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Data talk Leagues collaborate on conduct
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By Jack Copeland
The NCAA News
The NCAA News
Conferences are converting statistics from Division III’s Conduct Foul Program into actions to improve sportsmanship among student-athletes and coaches.
The program — entering its third year under formal Division III sponsorship — collects data and compiles reports on occurrences of conduct fouls such as red and yellow cards in soccer, personal fouls in football, technical fouls in basketball and ejections in baseball.
With at least 75 percent of Division III conferences participating, the program produces plenty of raw numbers that conferences typically are using to check their own efforts to promote sportsmanship on fields and courts against other leagues.
“It’s been helpful at times to be able to demonstrate to our constituents that we have work left to do,” said John Cochrane, commissioner of the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. “It’s been helpful at other times, depending on where we’ve ranked in the membership, in patting some groups on the back and saying thanks for your efforts — we’re making some strides and doing good things.
“It’s been both an opportunity to educate and an opportunity to reward.”
Probably the program’s most noteworthy outcome, however, is that it is helping the people who can have the greatest impact on reducing unsportsmanlike actions in games — institutional presidents, athletics directors, referees and coaches — to regularly compare notes on how to get that job done.
“It really forces programs to take a look at what they’re doing,” said Donna Ledwin, commissioner of the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. “I have to say we’ve absolutely had institutions take action because of this — because there have been trends, and those trends have been recognized at the athletics directors’ level and the presidential level.”
In other words, the program is greater than the sum of its numbers, suggests Empire 8 Commissioner Chuck Mitrano, who created the program in his own league in 2002-03, then fine-tuned it and used strategic-initiatives grants to expand it to other conferences until Division III officially sponsored the effort in 2005-06.
“A lot of people on the outside look at the program and think initially that it is all about statistics and data,” said Mitrano, who continues to administer the program for Division III. “But the real value and benefit is in the collection of that information from the institution by the conference office.
“That’s when conferences start to get the context: There may be a student-athlete who has a certain amount of infractions and is at risk, or a team that is impinging upon the rules consistently. It’s a great conversation starter.”
Real-time reporting
Under the program’s current format, those conversations may happen on a weekly basis.
At first, data were compiled and distributed at the end of a sport’s season. But within a couple of years, Mitrano worked with colleagues in other conferences to implement real-time tracking, in which institutions compile data and submit it to conference offices every week. The data ultimately are provided to Mitrano for compilation into a national report.
“We had baseline data from the first year, where we just collected data at the end of the year but we didn’t know exactly what we had,” he said. “The second year, we said we’re going to track this as it happens, within five business days, with infractions reports to the athletics director and then to the conference office.
“That’s when we started seeing that it allowed individuals the ability to have educational discussions and engage people, when they started seeing infractions come in. And that’s when our conduct fouls really dropped. I think in most sports, we saw 50 percent reductions from the year-one, non-real-time, to real-time (reporting).”
The AMCC’s Ledwin said that real-time reporting also produced measurable reductions of conduct fouls in her conference, which like the Empire 8 compiled a season-end report during the program’s first year.
“I can’t say definitively when we saw a change with real-time reporting, but I think we got people’s attention when we first started doing it,” she said. “Sharing the year-end reports with our members was eye-opening in a couple of situations, but when we started reviewing things on a regular basis throughout the season, that’s when we started to see some changes.”
In Iowa, the program served more to supplement steps Cochrane already had taken to address various issues stemming from conduct by coaches and student-athletes.
“I think the conduct foul reporting process has been a subsidiary process to our efforts,” he said. “When I began (serving as commissioner) six years ago or so, I thought we had some areas in the conference that really needed to be addressed, and we’ve implemented some policies to try and do that.”
However, data from the program are a useful tool in those efforts.
“It’s real helpful when we as a conference are trying to get a point across — whether it’s to a particular coaches’ group or the CEOs in our conference — that we’re doing really well as a conference in a particular sport in terms of our conduct-related fouls,” Cochrane said. “Or, on the flip side, if it appears in a particular sport that we really need to heighten awareness and perhaps take some steps to initiate change in our conduct.
“It’s used as a tool to reflect where we are and whether we need to make significant improvement.”
