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By Marcus Kabel
March 27th, 2008
CARTHAGE, Mo. - Ultimate fighting was once the sole domain of burly men who beat each other bloody in anything-goes brawls on pay-per-view TV.
The bare-knuckle fights are now attracting competitors as young as 6 whose parents treat the sport as casually as wrestling, Little League or soccer.
The changes were evident on a recent evening in southwest Missouri, where a team of several young boys and one girl grappled on gym mats in a converted garage.
Two members of the group called the "Garage Boys Fight Crew" touched their thin martial-arts gloves in a flash of sportsmanship before beginning a relentless exchange of sucker punches, body blows and swift kicks.
March 10, 2008 - nytimes.com
Correction Appended
At youth sporting events, the sidelines have become the ritual community meeting place, where families sit in rows of folding chairs aligned like church pews. These congregations are diverse in spirit but unified by one gospel: heaven is your child receiving a college athletic scholarship.
Parents sacrifice weekends and vacations to tournaments and specialty camps, spending thousands each year in this quest for the holy grail.
But the expectations of parents and athletes can differ sharply from the financial and cultural realities of college athletics, according to an analysis by The New York Times of previously undisclosed data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association and interviews with dozens of college officials.
Excluding the glamour sports of football and basketball, the average N.C.A.A. athletic scholarship is nowhere near a full ride, amounting to $8,707. In sports like baseball or track and field, the number is routinely as low as $2,000. Even when football and basketball are included, the average is $10,409. Tuition and room and board for N.C.A.A. institutions often cost between $20,000 and $50,000 a year.
“People run themselves ragged to play on three teams at once so they could always reach the next level,” said Margaret Barry of Laurel, Md., whose daughter is a scholarship swimmer at the University of Delaware. “They’re going to be disappointed when they learn that if they’re very lucky, they will get a scholarship worth 15 percent of the $40,000 college bill. What’s that? $6,000?”
Within the N.C.A.A. data, last collected in 2003-4 and based on N.C.A.A. calculations from an internal study, are other statistical insights about the distribution of money for the 138,216 athletes who received athletic aid in Division I and Division II.
Many students and their parents think of playing a sport not because of scholarship money, but because it is stimulating and might even give them a leg up in the increasingly competitive process of applying to college. But coaches and administrators, the gatekeepers of the recruiting system, said in interviews that parents and athletes who hoped for such money were much too optimistic and that they were unprepared to effectively navigate the system. The athletes, they added, were the ones who ultimately suffered.
Senior earns the highest academic award for SUNYAC Hockey
March 13, 2008
Senior Chris Koras (Toronto, ONT) has been named the SUNY Chancellor's Award of Excellence winner for Ice Hockey as announced by the State University of New York Athletic Conference (SUNYAC) office earlier this week. The award is given to the All-Conference player that has the highest cumulative grade point average.
Koras was named to the All-SUNYAC team as a second-team selection after finishing the season with six goals and a team-leading 14 assists for 20 points in SUNYAC games. Overall, he finished with 10 goals and 20 assists for 30 points. He helped the Golden Eagles to a 7-15-3 record and led the squad with five power play goals.
The senior center wraps up his career at Brockport with 98 games played and 82 career points on 22 goals and 60 assists.
The senior is a Business Administration major with a minor in Economics.
Having kids as young as five years old specialize in just one sport is 'damaging'| Krista Charke |
| The Daily News |
It used to be that children would change sports with each season or balance two or more sports at the same time.
Nowadays, it's more common for children as young as five years old to train in one sport year-round.
Rick Bevis, sports psychologist and professor of sport, health and physical education at Malaspina University-College, thinks parents are the main force behind the growing trend.
"Parents have stars in their eyes. They treat their kids like little professionals," said Bevis.
What the parents aren't taking into consideration, Bevis says, are the technical, physical and psychological damages limiting a child to one sport can cause.
Early specialization can lead to physical and psychological burnout, loss of transferable athletic skills, a greater risk of overuse and repetitive stress injuries, higher levels of pre-competitive anxiety and difficulty coping with athletic failure.
