in higher education. He stated, “Many have concluded that little can be done to rein in the arms race or to curb the rampant excesses of the market. As we stated in the 2001 Knight Commission Report: ‘Worse, some predict that failure to reform from within will lead to a collapse of the current intercollegiate athletics system’” (Splitt 2003, vii).13
I agree with Father Hesburgh and I will even take it further. If the intercollegiate athletics system as we know it does collapse, and we are not prepared for the change or a change occurs that we as passionate followers of college sports do not want, it will dramatically impact what happens in primary and secondary school sports, along with other currently available youth sports options. It is my hope that the alternative models and concepts outlined in the ensuing chapters can be built upon to prevent such a disaster, and to preserve and enhance sporting opportunities at all levels in America.
2
Interscholastic and Intercollegiate Athletics Development in the United States
IT IS important when suggesting new models or reform of any longstanding and accepted system to review where we are and how we got to where we are. This chapter provides a historical review of the American sports development system in an attempt to answer a very interesting question: Why is the United States the only country that has its primary vehicle of sports development and opportunity within its various educational borders? The European model, covered in chapter 5, essentially manifested itself in the same way but now has a much different and inclusive structure in comparison to the United States, most notably how the system is separate and distinct from the educational space. How did two systems that developed at virtually the same time, for many of the same reasons, end up creating drastically different governance and development models? It is a great question and one that must be discussed via a historical overview of how both systems developed.
AMERICAN SPORTS DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION
Few issues in sports have captivated Americans as much as intercollegiate and interscholastic athletics. The passion, the pomp and circumstance, the rivalries, and the unique American flavor of it all make them a significant part of the social fabric. I begin with the development of college sports in the United States because they provided the main impetus to those sports manifesting themselves at the primary and secondary levels of education.
College and other educationally based sports in the United States, while hugely popular and embedded in the cultural framework of the nation, have been the subject of significant concern and empirical inquiry for over a hundred years. Millions of fans attend games between athletes who are advertised as students first and athletes second. These “student-athletes,” as they are commonly referred to, provide fans with entertainment and possess the ability to bring communities together, while ostensibly gaining valuable life experience and access or potential access to a college education, with a financial package to help pay for it. Proponents of college sports, and to a lesser extent high school sports, point to other potential benefits that sound promising, but may not in reality be consistent residual effects of having athletics on campus. This includes such often-cited positive attributes as increasing a school’s visibility on a national level, which can lead to enhanced fund-raising, marketing opportunities, and applications for enrollment. In addition, sports participation is touted as a vehicle to provide educational opportunities for athletes to develop leadership, teamwork, and other beneficial social skills (Dosh 2013; Litan, Orszag, and Orszag 2003; Miracle and Rees 1994). Some critics have argued, with or without empirical research, that coaches and sports administrators will often denigrate academics and overemphasize the importance of sports to an institution, while gaining power to influence the academic primacy and moral compass of the institution (Splitt 2003).
INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS
Educationally embedded sports, throughout their history, show both similarities and differences with regard to other models of sports development and governance. The unique relationship of education and sports, forming the primary sports development model in America, essentially happened by accident. It began with American university students seeking recreational opportunities outside the few intramural activities available within their particular institution by organizing sporting events with other colleges, presumably to test their athletic prowess, manhood, and superiority in various events. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, student bodies and even administrations at prominent universities were progressively more determined to win in these rudimentary, student-organized intercollegiate sports, sometimes at any cost. While football was the main focus, other sports were also rising to sufficient importance in colleges’ profiles that certain institutions began to turn a blind eye to academic requirements just to get athletes onto the field. Professional baseball pitchers were becoming campus stars, playing college baseball under pseudonyms. Coaches were inserting themselves and nonstudents into football games.
In the early days of American higher education, faculties and administrators had never planned for anything as frivolous as organized athletics. The concentration was to be solely on academics. But students increasingly clamored for recreational activities that would offer a respite from the daily rigors of academic life (Chu, Segrave, and Becker 1985). Many faculty members recognized that this was actually beneficial to the academic progress and success of the students (Falla 1981). Whether it was a rowing regatta between Harvard and Yale in 1852, or the first “football game” between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869, these relatively little-noticed, social, yet oftentimes very competitive events were the precursors to today’s nationally popular, multibillion-dollar industry of intercollegiate athletics (Staurowsky and Abney 2011).
While the concept of a sports development model being primarily embedded within higher education might seem somewhat strange to observers who are not native to the United States, intercollegiate athletics have been a part of higher education and university life even outside the United States since the early eighteenth century, when athletics were made part of the curriculum at the Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. Intercollegiate competition in the United States is traced back to before the first recognized intercollegiate athletic rowing event in Boston in 1852, to as early as the 1820s, with no-holds-barred football and rugby games between Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. These “informal” events predate most organized athletics in America, scholastic or professional, including baseball (Ridpath 2002; Falla 1981; Howard-Hamilton and Watt 2001; Zimbalist 1999).
After the first official organized football game, pitting Rutgers against Princeton in 1869, proved to be very popular among the students and alumni as a social event, the faculties of the two schools canceled the following year’s contest because they feared an overemphasis on athletics as opposed to academics (Funk 1991; Zimbalist 1999). This strong faculty intervention might be one of the few times, if not the last, that university faculty exercised such control over the growth and power of college sports. Later, and to the disgust of the faculty, representatives of athletic interests (commonly known today as “boosters”) from both schools tried to leverage the very popular contest to raise funds to acquire property to build their own football fields. The 1883 game, played at the Polo Grounds in New York City, drew more than ten thousand fans and generated the money for the boosters to pay for the new fields. For the first time, intercollegiate sports were beginning to dictate university policy and conflict with academia in ways not even imagined (Zimbalist 1999).
New sports such as baseball and track and field were beginning to be established on college campuses across America. Contests were popular, but, as mentioned previously, many of the athletes were not even registered students at competing universities and colleges. There were even early reports of pay-for-play and recruitment of high-level athletes, mostly nonstudents, to play at certain schools. There was not a national or even regional governing body to harness what was becoming a burgeoning industry within the hallowed halls of academia, but it became apparent that governance was needed.
THE
