Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Why We Support Losing Teams—Sports Loyalty


When I was nine I lay in my parent’s bed for days struggling with red measles. Through fever and pain, I vaguely remember mom’s cool hand and wet clothes and clutching a rosary Above all I recall the Kansas City Athletics lose 12 games in a row while listening to my parent’s red bakelite radio. Predictable as humidity in high Missouri summer, the cast offs and mishaps who made up the Athletics plodded to the plate, struck out and erred their way to defeat, again and again and again. They were simply the worst team of their era. I grew up a fan.

The Athletics  built several Yankee championship teams by giving away Art Ditmar, Bobbyy Schantz, Clete Boyer, Roger Maris and others. This team drafted Reggie Jackson, Blue Moon Odum, Dave Duncan, Catfish Hunter and then stole away to Oakland to win championships. This team anchored my identity—my children trace my putative nutsiness to this.

Growing older I met Red Sox and Cubs fans who proudly wore losing. They bragged on their losing. Puffed up with a Nietzschean resentment again the rest of the world, these fans embraced the romance of rooting for the lost cause. Their pain grounded a hopeless chivalry and proudly handed on this legacy to their children. These fans formed a community in adversity and pride born of resentment against the unfairness and inequality of the world. The Athletics, refugees from Philadelphia, offered no glamor and no mystic. They were flat out the worst team of their era with NO REDEEMING FEATURES.


 These memories sadly meld with my support of the hapless Mariners, the second worst team in baseball for the last 4 years lead me to wonder: why do we support losing teams?


I can understand the resentment theory of community by resentment. This resentment flips into a populist hatred for the successful endless winners who are usually unjustly rich or cheaters to boot. It carries some weight and can drive revolutions.


I believe other wider and deeper reasons exist to support losing teams. These reasons answer a common attack on sports fans whom are accused of seeking psychological compensation by participating vicariously with winners. This identification supposedly compensates for brittle male egos and feeds a sense of superiority and domination that encourages arrogance and glorification of dominating the weak. This may apply to Yankee fans. However we who support teams that win and lose or just simply lose demonstrate integrity and loyalty in our loserhood.

Good fans support losing teams from loyalty and identity. Sport loyalty can help anchor or refine a personal self-narrative. Many, like myself, stay connected to their hometown roots or youth through following teams. College teams epitomize how mobile Americans thread links to hometowns or awakening to adulthood. These memories of home or college burn bright by following a team that reignites affiliation through winning and losing, although, honestly, winning feels better.

American immigrants traditionally adopt teams as signal of identifying with their new country. Similarly we can adapt to a new city or location by attending to the local teams. I still consider Kansas City my home teams, but after 25 years root for the Mariners and Seahawks. My children are northwest born and raised and identify with their Seattle teams.

Identity, community, and affiliation augment simple joy for a sport. I like many others will watch a sports game where I have not favorites but watch to enjoy the game.

Rooting for a team, especially a losing team proves to myself I am capable of enduring loyalty and unrequited love. It teaches and models loyalty to our family and friends. I am not referring to the bandwagon and good-times followers, but real fans staying  true through good and bad times.

Staying loyal to a losing team proves our capacity for integrity to ourselves. If not driven by resentment, this commitment to the team reminds us and teaches friends and children that loyalty is not a calculation. Loyalty and community do not grow from cost benefit analyses of value and pain. Loyalty to a team tests and grows our capacity for loyalty (and perhaps masochism). It imparts how love endures though good and bad. This matters even more when it turns out that rooting for a losing team can impact health, I mean really and do I care?!!! 

This type of loyalty and commitment endures through ups and downs of winning and losing of joy and sorrow of exasperation and elation. It proves our capacity for integrity even when we may find it under assault in so many areas of modern life.


Honest fans know that in the end their loyalty resides to a dream of community and its ideals. Every sports team exists as an institutional shell with rotating members who embody a vision of place and sport. The reality of a sport team encompasses flawed humanity and becomes erratic, messier and uglier than the aspiration. Every institution whether country, church, corporation or family exists as this dialogue between reality and possibility.

In the end team loyalty has a spiritual dimension as much tied to the dream of who we are and can be as well as the dream of our connection to our home. Often those hopes get crushed or deferred, but every now and then a glorious moment occurs when it comes so close to the dream’s ideal as to renew faith and commitment when verging on losing its heart.

Like friendship or marriage loyalty to a team obligates a person to stay through good and bad. We reserve the right to criticize and quit and leave but return. I can turn off games in disgust and vow never to care again, but I know, even if the team does not that I will eventually cave and return. Team loyalty is not a one-season stand. Team loyalty elicits loyalty and commitment for good and bad.