"Children who play one sport for a long period of time don't get to use different muscle groups, obtain an uneven body balance and their movement patterns become rigid and uniform," he said.
The Journal of the American Chiropractic Association says that the period between the ages of five to 13 should be "sampling years." A time when children can try a variety of sports with a de-emphasis on competition and winning.
The Division I Football Committee at its meeting last month in La Jolla, California, recommended an increased emphasis on crowd control during all rounds of the championship.
Committee members are empowering on-field officials to stop a game during a situation that compromises the safety of participants and fans or affects the integrity of the game.
For example, during the 2007 NCAA Division I Football Championship game between Appalachian State and Delaware in Chattanooga, Tennessee, fans began leaving the stands with about four minutes left in the contest to stand on the sidelines. While no negative incidents were reported, it’s a situation the committee doesn’t want repeated.
“We have an obligation to maintain a safe environment and protect the teams and fans to the best of our abilities,” said committee Chair John McCutcheon, the director of athletics at Massachusetts. “All it would take is for the wrong person, at the wrong time, making the wrong comment, and you could have an ugly situation. We don’t want anything to happen that will diminish the championship experience.”
In the future, on-field officials will be expected to stop the game until the playing area is cleared.
Since this policy encompasses the entire championship, institutions that fail to manage crowd control could lose the chance to host future FCS postseason games. This part of the proposal would have to be approved by the Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet.
“We’re looking at different scenarios where we can work with the host organization in terms of providing access in the stands if an emergency situation arises,” McCutcheon said. “There may be a call-in hotline number or text message system, if a situation needs to be addressed.”
Committee members also reviewed attendance and television ratings of the championship.
The final game on December 14 drew a neutral-field record crowd of 23,010 to Chattanooga’s Finley Stadium/Davenport Field.
Overall, the championship drew 179,046 fans, which is an average of 11,936 per game. Those numbers are comparable to attendance for the 2006 tournament.
The cable television rating for the championship final on ESPN increased to a 1.51 compared to 1.26 rating of 2006. Also, 3.6 million people viewed the game, which is an increase over the 2.9 million from the previous year.
Appalachian State’s presence in the final contributed to the increase. The Mountaineers opened the season with a shocking upset at then-No. 5 Michigan and drew attention to the quality of play throughout the FCS.
“When you look at it closer, you see that (Appalachian State over Michigan) wasn’t an isolated situation,” McCutcheon said. “We had several FCS teams beat Football Bowl Subdivision teams, and we had some where the games were very competitive. It shows the competitive level that FCS football has reached.”
Extra money for Arkansas high school football coaches — and, in many cases, lighter teaching duties, perhaps requiring no time in a classroom at all — is drawing criticism from a legislative leader and some state educators.
The additional pay for the head football coaches is as much as $30,000 a year in some cases, according to an article Sunday in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reporting on an investigation carried out by the newspaper.
"I feel like the districts are gaming the system to steer exorbitant dollars to athletic purposes," said state Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, chairman of the Senate Education Committee.
"I think that the mothers and fathers of Arkansas need to be thinking about the kind of educational preparation its going to take ... for their children to reach their greatest potential," he continued. "I'm absolutely convinced that proficiency in football will not produce good results."
Russellville High School teacher Paul T. Gray Jr., this year's Arkansas Teacher of the Year, said there are teachers at most Arkansas high schools who resent the additional money going to football coaches who make more money, may work less and may not even have to deal with students off the football field.
"The primary function of anyone who is getting paid a teacher salary is to teach," Gray said. "The first thing on any contract is that they are a teacher. Coaching responsibilities are added in on the bottom of the contract."
The state's 194 head football coaches draw more than $11 million altogether in tax dollars each year. More than $1.6 million of that goes to coaches who don't teach any classes. Some coaches are athletic directors or perform other nonacademic functions, but all are paid out of teacher salary funds.
