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issues and is drowning in scandals and debt, while the primary and secondary levels of education are being squeezed financially and are dropping opportunities for sports and physical education. It is imperative that all these systems be analyzed more closely to see if there might be a better way to maintain sports as an integral part of the culture without losing the benefits.

      IS IT REALLY ABOUT EDUCATION?

      The current athletic model in the United States is often justified because of the perception that it provides access to education and even an impetus to continue one’s education at a college or university. Social mobility through the combination of sports and education is often mentioned as a primary benefit for minorities and other disadvantaged groups. In other words, it can be argued somewhat successfully that athletics can allow potentially significant access to educational opportunity for some who may have not had that opportunity without participating in sports. The ultimate vehicle for social mobility is education, but while using athletics as a way to attain that educational promise sounds appealing on paper, it does not always provide the social mobility and brighter future that are promised. It is a truism that, first and foremost, individuals have to take personal responsibility for their own education. However, many athletes find their educational options limited and/or controlled in order to ensure their academic eligibility, with an emphasis on more time for training rather than access to a bona fide education. This becomes a trap: athletes know they have to be eligible to compete and that others may be counting on them, not just to win games but even to be a family’s potential lottery ticket out of poverty should they make it into the professional ranks—as unlikely as that is.¹¹

      These scenarios are damaging the academic primacy of our educational system. For example, it is easy to deduce that if a school’s major football star is needed to compete in a very important game, but he is not academically eligible under standards set by the governing organization (e.g., a state high school activities association or an intercollegiate athletics governing body such as the NCAA), things may be done to “game the system” to ensure that the star player is able to play, at the expense of educational integrity. Sadly, I can say that I did this myself during my time as an athletic administrator and coach at several NCAA Division I universities. I tried to rationalize any effort I made to keep an athlete eligible by saying that this young man or woman would go back to a very dark place, and that we were doing them a great favor by keeping them on the field or court. In reality, I was doing the school and fans a favor. I was not helping the athlete develop as a person nor was I doing anything to assist in his or her actual social mobility. I was only concerned about the here and now: we needed that player to give us a better chance to win. Now I realize the error of my ways, and it is a major motivation for writing this book.

      The conflict between sports and academics is very real, and it is only getting worse. The NCAA’s vice president for enforcement, Jon Duncan, announced in early 2015 that the governing body was investigating twenty serious cases of academic fraud (Wolverton 2015). This came on the heels of a major scandal at a premier public institution, the University of North Carolina, where it was uncovered by the Raleigh News and Observer and some impressive reporting by investigative reporter Dan Kane that a high percentage of men’s basketball and football athletes were kept academically eligible through a series of bogus, almost nonexistent classes in its Department of African and Afro-American Studies. Other details showed direct knowledge and involvement of athletic department personnel, faculty, and staff in grade changes, plagiarism, and the covering up of the scandal for up to eighteen years.¹² This is one of our public ivies and an institution which prided itself on doing things “the right way.” If North Carolina is doing this to keep its athletic machine afloat, it does make one wonder what others schools may or may not be doing to keep their athletes on the field.

      Academic scandals and improprieties regarding athletic eligibility are not just the domain of intercollegiate athletics. Unfortunately, this has been happening not only at the commercialized level of NCAA Division I sports, but at the high school and youth sports levels. Middle and high schools are not immune to the desire to keep athletes on the field no matter what the cost, and scandals have damaged school-based sports in America for many years. A recent example is the private, football powerhouse Bellevue High School in a suburb of Seattle, Washington. It was alleged that the remarkable success of the school’s football program, considered one of the nation’s elite high school programs, having produced several NCAA Division I players, depended on players who weren’t actually Bellevue High students. As strange as that may sound, according to the Seattle Times it appears that up to seventeen of the athletes became eligible to play “by traveling to a Bellevue office park for classes at an obscure, 40-student private school: The Academic Institute, Inc.,” which many Bellevue faculty stated did not adhere to basic educational standards. The high tuition to this storefront school was often picked up by the coaching staff or wealthy boosters (Liebeskind and Baker 2015). This is just one of many examples of high school programs rivaling their college counterparts as to how far some institutions of learning will go in abandoning their educational mission to gain a few wins.

      THE IMPORTANCE OF CHANGE

      Father Theodore Hesburgh, the well-respected former president of the University of Notre Dame, summed it up very well when discussing what the United States is up against concerning its educationally based sports development model, specifically 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

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