When it comes to community service in intercollegiate athletics, there are as many approaches as there are needs. The topic touches emotions like religion. Few individuals will say someone else’s way is wrong — but they’re eager to tell you their way is right. Even the U.S. legal system muddies the issue by using community service as punishment.

Each approach usually gets some positive results. Yet purveyors of each could learn from others’ methods, too.

Regardless, community service is a bedrock activity in the student-athlete experience. Most testimonials from student-athlete praise the practice — it complements their role-model status and allows them to give back to the communities that have supported them, and it enriches their life skills by interacting with younger students or in some cases people less fortunate than themselves.

At the same time, community service is another in a long list of time commitments for student-athletes. If it is required, some believe it may detract from the act’s good intentions; but schools that don’t perform regular service might lose a competitive edge with those that do — creating in essence a community-service arms race.

Incorporating community service within a college athletics department — or anywhere else, for that matter — requires stepping back, examining the mishmash and determining how much to plan. Or, maybe, deciding not to plan at all and letting everything be truly “volunteer.” Most athletics departments plan at least some community service, but many let teams work on such projects with little oversight other than that from coaches. Others are more formal.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, takes the latter approach. Director of Athletics Charles Brown said that about 10 years ago, the athletics department made community service a stated part of its vision.

“It is a requirement of all of our coaches and student-athletes,” Brown said. “During the recruiting process, we make it clear that it is part of what our teams do. It is also a part of my evaluation and the evaluation of our coaches.”

UMBC student-athletes serve seemingly everywhere, from nearby grade schools, where the program started and is still most active, to

the Maryland Equestrian Center. There, men’s lacrosse student-athletes have made helping disabled children learn to ride horses an annual cause.

Brown said that the community service message has been well received.

“I don’t think we’ve lost anyone from it,” he said. “Coaches and student-athletes give us tremendous respect for what we’re doing.”

Brown hired a full-time person, Lisa Gambino, to lay the groundwork of the program. Now, the community outreach coordinator post is held by Lindsey Prather, a former UMBC swimmer who graduated in 2005. As an undergraduate, Prather tutored at Catonsville Middle School, a five-minute drive from campus.

“I enjoy what I’m doing now because it keeps me involved in both education and athletics,” Prather said. “I’ve had a couple of student-athletes say, ‘maybe this is what I want to do for a living.’ This service program makes a huge impact.”

A balancing act

The Retrievers have partnerships with 87 different organizations through the program — 55 schools, 20 community organizations and 12 recreation/Catholic Youth Organization partners. With no football team, UMBC (enrollment 12,000) has about 500 student-athletes. Brown said the department is always looking to add more projects.

“When I describe what we do to other ADs, their jaws drop because they can’t believe it,” Brown said. “I can’t say there are no other schools (our size) that are as involved as we are, but I have never seen another.”

Brown said that UMBC athletics borrows from the overall school’s philosophy of being a good neighbor in its suburban community, an especially important approach given the institution’s relative newcomer status in staid Catonsville.

Of course, the good-neighbor philosophy is a common theme even if a school has grown with its home community, as has Ithaca College. Mike Lindberg, the Bombers’ associate athletics director/SAAC advisor, said that Ithaca athletics’ community-service approach is largely decentralized, but the topic still has been a consistent focus of the entire college for years.

“Service could be initiated by coaches, administrators, the SAAC, or individual student-athletes with a special cause,” Lindberg said. “Once they approach us, then we coordinate it so that there’s no overlap — we don’t want 200 student-athletes showing up at a grade school at the same time.”

Lindberg said that not all student-athletes immediately embrace service efforts, but his experience is that once they do, most want more.

“Not all of them are gung-ho at first but they usually come back very motivated and want to know when they can do it again,” Lindberg said. “It makes us better citizens, better neighbors, and the student-athletes learn so much, whatever the service.”

Sometimes motivation comes directly from the recipients of service. During an Ithaca women’s basketball game, a youth group with which the team had worked was in the crowd. Lindberg said they cheered “like crazy” throughout the game, then stormed the court at the buzzer and asked the Bombers for autographs.

“I don’t even think it mattered whether we won or lost, they still would have done that,” Lindberg said.

Campus SAACs typically play a key role in organizing community service. It’s part of the SAAC mission, and the convenience of having a representative from each sport at a meeting creates a natural tool for such projects. On the national level, the Division II SAAC has turned that idea into a massive effort in support of the Make-A-Wish Foundation (see story, page A3).

But some people think that campus SAACs may be falling short of some of their mission because of an over-emphasis on community service. One is Gary Williams, Carthage College’s director of student-athlete services/SAAC advisor.

 “Yes, part of the SAAC’s mission is to foster a positive image of student-athletes and community service is a part of that, but it’s not the only part of SAAC’s mission and I think that may be getting lost,” he said. “There needs to be a balance.

“I’m afraid that some SAACs are concentrating too much on community service and neglecting other parts of the SAAC mission, which is easy to do because there’s only so much time and SAAC representatives are generally some of the busiest kids around. Sometimes it’s easier to focus externally rather than trying to fix something that’s internal, which is supposed to be part of SAAC, too.

“SAACs are starting to be a community-service juggernaut and we’ve got to be cognizant that there is more to SAAC than community service.”