Supporting a losing team reminds me of Pascal’s secret, “the heart has reasons the mind does not understand.”

Friday, May 10, 2013

Regular Basketball Guy as Gay Athlete


The success of inclusion occurs not when heroes are needed but when regular folks can live a prosaic life while being true to themselves. Commentators have been wondering for awhile when a male professional player would step forward as a gay man to challenge the silent don’t ask don’t tell taboo surrounding homosexuality and men’ professional sports. Well Jason Collins stepped forward.

I believe the most important aspect of his revelation lies in how normal he is as an athlete and person.

Jason Collins is a journeyman professional basketball player with a gift for collective defense. He graduated from Stanford and played for 12 years in the NBA for six teams garnering 3.6 points, 3.8 rebounds and .5 blocks per game. By all measures he had a yeoman career as a successful professional career respected as a teammate and contributor. It helps that he is 7’ 255 pounds. Celebration and support erupted in many quarters, but to me the real success here lies in exactly his actions felt normal and natural extensions of his self and a moment in time.

Greg Antony mentioned “he never could score really well.” Charles also agreed. To me this represents the triumph and success of his coming out. Inclusion wins when regular guys can be honest about their identity and still ply their trade.

The movie 42 reminds us of the staggering heroic stoicism and incredible talent that Jackie Robinson needed to break the color line in American professional sports. He faced fanatical and brutal abuse as well as life threatening violence for years. Yet he co-existed with Thurgood Marshall and the NCAA assault upon separate but equal as well as Truman’s integration of the armed services. Robinson’s heroic stature and superstar status did not stand alone but as an aspect of a movement of heroes.

The gay rights struggle benefitted from unknown men and women risking jobs and safety for three decades. Courageous men and women outed themselves to challenge friends, family and professional world and remind people of the humanity of gay people. Magnificent gay athletes and superstars lead the battle in sports where Americans play out so many narratives of identity, acceptance and inclusion or exclusion.

Pathfinder tennis superstars such as Billy Jean King and the magnificent Martina Navratilova came out as players. Women tennis players created a social space and earned an acceptance by the fan based. Their courage and success along with strident and courageous action across society by many unsung persons forged a social space and expectations that permitted women basketball and soccer players to follow professionally and in college. Women’s sports has achieved opening, tolerance and acceptance in many domains along with a critical mass of athletes coming out. When college’s best female player Britteny Griner of Baylor announced her sexual orientation it rippled but did not swamp her life or career possibilities. However, I do not want ever to underemphasize the continuing costs, abuse and persecution that gay persons and players can experience such as Griner’s personal letter on her decision narrates, as she says “it takes a lot of courage to come out."

The big three American sports—men’s baseball, basketball & football—dominate American sports consciousness and fan identification. Here no gay players existed, none.

The irony with women’s athletes announcing that they are lesbian lies in how it matches social stereotypes of masculine or dyke lesbians. Most women’s athletics plays below the media radar except on special events like World Cup, NCAA tournament or Wimbledon. The hostility and reaction was muted by the lower profile and the fit with existing stereotypes. It is reaching a critical mass in locker rooms and in fan bases that helped and gained from society’s own changing mores.


Men’s sports, however, stood as a powerful bastion against that change. Americans deploy sports narratives to support the profoundest American myths. Sports narratives also permit criticism of them and become metaphors for struggles around class, race and ethnicity much as the symbolically fraught 42 does.

Sports stands tall as the stronghold of manly virtue and prowess. Athletic struggle personifies:  physical courage, physical strength and sacrifice, toughness in face of physical and psychological pain, overcovercoming adversity, and conquering competition.

Women storming this bastion represented part of an ongoing assault against disabling female stereotypes that demeaned and praised a limited and narrow range of female virtues. Success in sports authorized women to claim highly valued virtues. They could then redefine them and make them their own.

Masculine stereotypes of gay men focused not on the hyper-masculinity of the motorcycle chain crowd but the sissy drag queen feminine attributes of being a gay male. Coaches and players scourge each other with endless gay slurs as attacks and prods on players to man up and play with courage and tenacity. If gay athletes existed, they would challenge the monopoly of “real” men on athletic virtues as profoundly as women did. In some ways it posed a more dangerous threat because it came from within.