Glen Rose High School Coach Billy Elmore doesn't teach classes but works as the school's athletic director and maintenance director. His contract, however, lists him as a teacher.
"My duties are basically outside a classroom," he said.
Elmore is certified to teach and has worked in schools for 13 years. Elmore will move to Arkadelphia High School this fall to coach that school's team and will likely teach classes at his new school. He said it's not fair to slam coaches who don't teach because most of them have other work duties.
Ben Mays of Clinton, who was on the Clinton School Board for 20 years and now serves as a member of the state Education Board, questions whether state education dollars should finance athletics.
"The training and the fielding of a football team is a strictly local option thing," Mays said. "It's not part of the constitutional mandate (to provide all students with an adequate education). If an area chooses to do that and they take money out of state funds to do that with, I think that's kind of questionable whether that's an acceptable expenditure."
“It’s a thinking man’s game.”
You’ll hear that line used to describe any number of sports. A new book is out that makes the case for basketball, and offers up an analytic view of some of the game’s finer points.
Basketball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Paint, the paper-bound version of which was recently published by The University Press of Kentucky, is a nearly 300-page collection of essays about the intersection between sport and the mind. Edited by Jerry L. Walls, a professor of philosophy and religion at Asbury Theological Seminary, and Gregory Bassham, a professor of philosophy at King’s College, in Pennsylvania, the book gets contributions from what the editors call “a dream team of 26 basketball fans, most of whom also happen to be philosophers.” (Among them is Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.)
Essayists look at questions such as “How should you deal with strategic cheaters in pickup basketball?” and “Why does a player shoot well in warm-ups but struggle during live action?”
Given that Indiana is considered a birthplace of basketball, and that the state’s flagship institution, Indiana University, has been embroiled in a scandal that involves Kelvin Sampson, the men’s basketball coach who recently resigned under pressure, it seemed only fitting to start our Q&A session with Walls and Bassham with a discussion of the Hoosiers.
Newsday.com
John Jeansonne
HOT TOPIC
9:35 PM EST, March 1, 2008
Now comes the real Houdini trick for fans: Escaping from the escape.
Because, however accurate sport's historical function as the avoidance of reality, the shackles of troublesome developments increasingly ensnare those seeking relief in the fantasy universe of fun-and-games.
In a jock worshipper's equivalent of waterboarding, the FBI probe of Roger Clemens closely follows the lawsuit filed against the New England Patriots for spying and the resignation of Indiana basketball coach Kelvin Sampson for breaking the same recruiting rules he had violated in his previous job. Just to cite the most obvious cases.
Not surprisingly, a fair amount of evidence exists that the spectating public prefers not to ponder these difficulties. During Clemens' appearance last week at the Houston Astros' spring training camp, fans shouted at reporters stalking Clemens to "Leave him alone" and groused, "You're ruining it for the fans."
Will Leitch, editor of the enormously popular sports Web site Deadspin.com, began his new book, "God Save the Fan," with the chapter titled, "Please God, No, Not Another Essay About Steroids." He argued that fans don't care whether players ingest illegal chemicals; only that their team wins. "Being a sports fan," Leitch wrote, "mostly involves blissful ignorance of the outside world, and that is just fine [his italics]. That is, after all, why we watch sports in the first place."
When the story broke last September of Patriots coach Bill Belichick's nefarious video work, Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, wrote in Time Magazine that Belichick would "make an excellent fan" precisely because Belichick "doesn't care about being fair to the other team; he doesn't even real.ly care about his own players. He just wants to win."
Could it be, then, that by voicing a preference to just get on with the games (and win them), the spectating public has gotten itself into this mess by signaling players, owners and commissioners that rules and federal law need not stand in the way of all-out competition -- thereby enabling these doping cat burglars?
"I don't believe that's the dominant message from people who admire sports," said ethicist Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, whose resume includes past efforts fighting performance-enhancing drugs. "And, even if it is a significant number, they haven't thought through the consequences that, ultimately, sports will be dominated by maximum performance by whatever means at whatever costs.
"Then it will become exhibition. Circus. That's not sports."
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