Sport Ethics: Resilience

Athletic competition grinds down everyone. Athletes lose and fail constantly. In baseball the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time, in basketball fine shooters miss half the time. Developing and elite athletes make mistakes, lose and fail often. The consistency of failure discourages and weeds out many would be athletes, but the ones that stick it out learn from their errors.  I believe that successful athletes and teams master a fundamental virtue of professional success—resilience.

Resilience is a foundation of successful individuals and organizations. It presents itself in two related ways. 

The first begins with a baseline of performance. A person or organization performs at a particular level, hopefully high. This performance grows from the unfolding of the commitment, skills, coordination, knowledge and practice in a competitive environment. This level of performance is earned and critical to the individual or group's success. The baseline of achievement represents one way to measure resilience.

Resilience emerges and is tested in a particular environment with a particular group of people. A group or person can be performing at this baseline and then confront  misfortune or  shocks. These impacts hit the person or team and throw them off. The impacts can be internal, injuries, or external, new challenges, and threaten the integrity of the performance. A person or team can fall apart quickly when facing these hazards. Resiliency helps the person or team return to its baseline level after staggering from a difficulty. They "bounce back." This form of resilience depends upon keeping intact the integrity of purpose and performance under new and challenging tests.

The second aspect of resilience involves adapting and changing while keeping integrity of purpose intact. This response transcends just recovering from a blow to return to the baseline. Here the person or team  don't just bounce back; they change and thrive through the challenges. These adaptations empower the person or team to increase their performance and get better in response to distress or turmoil. This suggests that integrity of purpose itself can grow in light of new knowledge and challenges so that direction and performance adapt but remain intact to purpose.

Resilience is critical to success because all individuals and teams fail, make mistakes or face traumas that can undermine their confidence and performance. Everyone faces surprises and resilience undergirds response to surprise. If not handled, the trauma of misfortune or surprise can undermine their emotional, cognitive and relational performance.

During a competition or season of competing, shocks and surprises will occur. External shocks involve changing the environment of competition. New owners, new coaches, new talent can reenergize competitors who suddenly start to win. New tactics, techniques or strategies can throw off individuals and teams stymieing their ability to succeed. This changed environment challenges the competitive equilibrium of the person or team. These changes can induce shock, surprise or paralysis. 

The shocks need not just be external. Internal trauma requires just as much resilience. An athlete may fail or not perform up to expectations. Personal misfortune can undermine confidence or slowing physical skills can lead to sudden and unexpected declines in performance. Players might fail, be traded, or benched which erodes well choreographed relations. Injuries take away critical actors and skills, and new persons  suddenly appear and have to be integrated into a cohesive pattern of emotional and cognitive responses. All these throw off the internal equilibrium or coordination that enabled the team to perform at a high level. 

Whatever the cause, the performing baseline can no longer be achieved and is often no longer sufficient. To find success requires that individuals on the teams create a new balance among relations and skills and achieve new coordination and commitment. They need to reassemble resources to restore integrity of purpose and performance. 

This demand to restore integrity of purpose and performance under stress suggests critical dimensions of resilience lie in imagination and learning. Resilient individuals and organizations can see new possibilities and adapt beyond simply replicating what no longer works. 

Resilient individuals and teams have to be able to absorb the consequences of the changes, the losses or defeats, without falling apart emotionally, cognitively or relationally. Failure, trauma, assault generate chaos and confusion out of which the individual and team generate resources to restore relations and performance. 

The counterpoint of resilience lies in brittle or fragile individuals or groups. The person or group may feel robust and successful. These persons or teams may be brilliant performers when things are going well. They succeed within a definite scope and set environment, but when faced with sudden changes that upset established patterns, they struggle. The point of being fragile or brittle is that stress breaks them. Individuals or organizations do not recover when misfortune hits them. 

Brittle or fragile individuals or teams collapse. Facing sudden changes or new challenges the emotional, cognitive and relational balance of individuals gets skewed; they cannot bring the focused attention and relational coherence to bear under the stress of competition and the new experiences.

Under stress relations  can explode with recrimination and anger when members turn on each other. Individuals turn on themselves and cannot grapple out of their slumps. They might also implode into a silent spiral of panic and despair where players and coaches keep trying harder and harder patterns that replicate and reinforce the failed approaches and do not adapt to the new internal or external circumstance. Sometimes, the resilient action may involve simply dismantling a team that has fallen apart, and beginning the process of rebuilding.  

