After successfully inaugurating a forum for scholarly research on college sports at last year’s NCAA Convention, the second annual NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on Intercollegiate Athletics will probe more specific findings about the health and well-being of student-athletes during sessions January 13-14 at the Gaylord National in Washington, D.C.

Held once again in conjunction with the NCAA Convention, the Colloquium series is designed to give scholars a chance to present research and opinions about pertinent issues in college sports. The first Colloquium broached whether intercollegiate athletics was worthy of academic focus. The consensus was resoundingly positive. This year’s session is titled, “Paying the Price: Is Excellence in Sport Compatible with Good Health?”

Helping to stage this year’s Scholarly Colloquium is Maureen Weiss, professor and co-director at the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota. Weiss, who also is a member of the Colloquium’s Editorial and Advisory Board, focuses her own research on children’s social and psychological development through participation in sport and physical activity. She taught at the University of Virginia for 10 years before joining the Minnesota staff and was a professor at the University of Oregon for 16 years before that.

Following is a Q&A with Weiss about the purpose of the Colloquium series, the success of last year’s launch and expectations for the 2009 edition.

Q  Going into the first Colloquium at last year’s Convention, there was some skepticism from various constituencies that because this was an NCAA-sponsored event, it would be biased toward intercollegiate athletics, favoring what was good about the enterprise and avoiding the negative. Did the first Colloquium achieve the kind of balance that was intended?

Weiss: The advantage to inviting scholars to be the speakers is that we have this thing called academic freedom – none of us has a tie to the NCAA – none of us is in athletics administration. There’s no reason for us to not say what we think might be a valid discussion point.

We had several provocative papers last year that said, “Here’s how things are and here’s how they can be better.” People will raise issues, and what’s great is that (NCAA President) Myles Brand has been open from the start about inviting an honest dialogue, even when what’s said may be uncomfortable, which I think is healthy for the enterprise.

The primary purpose of doing this at all is to explore how to make things better for the student-athlete. That is what most everyone wants to accomplish, regardless of the scholarly discipline you approach it from or the standing you have in athletics or higher education. The Colloquium series adds to the research and data to help make those solutions more readily available.

Q  This year’s Colloquium features three “free-paper” sessions in which a refereed pool of researchers will present their findings. What’s the intent?

Weiss: Last year, with it being the first Colloquium and the board not knowing how it would go or who would come, we designed it only for keynote speakers and reactors to ensure that we were addressing the topic. Also, since all of us were involved in this as volunteers, we wanted to keep the entire program manageable.

With that first one behind us now, and because of its success, a subgroup of the advisory and editorial board explored the idea of supplementing the keynotes and the reactors with a “call for papers” as well, and have them juried. These “free-paper” sessions are the result. It serves two purposes – one is to demonstrate that we are open to having other people present besides the keynotes and reactors that we identify (although most of the people we have identified for this year are not on the advisory and editorial board). Second, the free-paper sessions identify some other topics and expose participants to other research that might not be covered by the keynotes and reactors.

Q  What prompted this year’s focus on good health as it relates to excellence in college sports?

Weiss: This year’s theme is a timely topic in terms of the healthy development of student-athletes. Many themes associated with student-athlete health and well-being – burnout, injuries, ethical considerations when returning to competition – all of those are what people frequently debate, and that will be addressed from different perspectives at the Colloquium.

The idea of a health focus was timely and different from the philosophical/ethical/sociological start we employed last year. The theme actually arose from among many potential themes two years ago when the board was planning the first Colloquium. We identified a notion of health in general, and now we have fine-tuned it.

In identifying potential keynote speakers, we wanted to be inclusive of various interdisciplinary perspectives. Dan Gould (director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports and professor in the kinesiology department at Michigan State ) comes more from the psychological perspective; Ron Zernicke (director of Michigan’s Bone and Joint Injury and Prevention and Rehabilitation Center ) comes from orthopedics and biomechanics; Mariah Burton Nelson (executive director of the American Association for Physical Activity and Recreation and former basketball student-athlete at Stanford) takes a sociological perspective but also is a practitioner; and Matt Mitten (director of the National Sports Law Institute and the LL.M. in Sports Law program for foreign lawyers at Marquette University Law School) is a lawyer.

So the four keynotes alone come from different perspectives. And then reactors to those keynotes also add different perspectives. Kirk Cureton, for example (professor and kinesiology department head at Georgia), is by training an exercise physiologist and he can bring in some of the physiological factors, and Jay Coakley (professor emeritus of sociology at Colorado-Colorado Springs) can address the societal demands that might lead an individual to being burned out.

So the reactors may agree with some of the points being made, but they also should be able to raise other points to consider – or perhaps even counter what the keynotes are saying.

Q  With one Colloquium in the books, the agenda for the second already developed and a third Colloquium planned for the 2010 Convention, what is the buy-in from various college sports stakeholders? Do faculty members who might have been predisposed to consider sports nothing more than a game find the enterprise a credible forum for scholarly research (as was the purpose of the first Colloquium)?

Weiss: It’s probably too soon to know the impact of the Colloquium series in that regard. Clearly, there is some demonstrated interest (as evidenced by inquires about and subscriptions to the new Journal of Intercollegiate Sport, and with the high number of people who have registered for this year’s Convention specifically to attend the Colloquium), but the reasons behind the interest haven’t been proven.

But we wanted to attract a broad audience with this year’s topic. Some of the attendees likely see this particular topic as being highly relevant to their work. They see this as a topic that will help benefit their student-athletes, which once again is our primary pursuit.

Q  What’s your desired outcome for the Colloquium this year?

Weiss: As an advisory and editorial board, we hope it is as successful as it looks like it will be on paper, and that people will leave wanting to seek more information about the topic – being more educated and curious – and seeing that the Scholarly Colloquium is not just an academic exercise but that the topic is very applied.

Most academics in our field do applied research to understand how to help others, and they see the benefit of research on these topics. The ultimate goal is the health and well-being of our student-athletes, so any kind of information that maximizes that outcome is a goal worth pursuing. I feel quite good about the lineup. Not only are the keynotes a significant attraction in this year’s program, but the reactors are in most cases just as high-profile as the keynotes.