The world of male competition and locker rooms formed a fraternity based upon trust and competition. The locker room served as a haven for men to relax, be themselves, be accepted and share victory as well as wounds of defeat. It provided a moral clarity and proving ground. Their private fraternity had its own form of love and sharing and respect. If the love shared by winning athletic teams became threatened by a self-conscious erotic component, it might rip away the haven and safety of the team and locker room.

Most professional athletes will admit to two things. First, they know there are gay athletes; second, they have never played with one. When Jason Collins revealed how even his twin brother did not know he was gay nor his fiancé, he revealed the power and costs of concealment. He could not even share his identity and capacity for love with his twin brother.

The battle for gay success and acceptances just as for black and female acceptance in sports required super stars to display immense skill and courage. They played to the old adage that black players or women had to work harder and better just to be considered equal to the white or male players.

What interests me about Jason Collins’ admission is that he did so as a “regular” guy player. He was not and never was a superstar, but he played the game well. For twelve years players, coaches fans have seen him prove his talent and worth.

Now the fans, players and coaches of six cities and teams know that this 7 foot 255 pound regular guy was a gay player. But no one was assaulted, no one in the showers was oogled, no one distrusted him and everyone knew he had their back on the court, in practice and in life.

The revelation reveals that the virtues of an athlete and teammate can be lived and proven by a gay player. Not a superstar, not a heroic figure, but a regular guy a veteran in the parlance doing his job, taking care of business and having everyone’s back.

He simply got tired of living a lie and sought to be “liberated” and to love freely and openly. He is at that point in his career that he may or may not have a contract next year but his disclosure marked a point of reference for sport, but just perhaps more reliable and deep.

Robbie Rogers is a regular successful soccer player like Collins. He plays in a below the radar sport in the MSL Soccer league but quit the sport in turmoil last February after coming out as gay. Now he has returned to play again for the LA Galaxy. He  described  the experience of returning to the field of soccer after coming out as "normal." Here as in the NBA the Seattle Times summarized it "it turns one big deal...into a smaller story for the next openly gay athlete.

You don’t have to be Jackie Robinson now to be a gay player in sports.

The proven existence of a good guy and fellow trusted player in locker rooms strikes at a deeper identity issue. The macho culture of sports extends prowess to sport and women. Admired athletes succeeded as predators with women and groupies. The disquiet of having a gay fellow teammate makes the male predators possible prey in their own sanctuary. Being a naked prey can be incredibly unsettling from being common predators celebrating their sexual excellence.

Scores of players have tweeted their support because they know him. More interesting the black community which has a complex relation with homosexuality in politics, united and rose up in the sport. Greg Antony of ESPN has talked insightfully about how black players must be for inclusion and must be for tolerance. Charles Barkley seconded him on national TV.

At the same time the hierarchy of the NBA came out squarely in his favor with David Stern tweeting support along with Michelle Obama.

His action, his experience and his respect gave credence to his action but it also provided a window of opportunity for the men in his sport to support him, for black leaders to resolutely support him even if carefully pointing out he is not Jackie Robinson. Finally it permitted senior political leaders to announce their support of him and inclusion and tolerance.

He said simply ‘I hope I can make it easier for those who follow.” Not only is he doing this, but his action will permit other male players to support and create a safer place in the world of mens’ sports. He could be one with Brittney Griner who said about combatting gay prejudice, “It’s my job now to, I hope, be a light who inspires others.”

This will not be easy or without conflict. A strong vein of evangelical Christianity threads through American male sport. A number of Muslims play. Both groups of players will struggle with the “sin” of homosexuals against the reality of a trusted teammate who excels and has their back. Many players will struggle with this personally and religiously, but these patterns are broken not just with strong and courageous actions of individuals but with unyielding support from leaders and bosses and coaches and commissioners. Jackie Robinson broke the barriers, his dignity, courage and skill earned a place for others, but Branch Rickey created the conditions and power to support the quest.

Well that’s the point. He is not a superhero or star. He’s a committed professional player who is respected, earned a good income and banged with the best of them while carving out a seven year career with one team and then a journeyman’s life with five other teams. He earned respect, trust and a salary. Now all he asks is the right to be free to love.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like Part II



Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students. Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.
2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.
3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.
4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

What Should a Student Athlete Graduate Look Like--Parts I & II


The NCAA defense of the concept of student athlete drives the immense efforts and progress college athletics has made over the last decade in increasing the graduation rates of student athletes. This increase has occurred in all areas and also led to pronounced increases in graduation rates of minority athletes as well as athletes in revenue sports. This progress is by no means perfect and requires constant pressure on schools and recruiting. The NCAA assumes that if a person graduates from the school, then the college has achieved the purpose that it sets for all entering students—a college graduate.