More than a few superb athletes or professionals remain startlingly brittle when they begin to struggle. They have been so successful so long and are so used to success, that they have not developed the emotional or cognitive capacity to accept the breakdown, adapt and work through it in ways that permit them to succeed again. The key here for individuals and teams lies in not seeing integrity as a hard and unchanging core, but understanding that integrity builds outward from purpose and outward manifestations of performance can change but be consistent with inner purpose and integrity. This often means individuals must change  aspects of their style or approach. Often trades of individuals who thrived in one ecosystem of support or competition will result in degraded performance because the athlete no longer possesses the support system that sustained them. What looked like individual accomplishment had been sustained by team and culture.

The first aspect of resilience involves the ability to absorb without disintegration. The second requires the team or individual to adapt and grow from changes. This adaptation under press of competition really defines true competitive  resilience. Simply not disintegrating does not suffice. If an individual just continues to absorb punches and continues to fail; they might be resilient, but only in a limited way. At the core this requires individuals keep their attention and focus under control even when things go badly. This permits people to improvise, test and adapt under pressure.

Real resilience means individuals and teams learn from their failures and mistakes. This requires emotional and cognitive suppleness and abiding confidence. Resilient individuals or teams do not cannibalize their emotions with self-doubt or recrimination, but get down to business of analyzing what is not working, how it can be fixed. Such an approach depends upon both self-mastery and forms of team and self-leadership.

Resilient individuals and organizations keep their attention and  ask critical questions facing these challenges:

1. What has changed? 
2. How can I identify how those changes have impacted my style and performance? 
3. How can I change my approach, training, tactics or strategy to respond to the new challenges of the environment? 
4. How can I adapt my internal game and skills to adapt to new teammates? 
5. What does the team need to do in terms of its commitment, training and roles to achieve the level of performance we lost and need to regain?

These questions grow from attention to common efforts as well as individual efforts. They shape reflection and improvisation and testing to find what works under the new conditions.

Modern professional and college sports entail incessant and often chaotic environmental changes. Free agency, trades and high injury rates lead to endless in season and game adaptations for teams. Individuals and teams have to reinvent themselves each year and sometimes several times during a season. Each year new classes arrive on college campus, old ones graduate and players now leave early. At the same time transfers and injuries make rosters much less stable. Successful teams and individuals must develop resilience.

In his book Eleven Rings Phil Jackson illustrates how teams can develop resilience and success in different ways. His early Chicago Bull teams won on the basis of a strong core of six or seven players who played together and grew into a remarkable “tribe” that played with trust, joy and skill. His later Los Angeles Laker teams built far more heavily around two players and a rotating caste of role players who came through the team. Both approaches worked but both required constant adaptation by the coach and the team as they had to work through the ups and downs and shocks of games and seasons. Jackson explains how the more resilient teams built upon a deeper set of relations and purpose that bonded the team members together. He also emphasized that resilient teams possessed  a wide range of experience and possessed several focal points of leadership who can step up and help teams reorganize and regain coherence. 

Organizations dependent upon just one star or leader are far more vulnerable to shocks, just like companies. 

This resilience grows into a cornerstone of successful professional and institutional careers in a chaotic world. Any learning process should build the capacity for resilience because growing and learning depends upon making errors, understanding why the mistake and then correcting the error, achieving success and moving forward. Ideally persons who learn in this process should develop an emotional and cognitive capacity to deal with failure and mistakes they make. Well played athletics  achieves this in a very powerful and sustainable way.

Student Athletics as Moral Endeavor II

Part II

The first promise singles out the college’s commitment to the student. This promise takes on special urgency because often the student may only be 16 to 18 when they make the commitment. When the student athlete is the first person in their family to go to college, the college’s promise, made by the coach, to get them an education and not just a chance to play sports or become a professional athlete takes on a unique and powerful moral imperative.

The university’s obligation is doubly important because if the student athlete does not leave with a credible degree, while they will have had a marvelous four years doing what they love, but at the age of 22, their athletic career will be over and their adult life will begin. The college promises more than learning athletics, it promises learning what skills the college can offer to prepare for adult life.

