment from falling apart when the AD leaves the facility.
“There’s a fine line between a hostile environment and a hospitable one,” said Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference Commissioner Dan Mara. “How do we keep people involved without crossing that line?”
Student-athletes admitted they would prefer a hostile game environment to no crowd at all. But if the goal is to eliminate or curtail the hostility, the players advised the administrators to be reasonable in their approach.
Jimmy Evans, a former basketball student-athlete at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, said he wants fans, not fanatics. “But it’s not church, either,” he said. “There has to be a middle ground.”
Virginia Union University basketball coach Dave Robbins said his players don’t mind at least a little hostility, since they play better on the road. “They like loud crowds, and they don’t mind fans being against them,” he said. “We have a saying in fact that the sound we like to hear most is that of complete silence.”
While student-athletes may tolerate or even support an edgy environment, Evans said, Division II should consider the family fan base that might not appreciate fans’ off-color chants.
“With the DII community focus, those hostile crowds — maybe players don’t have a problem, but families with young children do. Since we want to attract those families to build attendance, what they see and hear becomes pretty important,” Evans said.
Bentley College volleyball student-athlete and Student-Athlete Advisory Committee Vice Chair Carey Demos agreed to an extent, especially for sports that rely on community support for whatever crowd they can get. But even she was reluctant to make the environment too antiseptic. When Riggins asked her to choose between a game environment based on supporting the home team or opposing the visitors, Demos found some middle ground. “I thought Division II was about balance,” she quipped.
Perhaps the single suggestion that garnered the most enthusiasm was to have a respected student-athlete, coach or administrator encourage proper behavior in remarks to the crowd preceding any contest. Some thought having young fan calling for a positive game environment might be even more effective.
Teachable moments
Session participants noted other approaches that could mitigate bad behavior without sterilizing the competitive atmosphere. Many thought that student-athletes, who understand sportsmanship better than most other stakeholders, can influence game environments, both on the fields and courts and with the behavior of their peers in the stands. Owen Hannah, coordinator of officials for the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference, suggested dressing game-management staff (including student-athletes from the host institution’s other varsity teams) in bright shirts to establish an oversight presence. He said game officials in particular like to be able to see clearly whom they can rely upon for help.
Participants also agreed that coaches play a significant role as teachers. However, that notion led participants to ponder whether coaches are actually trained that way.
Tim Flannery, an assistant director at the National Federation of State High School Associations, said just 8 percent of interscholastic coaches receive any formal training that links athletics participation to its educational foundation.
He presented an initiative that targets coaches as teachers of life skills, including sportsmanship. The Web-based program, called “Fundamentals of Coaching,” is a student-centered curriculum for high school coaches that supports the NFHS academic mission. Thirty-six states already use it.
The course includes “teachable moments” for coaches to draw from as they lead their teams. Flannery said the program re-emphasizes why sport is part of education.
“The priority of sport is to teach young people life lessons,” Flannery said. “Winning is a byproduct, not the primary goal. Sports in and of themselves are not positive or negative. It’s a wonderful place to learn something positive if presented and structured properly by the coach.”
In one teachable moment, a basketball team has just lost a game because of a technical foul, and the coach in a postgame rant calls out the offending player and demands he tell his team what he said to the official to warrant the call. The player says he would rather not say, but when prodded by the coach to at least reveal where he got the idea of addressing an official in that manner, the player says, “I learned it from you, coach.”
Flannery said the video course emphasizes the coach as the role model and the influence he or she has on the student-athletes for the rest of their lives. “You’re in this to win, but never put winning ahead of allowing the student-athlete to learn something positive,” he said.
Next steps
Division II officials plan to develop an interactive education toolkit in the spring after the broader Division II membership gets a chance to discuss the issue at the 2008 Convention.
Also, Pfeiffer University President Charles Ambrose encouraged taking the discussion to the presidential level, perhaps in a joint meeting of Division II Presidents Council members and chairs of conference presidential bodies.
“As with the development of the strategic-positioning platform and the national championships festivals, the game-environment issue is one that requires presidential buy-in,” Ambrose said. “The game environment is difficult for ADs and other administrators to manage on their own and will take a level of presidential engagement to be successful. If we can get to the point at which presidents call their peers about a coach or a game situation that reflected poorly upon their institution, that will prompt change more than any other action.”
Officials also are considering a partnership with the NFHS, since the Fundamentals of Coaching program shares so many messages with intercollegiate coaches and focusing on relinking education with the athletics enterprise.
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