Athletic Development: Collegiate Model vs. Nationalism or Apprenticeships

The beginning of the college sports season is a good moment to think about college sports in a broader framework. In particular hows it exists as a model of development that competes with two alternatives--nationalist & apprenticeship.

Achieving athletic excellence takes years of commitment and is a high risk career aspiration. I want to examine three social models that have developed to further individuals on the path of becoming elite athletes. These development models emerged over time and have morphed often creating hybrids. For this discussion, I will call them the nationalist, apprenticeship and collegiate models. China, Europe and the United States epitomize them.

I want to focus on the life outcomes for the individual who sets out on these development paths. I will contend that the American model with its emphasis upon college as a final or intermediate stop for many aspiring athletes leaves the individual with much brighter long-term life prospects than an apprentice or nationalist based recruiting and training model.

A couple points to remember:

1)   The odds against succeeding as an elite athlete are very high—maybe 60,000 to 1 against a 15 year old athlete becoming a professional in the United States.

2)   Achieving elite status takes immense investment not just from the athlete but from other sources in training, infrastructure, coaching and arenas of play.

3)   Most aspiring athletes fail and are ejected from or quit the developmental systems. While sports have different peaking ages especially in the early development sports such as diving or gymnastics, the vast majority of aspirant athletes are “retired” by age 23.

4)  Athletic development begins with self-selection usually by parents + children, but quickly links to networks of scouting, recruiting and investing to push athletes along.

Athletics beckons folks as a domain of fun, achievement and reward. In some societies, it offers jackpot returns as professional players or as elite national team players in the Olympics and World Championships. The jackpots exist in terms of money from team salaries or sponsorships either as a professional or as a national or independent player. Successful elite athletes can earn glory and make good livings, become rich and be celebrities, but we need to remember  these odds resemble those of a lottery.

Nationalist

The easiest systems to identify are the nationalist systems that categorize sport as an extension of national identity and a tool of soft power. The Olympics epitomize this. The classic examples are  Germany or China’s huge investments in 1936 and 2008 Olympics to create center stages for states to deploy sports to strategically enhance their prestige. Olympic medal wars that media avidly followed during the cold war Olympics transformed into surrogates for claims of national superiority. 

The ultimate example of states deploying sports as a national prestige enterprise still remains East Germany. It forged a thirty-year athletic factory that produced numerous Olympic and World championships far beyond what their wealth or population could suggest. The state sponsored nation wide athletic clubs and recruited promising athletes at an early age. They segregated these young athletes into schools with intense training regimes augmented with rigorous systems of performance enhancing drugs. This resulted in Valkyrie women who dominated swimming and track and field for twenty years. It was followed by forty years of illness and side-effects to the men and women subjected to the science experiments and routines of drug usage.

 

In the nationalist model states scour the society and sponsor state sports clubs, teams and schools from age five and six. The modern Chinese model of juguo tizhi or "whole-nation sports system" represents the most comprehensive modern variation.  Sports authorities scout and recruit the best young athletes. The state then invests heavily in them usually from as early as age 6 and on. Usually the athletes leave their parents and go to separate schools where the children focus upon sports and may get the equivalent of a low-level high school education.

The states ruthlessly cull athletes who do not measure up. This results in tracking and sometimes moving recruited athletes off to physical education programs or simply out of the program. The athletes are segregated from society, trained as athletes and barely as students and most end up on the streets with little real education or life possibilities.

The stars are feted and pushed relentlessly as well as culled if they do not succeed. The celebrity and status come at the cost of significant political constraints upon conformity for the nationalist athletic has to represent the ideals of the country. Generations of athletes who have escaped national systems can understand the modern travels of China's Li Na who resents how she was forced to play tennis as a way to escape and now has left the system only to find herself covered, praised and excoriated for every deviation from the government's norms. Even then many world champions or Olympic competitors end up retired by age 24 with no education or skills to speak of. Often they fade back into the woodwork with low life chances unless picked up to help train the next generation.