If the university does not meet this promise, then the university simply exploits the passion and promise of the student athletes. In this the commentators are correct, the university must provide strong academic support for the student athletes to succeed on this onerous path.

We need to remember that colleges make these promises to any student they accept. In the case of student athletes the college requires them to compete as a condition of acceptance. The college can provide this support through regular college programs or athletic specific programs, but the school has this obligation. The college’s promise requires the university to provide several critical dimensions of support.

1)                    Coaching and personnel for training and medical care to support athletic development and achievement.

2)                   Academic and personal support to learn in the academic context and develop a personal identity beyond being an athlete.

3)                   College support requires multiple levels of resources:

1)   Five years of support to graduate plus strong summer school support. Huge numbers of regular college students now take 5-6 years to graduate. The sheer time and energy demands on college athletes means the student athletes need the extra time and summer support to have a good chance to graduate.

2)   Personnel to work with the student to ensure that he or she understands the complicated NCAA graduation progress requirements. This advice moves the student on a trajectory towards graduation but also keeps them eligible. To be honest in the early years of college, many student athletes identify primarily as athletes and getting them to study will be driven as much by their desire to stay eligible as to develop as an academic student.

3)    Help for students to navigate the tensions of taking exams and getting assignments in and working with professors when athletes must travel as part of their scholarship obligations. More than a few professors resent athletic travel interference with classroom academics, and student athletes need academic support needs to bridge the tensions.

4)  Tutoring and study tables will help students stay up with academics while spending 30-40 hours a week on athletics. Learning academically and athletically can be harsh and hard. The reality is most student athletes, even the best students, struggle during the first two years of college trying to balance this. Honestly very few freshmen, period, are truly ready for the academic demands of college life. This support bridges the critical first two years.

5)    This academic support is absolutely necessary when dealing with the athletes recruited from disadvantages backgrounds. Often student athletes from wretched urban or rural school systems need tutorial support and academic incentives to recover and stay on track as they struggle to catch up to the skills levels needed to be a self sustaining college student. Without this compensatory support at the beginning, disadvantaged student athletes will fail.

Many colleges fail student athletes at this academic nexus. College athletics becomes exploitation if schools do not support academic learning along with the athletic learning. Especially at the second level of division 1 and division 2, athletes do not get the academic support they need during the first two years. The NCAA and conferences are fighting to and must continue to push and incentivize colleges to provide academic support to address the reality of student life.

You see this failure manifest when the NCAA votes down regulations that would provide more academic and financial support for student athletes. The class based votes of the NCAA where mid-majors and lower level D1 schools vote against paying true cost of attendance or against academic reforms to avoid the costs demonstrates this moral failure.

Many NCAA officials believe that if schools are going to enjoy the benefits of intercollegiate athletics and exposure, especially those that involve recruiting underserved minority students, schools have the moral obligation to invest in the academic support required by the promise to provide the resource support for persons to flourish as students and athletes.

The pressure on this issue must never falter. Schools will funnel new resources into salaries and facilities, but it must also go to academic support. Conferences should be pushing this as a condition of membership. One of the real benefits of the new penalties for low graduation rates is that it forces schools to either recruit better prepared students or invest in better academic support for students.

In the end, however, the reality of the success or failure of the enterprise rests with the young man or woman who make the promise and face their possibilities as students of athletics, academics and life.

Student Athletics as a Moral Endeavor I & II

Student Athletics as a Moral Endeavor

I remain an idealist about the reality of being a student athlete, a chastened idealist, but still committed to the ideal. The ideal of being a student athlete should have moral power and place demands on us. I believe the moral standing grows from three promises that the athlete and the university make to each other. I will discuss them in detail and their implications for both the university and the student athlete.

These promises make the education of a student athlete a moral endeavor that flows from the promises. Here are the three promises that anchor student athlete into the moral life of the university and being a student.

•  The university promises the student athlete to provide the support and resources to grow to his or her highest potential as a student of academics and athletics.
• The student promises to the university to bring his or her highest commitment, talent and energy to develop their potential as a student both academically and athletically.
• The student promises to him or herself and often their God that she or he will be true to their talent and future and use the time to mature into the best person they can become.

These promises link being a student with both academics and athletics. Students are learners, and they learn and master both academic and athletic domains.

