Several years ago, a story appeared in the Charleston (S.C.) Gazette sports pages that was so unusual you might have thought you’d picked up the National Enquirer. Apparently there is a local church league in the Charleston area that — get this — teaches players fundamentals and life skills. Not only that, but according to Pastor Charles Larue, who runs the league, players are taught such fanciful notions as self-esteem, respecting authority and sportsmanship.
Clearly, that league is out of step with the real world, where parents are forced to sign agreements stating that they will act properly at all school sporting events; or where a coach decides to spray his football players with non-stick cooking spray before a game for that extra edge; or where a school board cancels the remainder of a basketball season because constantly suspending the players for poor behavior had no effect.
Sound outrageous? All those examples are true.
Clearly, sportsmanship has taken a dive. There is an absence of respect for the officials, for opponents. And those who should be leading — the captains, the coaches — are being disrespectful.
NFHS Executive Director Bob Kanaby agreed. “We have paid more attention to (sportsmanship issues) in the last decade than most items,” he said. “But at the same time, I also don’t want to simply say that the ship of state has sunk. Obviously, there’s a tremendous need out there that needs to be addressed, and there are things that can and must be done in order to turn the battleship around and get it started in another direction.”
The trickle down effect. “I think it starts with us,” said Mike Pereira, NFL vice president of officiating. “Whether it’s the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball or the National Hockey League, people watch us on Sunday afternoons, kids emulate what athletes do. The pros and college sports have a huge impact on the play of the game at the lower levels. To turn our backs on that is a huge mistake.”
Pereira explained that the NFL has gathered data on how the actions of its players have a direct bearing on young athletes. “The throat slash gesture had sneaked into our game,” he said. “The minute we saw that, we knew we had to address it. (Then-NFL Senior Director of Officials) Jerry Seeman got involved, and got with the officials, and said this is going to be a foul if we ever see it, no matter whether it’s directed at another player or just directed at the crowd. There’s nothing good that comes from it. No more than three weeks after (the throat slash gesture) appeared, we received a video from a Southern California high school official who sent it in so he could be evaluated by one of our guys. Lo and behold, there was a quarterback sack, and the high school kid who made the sack, got up and (made the throat slashing gesture). No secret where it came from.”
Kanaby agrees with Pereira’s assessment. “We can give you examples of the first headbutt we saw from a student-athlete,” he said. “We saw it at a professional basketball game, and then almost immediately after that we saw it (at the high school level).”
Kanaby said such occurrences are not unusual. “Did your younger children copy what your older children did?” he asked the parents in the audience. “It has to happen. Younger people look at older people, or even older siblings, and emulate what they do.”
Recognizing that problem is one thing; countering it is a big challenge. “We (at the pro level) sometimes work in contradiction with what everybody else is trying to do,” said Pereira. “(Student-athletes) coming out of colleges were not being allowed to do some of the things that we (in the NFL) have allowed them to do. Therefore, I think it’s incumbent on the NFL and everybody else (at the pro level) to assume responsibility, to work on our games, to work on those individuals who are creating those highlight clips on ESPN, and try to discourage that so that they emulate a positive role model for young people involved in the game.”
It was actually the NFL Players’ Association that asked the league for help in putting respect back into the game. Now, the NFL is ordering its officials to crack down on unsporting behavior and excessive celebrations. The league even put together an eight-minute video on sportsmanship. “We’re going to show that to every single player in the league, and we’re going to work on their consciousness,” said Pereira. “We’re going to explain to them and show to them and teach them how they are responsible for the future of our game. We’re taking a progressive approach not only through the video, but also through penalty flags and stronger enforcement for things like taunting. Our goal is to get respect back in the game.
“You can fine a professional player and sometimes that fine is not significant, and maybe it only hurts his wallet, but it doesn’t hurt the rest of the team. You get involved by throwing flags, and you hurt the other 44 members on that team, and now you’ve sent a strong statement.”
Beginning with the base of the pyramid. Kanaby and the NFHS have the most direct contact with the student athletes who hold the promise of that future. And there are more high school athletes than any other group of athletes. The equation is simple: A whole lot of kids play high school sports; a fraction of those kids get to compete at the college level; and a small fraction of those kids eventually go on to professional sports, where the trickle down behavior starts all over again.