Cochrane said those discussions may occur regularly through the season with league coordinators of officials, and also when appropriate with administrators on campuses — typically when a “significant” sportsmanship-related penalty or foul is reported.
“I tend to address it on an as-needed basis, then use our semi-annual gatherings (with faculty athletics representatives, athletics directors and institutional presidents) to report out and discuss strategies for continuing to address it down the road.”
While conference officials occasionally may have to deal with specific incidents by imposing an administrative penalty of some sort in response to an unsportsmanlike act by a coach or student-athlete, Ledwin said conduct-foul reporting opens opportunities through the season to address problems in an educational manner.
“You really don’t want to be punitive if you don’t have to,” she said. “You’d rather take an educational approach and say, ‘Hey, I can see you have yellow cards accumulating faster than anybody else in the league right now,’ or ‘the same kid has gotten three cards in the past two weeks.’
“That should get an athletics director’s attention — it’s not a random yellow card or technical. There’s a pattern developing, and that’s what the data have shown us conferences — there are definite patterns that this type of report reveals.”
Support for officiating
The impact of those educational efforts not only are reflected in program data. It also is being noticed by the people who are in the best position to judge whether conduct-foul reporting is having an impact on behavior: game officials.
Steve Bamford, associate commissioner of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, has observed the reporting program’s impact through his office’s oversight of more than 5,000 game officials in 12 sports. He says officials not only notice improvement in student-athletes’ and coaches’ conduct, but also in institutional game management, security, and efforts to improve crowd behavior.
“It’s a better game when there aren’t as many penalties and unsportsmanlike acts,” he said. “Officials can officiate; they don’t have to police.”
Even in situations where policing still may be needed, the reporting program is useful in identifying areas where corrective steps are appropriate, and then in supporting officials’ efforts to enforce or emphasize rules.
Conduct-foul reporting has played a role in leagues’ responses to chronic problems in sports ranging from soccer — where the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference enacted a policy in which teams lose points in conference standings based on the number of cards received — to basketball, where ECAC-assigned officials are being instructed to implement a no-tolerance policy this season in response to coaches leaving the coach’s box.
However, while data help identify trends that may need attention from a conference and its game officials, Cochrane says the numbers play only a supporting role in his league’s efforts to deal with conduct issues, and that he chooses not to share the actual data with the conference’s game officials.
“We certainly tailor our points of emphasis based on the trends that we see, but I haven’t perceived a significant value in (officials) knowing that this year, there were five unsportsmanlike-conduct fouls compared to only two in the past, or compared to 10 in the past,” he said. “I don’t want those sorts of figures dancing around in their heads and influencing the way they call a contest.”
The value comes more from using the data to identify problem areas, then working with game officials to address them, Mitrano suggested.
“We’ve been able in our conference to have a positive impact with officiating, because the officiating bureau understands the concerns and is responsive,” he said.
Broader goal
As for the program’s broader objectives, Mitrano said the Conduct Foul Program must raise the level of awareness of sportsmanship and ethical behavior within the playing field.
He believes the program not only is achieving that goal, but it also helps support other efforts by conferences to promote sportsmanship.
“This program has spawned other sportsmanship initiatives within institutions and conferences, just as a result of looking at the data and having discussion and tracking real-time and seeing the benefits,” he said. “It has at least contributed to an uptick in education about sportsmanship.”
Division III has embraced organized efforts to also address such problems as fan sportsmanship, through the “Be Loud, Be Proud, Be Positive” campaign that the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference was instrumental in creating.
Division III conferences also increasingly share — and borrow from each other — ideas for addressing sportsmanship from a variety of perspectives. Ledwin said the AMCC is implementing Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference program for selecting “all-sportsmanship teams” of student-athletes who demonstrate good conduct not only in games, but also on the bench, in practice and as spectators of other sports.
Ledwin said the Conduct Foul Program also impacts fan sportsmanship because it addresses a root cause of inappropriate behavior.
“There’s absolutely a symbiotic relationship here,” she said. “In Division III, it’s on two levels.”
She said the first is that spectators — not always but often — take their cues from the behavior of the coach and the behavior of the team, and act out accordingly. She also acknowledged that Division III spectators often include student-athletes from other sports. If those athletes act out in their own competitions, they likely will exhibit the same behavior as fans.