My friend Ed Taylor the Vice Provost & Dean of Academic Affairs at University of Washington insists that education is a moral endeavor. Its morality arises from the mutual commitment by student and teacher to help the student grow into his or her potential. This involves not just mastering technical skills to survive and achieve in a job or sport. The education should develop personal attributes to help a person succeed in life. The student can grow into a person of character, belief and commitment.

I believe Ed is correct, and that the moral nature of education means that the above promises should hold true for any “student” at an educational institution. The three promises reinforce two issues that apply to education and to intercollegiate sports.

§  First, accepting a student means that the college has assessed that the accepted student can succeed.

§  Second, the institution will provide the resources and support for any accepted student to succeed.

In American higher education as many of one third of students may come in with deficits in writing or math skills. Modern universities provide numerous introductory or remedial writing and math classes to bridge the student’s needs in this area. Universities also provide counseling, health services and guidance to support career and course planning.

The other side of this moral equation addresses the responsibility of the student. Professors and colleges cannot force a student to learn. A college should provide support, teaching, knowledge and opportunity. In the end, however, the student must study for class, take advantage of counseling resources, or visit with the professor or TA. The individual student must read the books, take the time to memorize or think hard about the assignments—students make the decision to forgo other opportunities whether drinking, partying or working to master knowledge and skills offered by the university.

Many students work today to go to college and balance working 20-30 hours a week with learning in classroom. Numerous students find their true passions in extra-curricular activities, service learning or internships where they invest time energy to flourish. At its best class teaching and experiential learning reinforce each other.

College education will not stick and achievement will not occur without effort and attention by the individual student.

The second promise of the student locks this in. Students promise to the institution to bring their attention and effort to work, grow and learn. Any teacher will tell you the worst experience in teaching happens when a teacher faces a classroom where no one wants to be there and no one cares about learning what the class offers.

The second promise implies the success of a student depends upon the inner dialogue students have with themselves about what they desire to achieve, whom they aspire to become and what their conscience and God ask of them.

Now let’s go back to the moral world of the student athlete. I am well aware that the cynics and college-educated ex-student athlete TV commentators make careers out of bashing the NCAA. Usually they focus exclusively upon the less than .o5 percent of the 450,000 student athletes who might move on to 3.6 year average careers in professional sports. Leaving these ultra elite revenue sport students aside for this discussion, we need to remember that being a student athlete, period, is hard. All student athletes tread a hard road.

Student athletes gain access to colleges, often ones they might not get into on academic or experience merit, by virtue of their athletic skill. They are expected as a condition of admission to compete on behalf of a university and contribute to the university’s team athletic success. This involves at least 25-40 hours a week devoted to practice, film watching, conditioning, travel, medical work and actual competition.

The amount of work spent on athletic achievement goes up as the division rises. This is partially due to elite status but also connected to the fact that Division 1 & 2 offer scholarships, and student athletes feel a strong moral obligation to devote that time. It also reflects the reality that most student athletes are pursuing a passion. They are competing in activities they love and have mastered. The athletes want to excel and play and for 99.5%, college is the last chance they will have to play.

The experience of achieving in an activity a person is committed to and excels at is rare and exceptional for any human beings. Harvey Perlman the Chancellor of Nebraska-Lincoln often muses that he wishes more students had the chance to be as passionate about their college activities as student athletes.

Being a student of academics and athletics at the same time takes immense effort, discipline and time management by student athletes. Student athletes know this, and all the graduation surveys reflect learning time management and self-discipline as two of the major attributes and accomplishments of student athletes. It is exhausting but these attributes undergird the student athlete’s promise:

1)        these attributes grow from the dedication to study and learn their craft as athletes and contribute to their university and team and individual desire to achieve.

2)        this self-discipline and time management enables them to study and learn in class, study homework and hand in assignments and take exams despite the time they devote to athletics.

This life and dedication of time and attention reveals the strength and importance of the two promises that student athletes make to their team/school but also to themselves and their God.  

Part II will look more closely at the first promise, the one the college makes to the student athlete.

______________________________

The first promise singles out the college’s commitment to the student. This promise takes on special urgency because often the student may only be 16 to 18 when they make the commitment. When the student athlete is the first person in their family to go to college, the college’s promise, made by the coach, to get them an education and not just a chance to play sports or become a professional athlete takes on a unique and powerful moral imperative.