The need for high school students to learn sportsmanship is crucial. “We have to constantly reinforce in our own minds the fact that sportsmanship is a learned behavior,” said Kanaby. “Whereas we have our classroom activities to teach math skills, English skills, language skills and the like, we use our playing fields and gymnasiums to teach other skills of life — respecting your opponent, respecting yourself, and doing all the kinds of things that tend to make you better prepared to face life. Sportsmanship, then, becomes the curriculum of the sports activities in that school. You learn to deal with defeat. You learn to deal with victory. And all those other parameters that basically help you deal with what life is going to give you.
"We fail a youngster if on a Friday night he passes for 300 yards, and then on Saturday night he beats up his girlfriend. We fail that youngster in terms of understanding what they really should gain from participation in sports. We have to decide very clearly whether we want to educate young people to be All-American football, basketball, or other sports players, or if we want them to be basically good people who are ready to contribute to our society.”
Toward that end, the NFHS identified six groups of people who factor into sporting behavior. “The first group is the coaches,” said Kanaby, “because coaches are the first line in terms of whether or not something is going to be acceptable, or something is not acceptable relative to behavior. The second group are officials, followed by school administrators, athletic administrators, the student athletes themselves, and, most recently identified as being a real source of need on our part and everyone’s part, are parents and fans. Those six core groups are going to determine what the outcome of these educational experiences are going to be — positive or negative.”
The NFHS has educational programs for coaches, centering on the principles of coaching and the reasons why athletics are part of the educational experience. The NFHS is also discussing with the National Association of Secondary School Principals the idea of offering one-day workshops to impress upon them the importance of their athletic programs in their schools, especially as they relate to the educational development of young people.
As far as how high school officials can be involved in that process, Kanaby said, “If (officials) embrace and believe in the fact that a playing field or a gymnasium floor is a classroom setting, much like a math class is during the course of the day for that youngster, then an official plays an important part in terms of keeping order, in terms of making certain that the game is played within the rules.”
But the educational process by its nature is no overnight solution. It takes time and patience to teach and accept those notions. “If we’re making any progress on this at all nationwide,” said Kanaby, “it’s on the playing field itself, because we have control over players, we have control over coaches, we have input to officials, we have control over administrators to some degree.”
The coach. As Kanaby mentioned earlier, the coach is the first line of enforcement of good behavior; but the coach can also be the first line of acceptance of poor behavior. “This whole value analysis we’re discussing, nobody can argue with integrity and honesty and all that,” said Pereira. “All those values are common sense, and we could all come up with them as goals to achieve, but I look at responsibility. Who is responsible for making a situation a more positive situation for the officials? It’s coaches. They have to be responsible. They should be the people who lead by example. If the coach is allowed to berate an official, or if he has an over-emphasis on winning and possibly skirting the rules to win, then we’re going to have a hell of a tough time trying to teach kids right from wrong.”
Kanaby agreed with Pereira’s assessment and added, “The coach is the key. The coach will always be the key. The coach has always been the key. But we’ve seen a dramatic change in our coaching staffs in this country.”
According to Kanaby, it’s no longer the norm to have a teacher-coach who is an authority figure involved with and seen by the students all throughout the school day. Instead, coaches are coming from elsewhere in the community and may not even show up on school grounds until after the regular school day is finished.
"It’s extremely difficult to provide the (sports as an educational experience) message to those individuals unless school administrators and athletic administrators are designing programs that actually bring those individuals in at some particular time of the year, and say, ‘Here is why we have these sports programs in our schools,’” said Kanaby. “‘It’s not to win the state championship, it’s not to win the league championship, it’s not to do all those things. They’re great byproducts to what happens, but the real reason is education.’
"I’ve talked to athletic administrators who say 75 percent of their coaches are not in their school building. They come there at three o’clock or later. They don’t see any of the students all day. The kids don’t see any of them all day. Don’t get me wrong, to be very frank, we have a lot of teacher-coaches who are in schools all day, and they do a horrific job. We would be better off without them. But it’s generally better (if I’m a coach) if I see my team in the halls, if I see them in the cafeteria and I talk to them. I’m building a bond.”
Don’t lose sight of reality. Good sporting behavior doesn’t have to exclude heated competition and exuberance during play. “I don’t think celebration is disrespect,.” Pereira said. We don’t want to take the fun out of the game, and we do not discourage individual acts that are not ludicrous that show spontaneous celebration.”
The process of improving sportsmanship isn’t going to happen overnight, but it is happening. Individuals and organizations at all levels of competition realize the need for it; they see the poor behavior on the part of the athletes, coaches and spectators; they see the droves of officials leaving the profession. But officials should not simply sit back and passively wait for their lot to improve.
Copyright © 2006 Referee Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. For reprint permission, please contact editor@referee.com.