I want to discuss what this ideal of graduating from college looks like for a student athlete to see if it makes sense. Most media critics of the NCAA seem to assume that no student athletes graduate and that their degree is meaningless. This gives credence to their claims that the system is a “plantation” and based on “exploitation” because the student athlete, beyond playing what they love for four years, gains nothing of lasting value.

What should a graduated student athlete look like?

We need to remember that American higher education exists at many levels from private colleges to state comprehensive or open enrollment universities to R1 world-class research institutions. Each set of schools has different missions and different graduation rates. 

Students coming from well off homes and attending good private colleges may graduate at rates of 90 percent over a 6 year period while students coming from wildly diverse homes to open enrollment comprehensive state schools may graduate over six year period at 40 percent rates.  The NCAA covers all these rates, but reasonable rates across all levels suggest that strong state schools—which can be a proxy for NCAA colleges, will graduate students at the rate from 50-65%. This is a simple rate where you take the number of students who enter at a given year and divide it by the number who have graduated six years later. This simple division rate is what the federal government uses for its graduation rate numbers. This “target” rate drives the NCAA’s own efforts to graduate student athletes at the rates normal students graduate. The NCAA ideal would be to have student athletes graduate at an 80 percent rate.

This simple federal rate does not capture the complexity of student lives. While few students flunk out of the modern universities, many drop out from lack of money or lack of motivation or they transfer. Many drop out for a while and come back later.

Schools know simple 6-year averages do not capture the true reality especially at large schools serving diverse populations where the path to completing college can be nonlinear. This same issue impacts college athletes in a powerful way. Simply measuring the number of athletes who enter a class and those who graduate 6 years later tells you very little for two reasons.

1)   Many student athletes transfer and move on to graduate from other schools. In sports like men’s basketball the transfer rate can be over 30 percent. The federal rate misses this while NCAA numbers positively account for a transfer who graduates. 
2)   A very few student athletes leave to become professional athletes. This is not the norm but afflicts a few elite institutions. The effect is mitigated in baseball and football by rules made by professional teams who do not draft players until they have at least three years of college. Given the modern emphasis upon summer school classes and progress towards degree, a student athlete at the end of three years is often very close to graduation and well ensconced in a major. The NCAA does not penalize a school who leaves in good standing to play professional ball. 

As a membership organization the NCAA tries to respect the autonomy of different schools with different missions. The schools demand that autonomy. The NCAA gives schools immense freedom on their classes and graduation requirements but requires markers to ensure student athletes make reasonable progress toward graduation. This seeks to avoid past scandal where schools could go years without graduating their players.

What Graduates Should Know

Let’s get down and dirty and ask what a college graduate should possess and whether a graduated student athletes possess this. I believe we want to see several outcomes from any college graduate:

1)            They can read, write and reason. This is the bottom line of college, and many fine state universities face high school populations who possess real deficits in their ability to read and comprehend advanced prose, or reason and express it in writing. 

This miscarried outcome of modern high school education wounds the capacity of many college freshmen to reason or write clearly. Universities around the country have scaled down introductory writing and expanded writing requirements to adapt to this shortfall bringing students up to higher writing and reasoning levels. The reading and writing ultimately are means to a deeper end, the trained capacity to reason about problems.

2)            Students know basic math and can deploy sensible math including statistics skills to understand the world around them and use it to budget their lives and understand the realities of business and government. This remains the most fundamental failure of modern American education. Universities around the country have scaled down math requirements deal with the mathmatically illiterate populations they get from high schools. With the exception of technical professions that require strong mathematical literacy, modern higher education struggles to secure reasonable proficiency in applied math or statistics or even spread sheet math required by so much of modern life. Colleges strive for this but are floundering in achieving it for all their students.

3)            Reading, writing and math literacy—sound familiar? These should provide the basis for a college student to enter a major—a selected area where a student masters a field of knowledge and can solve problems within it using the technical and language based skills of the field. Many majors such as sociology, my own political science, anthropology, English literature, history etc. teach a student to reason about issues and integrate reading and analysis, but not necessarily practical mathematics, to engage serious problems. 

None of these majors guarantees a job or job preparation

Many social sciences and humanities rank very low on some the job preparation scales. Good majors provide the chance for students to become educated individuals capable of thinking through issues, reasoning about them, communicating their reasoning and writing about them. These skills contribute to multiple career and life paths.  Some majors such as economics, applied math, or modern empirical psychology provide a level of mathematical and analytical competence that can be deployed in many professional paths that differ from the reasoning and analysis of many social sciences and humanities.