The university’s obligation is doubly important because if the student athlete does not leave with a credible degree, while they will have had a marvelous four years doing what they love, but at the age of 22, their athletic career will be over and their adult life will begin. The college promises more than learning athletics, it promises learning what skills the college can offer to prepare for adult life.

If the university does not meet this promise, then the university simply exploits the passion and promise of the student athletes. In this the commentators are correct, the university must provide strong academic support for the student athletes to succeed on this onerous path.

We need to remember that colleges make these promises to any student they accept. In the case of student athletes the college requires them to compete as a condition of acceptance. The college can provide this support through regular college programs or athletic specific programs, but the school has this obligation. The college’s promise requires the university to provide several critical dimensions of support.

1)                    Coaching and personnel for training and medical care to support athletic development and achievement.

2)                   Academic and personal support to learn in the academic context and develop a personal identity beyond being an athlete.

3)                   College support requires multiple levels of resources:

1)   Five years of support to graduate plus strong summer school support. Huge numbers of regular college students now take 5-6 years to graduate. The sheer time and energy demands on college athletes means the student athletes need the extra time and summer support to have a good chance to graduate.

2)   Personnel to work with the student to ensure that he or she understands the complicated NCAA graduation progress requirements. This advice moves the student on a trajectory towards graduation but also keeps them eligible. To be honest in the early years of college, many student athletes identify primarily as athletes and getting them to study will be driven as much by their desire to stay eligible as to develop as an academic student.

3)    Help for students to navigate the tensions of taking exams and getting assignments in and working with professors when athletes must travel as part of their scholarship obligations. More than a few professors resent athletic travel interference with classroom academics, and student athletes need academic support needs to bridge the tensions.

4)  Tutoring and study tables will help students stay up with academics while spending 30-40 hours a week on athletics. Learning academically and athletically can be harsh and hard. The reality is most student athletes, even the best students, struggle during the first two years of college trying to balance this. Honestly very few freshmen, period, are truly ready for the academic demands of college life. This support bridges the critical first two years.

5)    This academic support is absolutely necessary when dealing with the athletes recruited from disadvantages backgrounds. Often student athletes from wretched urban or rural school systems need tutorial support and academic incentives to recover and stay on track as they struggle to catch up to the skills levels needed to be a self sustaining college student. Without this compensatory support at the beginning, disadvantaged student athletes will fail.

Many colleges fail student athletes at this academic nexus. College athletics becomes exploitation if schools do not support academic learning along with the athletic learning. Especially at the second level of division 1 and division 2, athletes do not get the academic support they need during the first two years. The NCAA and conferences are fighting to and must continue to push and incentivize colleges to provide academic support to address the reality of student life.

You see this failure manifest when the NCAA votes down regulations that would provide more academic and financial support for student athletes. The class based votes of the NCAA where mid-majors and lower level D1 schools vote against paying true cost of attendance or against academic reforms to avoid the costs demonstrates this moral failure.

Many NCAA officials believe that if schools are going to enjoy the benefits of intercollegiate athletics and exposure, especially those that involve recruiting underserved minority students, schools have the moral obligation to invest in the academic support required by the promise to provide the resource support for persons to flourish as students and athletes.

The pressure on this issue must never falter. Schools will funnel new resources into salaries and facilities, but it must also go to academic support. Conferences should be pushing this as a condition of membership. One of the real benefits of the new penalties for low graduation rates is that it forces schools to either recruit better prepared students or invest in better academic support for students.

In the end, however, the reality of the success or failure of the enterprise rests with the young man or woman who make the promise and face their possibilities as students of athletics, academics and life.

Sports Ethics: The Fragility of Athletes

Just a normal jump tangle going for a rebound in a hard fought close game. A Texas A&M player  Derrick Roland went up, lost the rebound to Washington's Quincy Pondexter. Pondexter and the game raced down the floor, but Roland came down wrong. Pondexter recounted, "I heard a loud slap, like his hand hit the floot, but that was the bone break. It's one of the nastiest things I've ever seen in my life."

I watched the game and along with the  Texas A&M bench could hear the break. Two breaks. The bone stuck out of his leg. Doctors and trainors rushed to his side. The 10,000 boisterous fans fell silent for ten minutes. Roland was rushed to Harbourview trauma center where he had major surgery. The moment silenced the crowd and reminded us all of how fragile and dangerous athletic competition can be.