Location, location, location

A major reason athletics departments choose to work with a particular worthy cause is, simply, how far student-athletes will have to go from campus to participate. All schools want maximum time and effort to be spent on doing good, not traveling. Sometimes a former nearby “mentee” grows into a mentor on the very campus that started the relationship. Humboldt State University softball student-athlete Vanessa Shernock, who attended grade school and high school near the Arcata, California, campus, said she was influenced by college student-athletes’ visits during her prep days. Now she’s returning the favor as a mentor herself.

“Humboldt State is a huge part of the local community and I think that the student-athletes can be great ambassadors for our school,” she said. “I feel that everything we do reflects upon our coach, team and school. I want that to be a positive reflection.”

The neighborhood approach also persists at large, national-profile schools like the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which has an active community-service program called Carolina Outreach. In that structure, one member of each team meets monthly as a group to discuss possible community projects with Cricket Lane, director of student-athlete development/SAAC advisor.

Like many large public universities, the North Carolina campus is home to a major medical facility (North Carolina Children’s Hospital), which is is a natural for community service. Seeing this during the spring of his freshman year, Dave Werry, now a senior on the lacrosse team, started work toward founding Carolina Dreams.

“We wanted to start a program that student-athletes could participate in even with very limited schedules,” Werry said.

In Carolina Dreams, which started last year, teams host 10 to 15 families of outpatients at four athletics events per semester. The host team will spend most of the day with the visitors, including sharing lunch at the campus academic center. Werry said the response from his peers has been tremendous.

“Now we can’t host enough events for all the student-athletes who want to get involved,” he said.

North Carolina also has two other main off-campus community-service efforts in addition to numerous smaller projects. In one, a team spends a Saturday helping build a Habitat for Humanity house. The other is a partnership with Gatorade called Get Kids in Action, which is designed to increase physical activity to reduce and prevent childhood obesity. In that program, student-athletes participate in various events with local grade school students to help inspire them to be more physically active. The campus’ Get Kids in Action program is the country’s first, but the program will soon expand to 25 other campuses nationally.

Lane said that at a school like North Carolina, which receives tremendous fan support from its townspeople, it’s especially important to give back to the community with service projects.

Carthage’s Williams, while acknowledging the great work that is being done in communities around the country, said that for the Kenosha, Wisconsin, campus, a different, more internal view has worked well, both educationally and practically.

“External projects are great, but there is so much need within our own institution (for volunteer projects),” he said. “In community service, we focus on helping each other on campus through tutoring, mentoring, helping with event management, campus cleanups and maintenance.

“One of the purposes of community service is to teach kids to give to each other, and we feel the best way to do that is to focus internally so they can see the results instead of going somewhere else, then leaving.

“That makes the results more tangible.”

One of Baldwin-Wallace College’s programs combines the campus/community approach with SPROUT, an acronym for Single Parents Reaching out for Unassisted Tomorrows. SPROUT helps 12 single mothers who live with their children in separate campus group homes while completing their undergraduate degrees. Some student-athletes work directly with the children. Others help the mothers maintain health and fitness. Michelle Nicopolis Gallagher, Baldwin-Wallace’s director of student-athlete services/SAAC advisor, said the program has helped some of the participants clarify career goals, getting them to embrace early childhood education.

Is competition good?

Nothing stirs a student-athlete or a coach more than competition, so many schools — and some conferences — keep track of which group can do the most community service or raise the most money. Others wince at even the appearance of a contest. That issue, plus the question of how much publicity a school gets — and should solicit — for community service can be touchy territory.

UMBC embraces competition for its Retriever Cup, which is presented each year to the team that amasses the most points from successes not just in community service, but also in a number of other activities such as academics and attendance at sporting events other than their own.

“Some of our teams are almost fanatic about competing for the cup,” Brown said. “It’s a very good motivator.”

North Carolina is more laid back.

“I want them to do it because they want to do it,” Lane said. “Doing community service is a great way to get out there and give back. We’re active rather than competitive.”

Baldwin-Wallace twists the question in an entirely different way. It encourages teams to work with other campus squads.

“At the beginning of this year, we (SAAC and the athletics department) decided that since so many different teams were doing so many different things, we were spread too thinly,” Gallagher said. “We said, ‘Why not create more unity among teams and have that unity spread throughout campus?’ ”

So, they’ve formed brother-sister teams, typically a fall sport partnering with a spring sport. Each team will pick a “spirit” game where the sibling team will organize a special support effort for that contest. When the teams do community service, they do them together, rendering the scorekeeping issue moot.

At Carthage, Williams encourages competition within teams. For example, he split the football team into groups of 10 to 12 each, then kept track of hours served by those groups as a motivator.

Pro-competition or not, most schools make at least some effort to publicize what they do in the community, something they may not have done as much years ago. When that effort is successful, the appearance may be that student-athletes are doing more community service than in past years. Most said community service by student-athletes has been done at a steady pace for many years, but Gallagher perhaps spoke for all, saying the perception that more is happening now is not a bad one, real or imagined.

“It is more in the public eye now,” she said. “Part of that may be because there has been so much focus in the media about student-athletes in a negative spin that schools have reacted by wanting to shine more light on the good that is being done.

“It is refreshing when you see and hear a lot about community service because that paints a more accurate picture of the majority of student-athletes.”

Which brush or shade of paint should be used? The answer, of course, depends upon the nuances of each NCAA campus and its surrounding community.