4)           Professional competence that prepares students to leave school and enter into a professional career path. This is a more rare outcome, and the vast majority of college students do not pursue this route. Students, however, who enter engineering programs, science programs or information science or computer science for example can achieve this as they can in applied humanities such as design or art or theater programs.  Business schools offer undergraduate degrees but with the exception of accounting, most of the “skills” tend to be softer and lead to less efficacious reasoning outcomes than anticipated.

I think any student athlete who graduates as a true student must meet categories 1 through 3 at least—in this they would join the vast majority of American undergraduates.



Graduating from college is no guarantee of a job, and this applies to students athletes as well as most college graduates. The modern economy has made clear that getting a job is much harder than graduating from college, and many colleges are struggling to connect career preparation with traditional university generalist education. One of the major changes in higher education in the last twenty years has been the increasing importance for experience based learning of internships, extra-curricular activities or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises

We also have to remember the baseline entry level will shape the baseline of the graduates. The exact level of skill and exacting rigor and reasoning capacity may be tied to the mission of the university and level of commitment by the student body at large including student athletes. I don't’ expect the quality of knowledge and skill on average of many state college open admission students to match that of an elite private student graduate, but I do expect it to match strong standards of writing, reasoning and competence needed by business and life paths.

The vast majority of student athletes graduate at rates comparable or above similarly situated populations at their universities. This has been the great unheralded success of the NCAA and college athletics over the last twenty years. 

Graduating surveys support that graduating student athletes possess comparable levels of skills in the first three areas to their peers. Few university graduates master the professional path. It is even rarer to master the professional path given how hard it is for student athletes to get the advanced class requirements given their travel schedules.

I also want to acknowledge the real challenge that colleges face in bringing in a number of special admits each year to play athletics. Many of them are minority athletes from low social economic status backgrounds. Many come from broken urban or rural high schools and have not received the resource investment or education to be prepared for college level classes.

These special admits are admitted in clear knowledge that the admitted student does not fit the academic profile of regularly admitted students. These special admitted students will need strong academic and personal support the first two years to become a viable college students with their reading, reasoning analytic, math and class room skills.

These students come in identifying as athletes and aspiring to become professionals. Their reading levels may hover around 10th grade and they have grown up seeing themselves as academic failures and athletic successes. The amazing thing is that with strong support from staff, a strategic academic plan over two years and relentless pressure from coaches linking their ability to play to their performance in the classroom, the vast majority of these special admits can grow into viable academic students as well as athletic students

Colleges are now graduating minority student athletes at record high levels after twenty years of sustained effort and making it in coaches’ interests to get athletes to class and move towards degrees. I don’t want to romanticize this, a large number of schools still need to bring up the graduating level of their minority basketball and football players.

The key lies in strong investment in academic and social support for this development and unremitting coaching support. The NCAA reforms are all aimed at changing coaches’ incentives to put more effort into pushing academics and invest in robust academic support.

The Broader Case for Student Athletes

Here I want to make a case about what college athletics can also achieve. Many students learn the most in their internships, extra-curriculars or service learning or in experience based labs and exercises.  I would make the case that student athlete graduates possess not only the three academic dimensions but have gained other vital capacities that will stand them in good stead for life and careers.

Here are four vital skill sets that student athletes graduates often have gained.

1)   Goal setting, self-discipline and time-management are inbred into the process of being a successful athletic student.
2)   Cooperation, self-sacrifice and team coordination and commitment are ingrained in athletic team competition.
3)   Sophisticated pattern recognition of situations that develop in real time. Athletes must master complicated patterns of play and real time opposition and understand, integrate and deploy this perceptual skill.
4)  Taking responsibility and making decisions that have real time consequences based upon the pattern recognition while under intense stress. This real world acclimation to deploying knowledge and judgment under competitive stress infuses all athletic activity.

The data on the cognitive and emotional attributes of athletes supports the maturing of student athletes in these areas. I found one of my greatest hopes and frustrations was getting students who are athletes to understand how these athletic driven attributes transfer to the academic classroom and to the life they will face after college. When young student athletes figure this out, their lives change profoundly. 

I cannot emphasize enough how much this second set of attributes depends upon a high and moral quality of coaching, the type that the recent Rutger's scandal illuminates what should not happen. 

I believe that if the student athlete graduates from college and if the combined endeavor of the athlete and the college have achieved three of the four outcomes above, then colleges have done justice to the student athletes and vice versa.

I also believe that the value added attributes generated from athletic participation enrich and deepen the quality of the person who graduates from college.