To Ledwin, student-athletes should be held accountable for the their behavior in both venues.
Cochrane agreed that the Conduct Foul Program can influence fan behavior by pointing to trends in student-athletes’ and coaches’ behavior, and thus by sparking discussion of ways to improve conduct.
“These types of initiatives are so critical,” he said. “For one, it keeps the issue on the front burner, which is where it needs to be. We constantly need to be reminded that what we do is about more than winning and losing. It’s about instilling character, and winning and losing with grace, dignity and respect for your opponent.
“Those are all critical things that this initiative helps us to continue to pass along to our coaches and student-athletes.”
Those initiatives, as well as an ongoing emphasis on sportsmanship education and standards for fan behavior, earned the Empire 8 an unprecedented honor October 10 when the Institute for International Sport designated the conference as its first “All-American Sportsmanship Conference.”
The league will be honored during the annual observance of National Sportsmanship Day March 4 along with 12 schools that earned “All-American Sportsmanship” recognition.
“Under the great leadership of Commissioner Chuck Mitrano and the league’s outstanding athletics directors and presidents, the Empire 8 is a model of good sportsmanship,” said Dan Doyle, the institute’s executive director and founder of National Sportsmanship Day.
Various criteria are considered in awarding the “All-American Sportsmanship” designation, including whether nominees have implemented codes of conduct; strategies for promoting sportsmanship to parents, coaches, athletes and fans; and methods for evaluating the effectiveness of a sportsmanship programs. The institute also solicits information about effective sportsmanship initiatives at an institution.
Joining the Empire 8 as honorees for 2007-08 are three elementary/middle schools, three high schools, two junior colleges, and four NCAA Division I schools: Auburn University; Bucknell University; Clemson University; and Indiana University, Bloomington.
The members of the Empire 8 are Alfred University, Elmira College, Hartwick College, Ithaca College, Nazareth College (New York), Rochester Institute of Technololgy, St. John Fisher College, Stevens Institute of Technology and Utica College.
The program — entering its third year under formal Division III sponsorship — collects data and compiles reports on occurrences of conduct fouls such as red and yellow cards in soccer, personal fouls in football, technical fouls in basketball and ejections in baseball.
With at least 75 percent of Division III conferences participating, the program produces plenty of raw numbers that conferences typically are using to check their own efforts to promote sportsmanship on fields and courts against other leagues.
“It’s been helpful at times to be able to demonstrate to our constituents that we have work left to do,” said John Cochrane, commissioner of the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. “It’s been helpful at other times, depending on where we’ve ranked in the membership, in patting some groups on the back and saying thanks for your efforts — we’re making some strides and doing good things.“It’s been both an opportunity to educate and an opportunity to reward.”
Probably the program’s most noteworthy outcome, however, is that it is helping the people who can have the greatest impact on reducing unsportsmanlike actions in games — institutional presidents, athletics directors, referees and coaches — to regularly compare notes on how to get that job done.
“It really forces programs to take a look at what they’re doing,” said Donna Ledwin, commissioner of the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference. “I have to say we’ve absolutely had institutions take action because of this — because there have been trends, and those trends have been recognized at the athletics directors’ level and the presidential level.”In other words, the program is greater than the sum of its numbers, suggests Empire 8 Commissioner Chuck Mitrano, who created the program in his own league in 2002-03, then fine-tuned it and used strategic-initiatives grants to expand it to other conferences until Division III officially sponsored the effort in 2005-06.
“A lot of people on the outside look at the program and think initially that it is all about statistics and data,” said Mitrano, who continues to administer the program for Division III. “But the real value and benefit is in the collection of that information from the institution by the conference office.
“That’s when conferences start to get the context: There may be a student-athlete who has a certain amount of infractions and is at risk, or a team that is impinging upon the rules consistently. It’s a great conversation starter.”Real-time reporting
Under the program’s current format, those conversations may happen on a weekly basis.
At first, data were compiled and distributed at the end of a sport’s season. But within a couple of years, Mitrano worked with colleagues in other conferences to implement real-time tracking, in which institutions compile data and submit it to conference offices every week. The data ultimately are provided to Mitrano for compilation into a national report.
