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Volume CXXXIII, Number 9 |
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The return of the teacher-coach
PAT ROCKEFELLER
COLUMNIST
As my professor passed out copies of a case study he himself had authored, he remarked, "We will be reading this for class, but first let me defend myself against the charge of unbridled vanity." The fact is, there was no need to justify using his own paper for class. Students are used to reading their professors' scholarly work. What we're not used to is reading our coachs'.
Recently, Men's and Women's cross country and track coach, Peter Slovenski was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. A self-described traditionalist, Slovenski wrote that there is one easy way to clean up athletics in higher education: make coaches part of the faculty with the full benefit of tenure and judge them not on win-loss records, but on the same credentials one would a professor.
Historically, coaches used to be a part of the faculty, teaching physical education classes during the day and coaching in the afternoon. This began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s as big-time D-I schools began to change their programs to mimic the culture of the pros in response to large market television audiences. No longer were athletic programs based on an educational model of improvement of the body, mind and character, but instead based on the need to win above all else. Suddenly college sports were getting their soul from the pros, not from academia.
As the D-I schools began this change, other levels of college athletics followed suit, if not to such a great degree. The change can be felt today on all levels of sports-from steroid abuse in high schools and colleges to questions over the age of Little League pitchers. Slovenski concedes that the changes have not been felt the same way at Bowdoin as at other schools, but even NESCAC institutions (read: Williams) have made significant changes.
Asked about the future of NESCAC sports, Coach replies, "NESCAC colleges have spent the past 6 to 8 years shifting to a model similar to the Ivy League in our specialization of athletic programs. I think going the other way, more toward what M.I.T. does with coaches who also teach physical education classes, encourages the kind of educational sports programs that are best."
There is a belief among many that the Renaissance man is dead-that we rarely if ever see the state champ also take home a book award, or the quarterback with a 4.0. Slovenski argues that the Renaissance man has been replaced with the specialist, and that this is largely the fault of those who are often most critical of it-the professors. While correct to criticize much of modern athletics, it was the professors that forced the change by divorcing the classroom and the playing field.
Slovenski writes in his article, "Viewing modern athletics culture as an opponent of academic culture, professors led the way in abolishing physical-education requirements and de-emphasizing physical-education departments...athletic culture became much more difficult to control once it was outside the academic system." Before the death of the true student-athlete, we saw the death of the teacher-coach.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s-a time of revolution on campuses across the country, it is easy to see how the physical education requirement, with its regimented structure and emphasis on character and competition could be seen as hierarchical, physically aggressive, and antithetical to the cerebral and abstract rumination of the academy. Athletics weren't progressive.
But with athletics outside the bounds and constraints of academics, they became progressive institutions of their own, and as most things "progressive," they kept on progressing as far as they could until regulation was required to rein them in. Gone was the institutional character of programs that had worked in harmony with the classroom. Gone were the informal agreements amongst schools and coaches regarding what was permissible. Gone was the sense that sports were for teaching sportsmanship and building character.
Now, it should be clear that Coach Slovenski's article was written specifically about big-time D-I sports, those schools with programs that today act not so much as a branch of education, but as the minor league for pro athletes. One would be hard pressed to make the same case for the state of Bowdoin athletics. However, to a lesser degree, the institutional change can be felt at the NESCAC level. Recent limits have been imposed throughout the NCAA regarding pre-season practices, and NESCAC football teams are now limited to 70 players, forcing cuts on many teams for the first time.
While calling Bowdoin "a terrific place for teacher-coaches," Slovenski sees a difference between what he does and what his father did as a track coach at Bates for 43 years. "He taught a class in the morning, then coached track in the afternoon, and then came home to be with his family at night...I coach track in the afternoon, and then I am something of a telemarketer at night. He had to teach to be promoted; I have to recruit."
The role of recruiting cannot be underestimated. While coaches used to coach multiple sports a year, today they specialize in one sport, with few exceptions, leaving three seasons to recruit. And when job security is based on winning, this is understandable. A good coach may be able to improve a player, but a good recruiter can get a better player from the outset.
Ultimately, the offer of tenure to a coach gives him or her the ability to stress more than just winning with the players. It would give a coach the ability to return college athletics to its purer past as well as "represent a commitment from colleges to live up to their rhetoric about the educational value of both winning and losing," as Coach wrote.
He makes the point that there is a mathematical aspect to sports. There cannot be more winners than there are losers, and that therefore "the modern emphasis on winning has not created more winners, just worse losers."
Outside his article, this can be seen in the work Slovenski does in the summer. For the last 15 years he has run the Bowdoin College Day Camp. In an age when others go to specialized camps, these children play wiffle ball and dodge ball, learn to swim, sing, and knit, and do math. They read poetry and play chess. Slovenski spends the summer trying to create Renaissance boys and girls.
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