Apprenticeship

The apprentice model starts like a free market model. No central mechanism controls or invests in the athletes. Individual kid’s talent and desire as well as parental influence pave the sports route. Parents matter a lot when they invest in and push the children.

Many kids find the sports on the street or at local clubs or schools. They end up playing in diverse social places and migrate slowly into local clubs. The entry-level costs are very low, and lots of kids and families partake here. The market competition gradually weeds out kids and parents in three ways. First, the ones who do not develop quickly end up playing in recreational leagues that are fun and enjoyable but have no future paths. Second, some will get advantages because parents will invest more time and resources in them getting them training and performance that will be noticed. Third, a group of promising kids will be seen by scouts or teachers and join a network that has some resources, teachers and the possibility of a path up and out through sports.

In apprentice systems that dominate European sports especially soccer, clubs scout extensively and recruit young players into their feeder clubs and then leagues. These young players become very young professionals by American standards getting food, lodging travel and training and playing time plus stipend by age 14-17.

Athletes move up in the system through different degrees of play and coaching. A severe culling can occur here as competition increases. In many areas, international players from Africa, Latin America and the United States end up playing in the systems. The competition gets very intense among very young professionals who parse out to many different levels of professional teams and leagues. While soccer typifies the model it is the substructure of most team sports such as volleyball or crew or basketball.

The apprentice system gives very little weight to non-sport or formal education. Because so many players come from the working class or below, few have families that push formal education. Some clubs make erstwhile efforts to encourage education, but once on the road and training for elite status, formal education falls by the wayside.

This has the advantage of culling talent earlier and creating immense number of hours and expertise earlier. Apprentice systems produce higher quality younger players, but trade off formal education and long term life changes. When players leave or are left by the apprentice system or clubs, they have no real formal education and no occupational training except their sport. You can see this in the USA national soccer team coach Jurgen Klinsmann’s announced preference for recruiting young Americans raised and trained in Germany rather than those who actually go to college.

The cast offs of the system have few real career options or training for higher education and end up at 22 ill prepared to advance. The results are large numbers of failed apprentices with few life possibilities or skills beyond finding some place in the existing sports system. The professionals in such systems can have longer careers because of the higher number and gradation of leagues. So a class of travelled second level elite players inhabit the worlds of international apprentice based soccer but also basketball, volleyball, cricket and similar sports sustained by apprentices and sponsored European corporate teams or professional teams. But the vast majority of ambitious athletes who commit to the system end up retired early without formal education and limited life possibilities.

Collegiate

Here the often-maligned American collegiate system can shine. Most American elite athletes channel through higher education. Young athletes in most sports aspire to college scholarships rather than going professional. Even those seeking to be professionals usually go through college to get there.

This collegiate model possesses a distinct advantage for the athletes. The athletes filter into different divisions of elite play, but still get to compete in the sport they love. They find appropriate levels of competition and experience the joys, challenges, problems and dimensions of intense athletic competition but also college education. They can graduate with a higher education degree that opens up a much higher level of work paths and higher income.

The American system can accommodate strong Olympic and national team feeders. In most sports the ultra-elite of American college athletes can go on to be on national or Olympic teams or take time off to compete. In addition, many sports such as gymnastics, swimming or diving and track and field and end up offering scholarships to players after their Olympic competition possibilities have peaked. 

At the same time wannabe Olympians or professionals need not go this route. Large numbers of swimmers, skiers, gymnasts, tennis or golf players take independent parent or sponsor financed tracks to compete and forgo college. This happens exclusively in many winter sports such as various forms of skiing and X sports.  Many top golf and tennis or soccer players never end up in college and bypass directly for professional leagues at a very early age. Similarly the major-league baseball systems provides a European club style developmental track for high school graduates, but it ensures they got through high school first.