“We had baseline data from the first year, where we just collected data at the end of the year but we didn’t know exactly what we had,” he said. “The second year, we said we’re going to track this as it happens, within five business days, with infractions reports to the athletics director and then to the conference office.
“That’s when we started seeing that it allowed individuals the ability to have educational discussions and engage people, when they started seeing infractions come in. And that’s when our conduct fouls really dropped. I think in most sports, we saw 50 percent reductions from the year-one, non-real-time, to real-time (reporting).”
The AMCC’s Ledwin said that real-time reporting also produced measurable reductions of conduct fouls in her conference, which like the Empire 8 compiled a season-end report during the program’s first year.
“I can’t say definitively when we saw a change with real-time reporting, but I think we got people’s attention when we first started doing it,” she said. “Sharing the year-end reports with our members was eye-opening in a couple of situations, but when we started reviewing things on a regular basis throughout the season, that’s when we started to see some changes.”
In Iowa, the program served more to supplement steps Cochrane already had taken to address various issues stemming from conduct by coaches and student-athletes.
“I think the conduct foul reporting process has been a subsidiary process to our efforts,” he said. “When I began (serving as commissioner) six years ago or so, I thought we had some areas in the conference that really needed to be addressed, and we’ve implemented some policies to try and do that.”
However, data from the program are a useful tool in those efforts.
“It’s real helpful when we as a conference are trying to get a point across — whether it’s to a particular coaches’ group or the CEOs in our conference — that we’re doing really well as a conference in a particular sport in terms of our conduct-related fouls,” Cochrane said. “Or, on the flip side, if it appears in a particular sport that we really need to heighten awareness and perhaps take some steps to initiate change in our conduct.
“It’s used as a tool to reflect where we are and whether we need to make significant improvement.”
Cochrane said those discussions may occur regularly through the season with league coordinators of officials, and also when appropriate with administrators on campuses — typically when a “significant” sportsmanship-related penalty or foul is reported.
“I tend to address it on an as-needed basis, then use our semi-annual gatherings (with faculty athletics representatives, athletics directors and institutional presidents) to report out and discuss strategies for continuing to address it down the road.”
While conference officials occasionally may have to deal with specific incidents by imposing an administrative penalty of some sort in response to an unsportsmanlike act by a coach or student-athlete, Ledwin said conduct-foul reporting opens opportunities through the season to address problems in an educational manner.
“You really don’t want to be punitive if you don’t have to,” she said. “You’d rather take an educational approach and say, ‘Hey, I can see you have yellow cards accumulating faster than anybody else in the league right now,’ or ‘the same kid has gotten three cards in the past two weeks.’
“That should get an athletics director’s attention — it’s not a random yellow card or technical. There’s a pattern developing, and that’s what the data have shown us conferences — there are definite patterns that this type of report reveals.”
Support for officiating
The impact of those educational efforts not only are reflected in program data. It also is being noticed by the people who are in the best position to judge whether conduct-foul reporting is having an impact on behavior: game officials.
Steve Bamford, associate commissioner of the Eastern College Athletic Conference, has observed the reporting program’s impact through his office’s oversight of more than 5,000 game officials in 12 sports. He says officials not only notice improvement in student-athletes’ and coaches’ conduct, but also in institutional game management, security, and efforts to improve crowd behavior.
“It’s a better game when there aren’t as many penalties and unsportsmanlike acts,” he said. “Officials can officiate; they don’t have to police.”
Even in situations where policing still may be needed, the reporting program is useful in identifying areas where corrective steps are appropriate, and then in supporting officials’ efforts to enforce or emphasize rules.
Conduct-foul reporting has played a role in leagues’ responses to chronic problems in sports ranging from soccer — where the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference enacted a policy in which teams lose points in conference standings based on the number of cards received — to basketball, where ECAC-assigned officials are being instructed to implement a no-tolerance policy this season in response to coaches leaving the coach’s box.
However, while data help identify trends that may need attention from a conference and its game officials, Cochrane says the numbers play only a supporting role in his league’s efforts to deal with conduct issues, and that he chooses not to share the actual data with the conference’s game officials.