This weekend the magnificent running back at South Carolina Marcus Lattimore was bursting through the line when two  Tennessee players tackled him with perfectly legal and tough hits . His body twisted and his leg twisted in inhuman ways until it flopped out in an unnatural angle. Tennessee players walked out to stand with him and honor him in his injury. Now he lies in a hospital with his season and possibly his career over. I could go on adding on the innumerable athletes in sport after sport whom have seen their game an careers snatched away by one misstep.

One fall. One slip. One tear. One break.One hit. Every athlete lives with the possibility of his or her sports life ending in a micro-second. Everything they have worked for and valued in themselves can be taken away without a moment's notice, usually by accident or chance.

This hovering fragility lies deep inside the minds of every athlete. It infuses the drive for athletic excellence and performance.

Every athlete is incredibly vulnerable to physical injury. The excellence of athletics builds upon the health of the body. All the character and commitment and mastery depend a sound body. Injuries can come from contact with another athlete or from a mistake or bad luck in execution or a mistake in practice; it lurks everywhere. One wrong cut, an ACL blows; one trip, an ankle goes; one wrong swing, a shoulder locks; one missed twist, a knee tears, a shoulder shreds. One greatness of athletic accomplishment lies in how humans can take this frail but resilient mortal coil and transform it into admirable feats of mastery and discipline. How they can overcome physical limitations and pain to achieve these goals.

This physical foundation can collapse in a mini-second. Every elite athlete has struggled through the pain and despair of injury. All athletes are aware of their own physical mortality, even as it means little to them. To a young athlete in superb shape, immortality seems more the norm than mortality, but it shadows them all.

This vulnerability can tear away the dream, path or livelihood in a second. This ever present vulnerability creates a peculiar fragility that generates a compelling  urgency to compete in game time. All  athletes live with the endless  shadow of injury and bodily expiration date hang over them. 

Most athletes ignore it; can't even acknowledge it. When they face injury, they grapple with it, rehab and overcome it. They learn to view their bodies as allies but also dimensions to be mastered, cared for and feared. If they are good they read the bodies well and carefully. But bodies can betray them. Time betrays bodies, but life, accident, one false move or awful collision and bodies can fail.

The quickness with which it can all disappear raises the intensity of the experience of play. The sheer joy of playing, the satisfaction of mastery, the cordial fun of hanging with team and friends, all reinforce and make athletics worth while. They provide motive, reward and renewal for athletes.

This extreme vulnerability infuses the games with the sense of urgency and intensity. Most athletes know that they live on borrowed time. Their own bodies and skills will break down soon enough. Their own skills will fade or be surpassed by the unrelenting competition of each new generation of younger athletes pushing them to get better and pushing to replace them. All this should remind athletes of the gift and privilege of competing.

The fragility of injury just amplifies this urgency and intensity. Few of us perform jobs whose very structure can take the job away from us. Few of us face the unrelenting competition and demands of each day or performance. Dancers and very high risk workers know the same tradeoff and intensity. Athletes who don't get this, fail to develop or flourish. Athletes who do get it can flame out or like a firefighter or dancer learns to meld performance and intensity and just "do my job."

This explains the hunger and drive of athletes as well as the strained morality of players who seek to play through pain or hide their injuries to get to the field, to compete. For some it may be about money in the rarified pro ranks, but for the vast vast majority, intense play challenges themselves, their bodies, their skills and time. Time and injury shadow every moment saturating athletic action with potential depth and energy. This makes the game worth playing.

Athletes are humans and know they possess  limited tim. They want to draw every ounce of satisfaction from the time they have. They want to play and compete. An injury can also lead to a journey of painful recovery, rehabilitation and hopefully self discovery. When an athlete's achievement is stripped from them with injury, they are challenged to discover the depth of their humanity, not just their identity as an athlete.

Athletes live at an edge of loss and accomplishment that makes competing an embodiment of the existential moment of existence. The very exhilaration of that edge, that danger helps them endure the risk for the reward of play.

Then again, all life is vulnerable and saturated with the possibility of loss. As is often the case, sports simply etches large and clear the reality that underlies all our lives.