There are more rational ways to get to colleges. But given a choice, I would rather have an aspiring athlete aiming for a college scholarship rather than aiming to enter a professional apprentice track at age 14. At college they have the chance to develop as athletics but also develop as persons and acquire deeper social and intellectual capital. This makes it makes it a much richer and more defensible developmental approach for athletes.  The college approach has profound strengths for the development of the individual person given the low probability of any elite athlete of making a career out of it. 

International student athletes who come to the United States provide some insights. I remember one international rower telling me, “I can come here and perfect my rowing and get a degree in accounting. At home I would never get a chance to go to school given my national team commitments.”  Another mentioned, “at home I had a choice. Play and take the chances to become a professional or quit and go to school, if I could afford it. I came here, played for five years, got a good degree and realized I would never be a pro.”

Meeting and working with international athletes and students changed my view of the American system with its focus on helping athletes become students; its capacity for people to compete at multiple level; and the outcome of elite athlete aspirants who end up with degrees and life chances beyond their sports.

To me as an educator the real success and advantage of the American college athletics systems lies in the outcomes for the person. When it works, and it works well the vast majority of the times, 90,000 athletes each year graduate with college degrees and have experienced four years of elite play at their appropriate levels; have had the chance to gain an education and mature with peers and in the classroom; have learned to carry themselves as a person and student as well as an athlete. Their life chances and callings remain far more open and challenging than the young athletes who are retired by age 23 in the nationalist or apprentice based systems.

Sports Ethics: Being Replaceable

“Everyone is replaceable.” This fundamental truth underlies modern organizational life. When we leave, another will do our job, differently, but our job will get done. If I get sick and cannot teach my class, another professor will take my place. If my doctor cannot show up for a surgery, another will perform it. Someone on an assembly line gets fired or sick and another trained and competent person will step in. Modern life cannot afford indispensible people.

A sport engraves this truth for all. A player goes down in a game and another one trots onto the field and takes his or her place. Someone is having a bad game and the coach yanks them and a substitute takes his or her place Some times the replacement does worse, sometimes better, often they perform competently; they fill in. Sometimes they excel and replace you having done their apprenticeship and take advantage of the opportunity.

The other day one of our local “sports radio” gurus opined, “closers are like half backs now. They are simply replaceable, you can find them anywhere.” He described everyone on every sports field. Obviously superstars exist and gradations of excellence exist among athletes and in life. But the function can and must have backups and even superstars can be replaced when they are injured or fade.

Athletic competition highlights the replace ability that shadows all our professional lives. For me the modern baseball statistics such as VORP—value over replacement player—or WAR—wins above replacement--isolate this truth with singular clarity. The world of sabermetrics has constructed a model—the replacement value player. This model predicts the performance in vital offensive and presently measurable defensive skills. They can do this for the average team but also for the average position player especially pitchers.

The key to the statistic lies in the fact that aside from remarkably outliers whose skill sets are quanta above everyone else, most players hover around this statistical portrait, this mean of player. Even when they have “good years” they regress to this mean over their career.

Being average is not a death sentence, in fact it can guarantee a long career across a number of teams. It means you are the player included in blockbuster add-ons or one that involves two obscure names or a second level prospect for you. Consistent sports average performance locks in a strong predictive reliability that varies little for as long as a decade. It defines the reliable expert performance of a seasoned professional.

Remember to be average among the elite athletes of the world places the “average” player light years above the skill sets of all the other professionals who aspire but fail to succeed at the elite levels. Average defines superb technical skill and endurance.

In baseball a team of average players will win 82 games, not enough to win a championship, but not a disaster. Every team needs reliable average players or better yet a cluster or players who hover 2 or 3 runs or 1 or 2 wins above average to complement their superstars.

This statistical model reduces players like all of us in a capitalist system to profiles of productivity. It makes them and us faceless for the most part. Faces and personalities generally belong to the superstars or people having their day in the sun being on their peak performance years.