“We certainly tailor our points of emphasis based on the trends that we see, but I haven’t perceived a significant value in (officials) knowing that this year, there were five unsportsmanlike-conduct fouls compared to only two in the past, or compared to 10 in the past,” he said. “I don’t want those sorts of figures dancing around in their heads and influencing the way they call a contest.”
The value comes more from using the data to identify problem areas, then working with game officials to address them, Mitrano suggested.
“We’ve been able in our conference to have a positive impact with officiating, because the officiating bureau understands the concerns and is responsive,” he said.
Broader goal
As for the program’s broader objectives, Mitrano said the Conduct Foul Program must raise the level of awareness of sportsmanship and ethical behavior within the playing field.
He believes the program not only is achieving that goal, but it also helps support other efforts by conferences to promote sportsmanship.
“This program has spawned other sportsmanship initiatives within institutions and conferences, just as a result of looking at the data and having discussion and tracking real-time and seeing the benefits,” he said. “It has at least contributed to an uptick in education about sportsmanship.”
Division III has embraced organized efforts to also address such problems as fan sportsmanship, through the “Be Loud, Be Proud, Be Positive” campaign that the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference was instrumental in creating.
Division III conferences also increasingly share — and borrow from each other — ideas for addressing sportsmanship from a variety of perspectives. Ledwin said the AMCC is implementing Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference program for selecting “all-sportsmanship teams” of student-athletes who demonstrate good conduct not only in games, but also on the bench, in practice and as spectators of other sports.
Ledwin said the Conduct Foul Program also impacts fan sportsmanship because it addresses a root cause of inappropriate behavior.
“There’s absolutely a symbiotic relationship here,” she said. “In Division III, it’s on two levels.”
She said the first is that spectators — not always but often — take their cues from the behavior of the coach and the behavior of the team, and act out accordingly. She also acknowledged that Division III spectators often include student-athletes from other sports. If those athletes act out in their own competitions, they likely will exhibit the same behavior as fans.
To Ledwin, student-athletes should be held accountable for the their behavior in both venues.
Cochrane agreed that the Conduct Foul Program can influence fan behavior by pointing to trends in student-athletes’ and coaches’ behavior, and thus by sparking discussion of ways to improve conduct.
“These types of initiatives are so critical,” he said. “For one, it keeps the issue on the front burner, which is where it needs to be. We constantly need to be reminded that what we do is about more than winning and losing. It’s about instilling character, and winning and losing with grace, dignity and respect for your opponent.
“Those are all critical things that this initiative helps us to continue to pass along to our coaches and student-athletes.”
Empire 8 initiatives win recognition
The Conduct Foul Program is one of several sportsmanship initiatives developed in recent years by the Empire 8, which also has seen other leagues emulate its game-management policies and its requirement that student-athletes or coaches sit out an additional contest after an ejection.
Those initiatives, as well as an ongoing emphasis on sportsmanship education and standards for fan behavior, earned the Empire 8 an unprecedented honor October 10 when the Institute for International Sport designated the conference as its first “All-American Sportsmanship Conference.”
The league will be honored during the annual observance of National Sportsmanship Day March 4 along with 12 schools that earned “All-American Sportsmanship” recognition.
“Under the great leadership of Commissioner Chuck Mitrano and the league’s outstanding athletics directors and presidents, the Empire 8 is a model of good sportsmanship,” said Dan Doyle, the institute’s executive director and founder of National Sportsmanship Day.
Various criteria are considered in awarding the “All-American Sportsmanship” designation, including whether nominees have implemented codes of conduct; strategies for promoting sportsmanship to parents, coaches, athletes and fans; and methods for evaluating the effectiveness of a sportsmanship programs. The institute also solicits information about effective sportsmanship initiatives at an institution.
Joining the Empire 8 as honorees for 2007-08 are three elementary/middle schools, three high schools, two junior colleges, and four NCAA Division I schools: Auburn University; Bucknell University; Clemson University; and Indiana University, Bloomington.
The members of the Empire 8 are Alfred University, Elmira College, Hartwick College, Ithaca College, Nazareth College (New York), Rochester Institute of Technololgy, St. John Fisher College, Stevens Institute of Technology and Utica College.
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