It also means that any player who falls below the average model loses both economic value and probably their career fairly fast. The economics of player compensation combined with the pipeline that rigorously culls players and forges high skill potential replacements mean that players who slip below the VORP line in any sport can soon be replaced by younger, lower cost and higher upside players.

Knowing you can be replaced haunts everyone one of us who derive self-worth from work. Athletics just makes it visible and clear to all of us what our real fate is.

It also reminds us that athletes must pull their own weight. They must be able to contribute. The harsh beauty of sport exposes people so brutally. It puts a spotlight on not contributing. Average may be barely good enough for a while, but the economics of younger players reaching average make it a career ender after awhile.

The insights of VORP and WAR are now spreading to all sports. Most general managers now understand the role of replacement value and the fungible nature of most players. They can now think far more intricately about trades and drafting since a collection of +2 and +3 players can lead to contenders without anyone noticing. You see the same mind set in modern American football’s attitude towards once revered running backs, nonguaranteed salaries and NBA’s nameless array of “role players”who  surround the stars.

Being replaceable not only reminds us of the cost of average, but the powerful aggregate worth of cumulative above average high performance. Success for most teams and organizations resides not in the superstars but in the depth of above average consistent performers who together produce reliable winning teams.

Why Sports Unions Succeed when others Fail I

The Paradox of Modern Sports Union Success

Unions are dying in the United States. Less than 8 percent of the private sector work force is unionized. So why do unions flourish so successfully in professional sports?

Well it is not because the owners like them. Both professional football and basketball owners are trying to destroy their unions with lockouts. Both will fail, and the owners know it even as the football lockout enters its fourth month and will be resolved soon.

The owners hate the unions; I mean they hate the unions. Many of the owners are self-made wealthy using the teams as forms of ego gratification or extensions of their own Ayn Rand self images as self-made individualists. They will do anything and have tried everything including collusion to destroy the unions, but they fail. Why?

I think the reasons sports unions succeed derive from the very unique shape of the labor market that makes it relatively immune to the global forces that undermine unions all over the world.

The global market enables employers to shift jobs to lower wage countries. Borders mean little, and even technical jobs can be outsources at will an connected via the internet. If owners don’t shift jobs abroad, they can always shift to the south or southwest where government war on unions will ensure lower wages, benefits and working conditions. The shape of the labor market in sports limits these options for owners.

Traditional unions depend upon their ability to organize workers and get workers to perceive that a common good can be achieved by negotiating wages and working conditions together. A common good gets disturbed across all union members. The gain is greater for all workers over the long run than if workers negotiated individually for their contracts. This is the key; if the union stays together, the long term benefits are huge, but if they fall apart, then the benefits fail them.

The benefits of a union revolve around guaranteed wages for work. But the combined power also generates benefits and work rules around safety, none of which individuals on their own could gain. Left on their own,  individual workers would end up with lower benefits, lower wages or job security and less safety over the life of the contract—this is exactly what has happened in the modern American private sector.

So why do sports unions work?

The first and more ironic point is that the owners actually gain an immense legal advantage from having unions to negotiate. This enables owners to get things like salary caps, entry salaries but above all transferrable contracts that can be traded within the league or cartel. The negotiated contract protects the owners and their cartel from potential anti-trust and restraint of trade challenges. The contract protects certain aspects of the game that permit some level playing field and the patterns of player investment and trades that the teams depend upon.

The professional unions move to decertify themselves removed this cover for the superstructure of the sports and their profitability. This enabled the union members to launch a series of law suites that would destroy the profit structure as well as the competitive balance of the leagues upon which the profitability depends. This is doubly important for basketball and football because both depend upon salary caps which could not be sustained without a strong union agreement.

So against their better judgment, the owners need and accept but hate the unions.

Part II will examine the exceptional form that unionization takes in professional sport to adapt principles of unions with the need for compensation for superstarts.