Sports Ethics: Focus on What you can Control—Yourself

Marcus Smart, an Oklahoma State All American was just suspended for three days after hitting fan who yelled an expletive at him in a game. His suspension will hurt his team badly and highlights an ever-present challenge in athletics and life--individuals have to focus upon what they can control-themselves. When they move beyond it like Marcus, they damage themselves and their team. Smart gets it in acknowledge his harm to his teammates and fans and does not duck the issue, “It’s something I’ll have to learn from, a lesson I’ll have to learn from. The consequences that are coming with it — I’m taking full responsibility. No fingers pointing — this is all upon me.”

Every competition produces a stream of stress, mistakes, accidents, and intentional and unintentional impacts, bad referee calls. The chaotic complexity of competition creates bad luck, good luck, and unanticipated and pathological consequences for even perfectly executed perfect execution. These endless challenges pound on the psychological integrity of athletes and professionals and make self-conscious self-mastery the ethical foundation of achievement.

Every young and old athlete has heard it from coaches and players a thousand times—focus on what you can control—yourself.

The moral bedlam of competition can lead athletes and professionals to become confused, angry, frustrated even lost. The confusion of competition can invite explosions and erratic behavior and deformed judgment all of which hurt the person and the person’s team. Good and successful professionals drive themselves to master skills and execute under pressure. This success depends upon developing self-mastery to control oneself. Good athletes and professionals cultivate a zone of control that integrates emotions, perception, mind, attitudes, body and intent.

Every successful athletes and professional faces this constant exhortation—control what you can control—yourself. It is the foundation upon which all other skills and the ability to succeed under stress and competition depend. It is also one of the hardest lessons for people to master; it also anchors personal responsibility of the athlete and professional.

The zone of control depends upon the athlete’s ability to master internal psychological control. Persons can educate their emotions. They can train themselves what to be angry about and what to ignore. They can channel intruding emotions into other actions or offset erupting emotions with prepared and integrated programs of integrated memory, emotions, perceptions and intention that enable them to counter program anger or frustration. Losing it is not preordained but a failure of internal self-mastery.

This means developing a form of full-bodied wisdom that lead the ancient Greeks to value sports so highly. One’s emotions become a form of pattern recognition that instantaneously recognize the rightness or wrongness of actions. They provide internal armor against loss of control and weakness of will by supporting disciplined intentional action under conditions that the emotional augments perception sees as appropriate. This pattern recognition embodies not just the knowledge of trained athletes and professionals but also the amalgamation of emotion and cognition.

This form of embodied wisdom and training takes time and effort. It requires constant self-effort by the young athlete encouraged by coaches and fellow teammates. Players working with coaches and fellow players can educate their emotions and train themselves about what to be angry about and how to channel that anger rather than either get angry over things they cannot control or let the anger control them and drive them to irrational or hurtful actions.

This self-mastery remains the key to building physical and emotional resilience in action. This resilience enables players to face failure and bad luck and intentional goading but rebound and continue forward. 

The emphasis upon controlling what you can control can focus inward--players cultivate their own deep values. A player can grow into a deeper commitment to their team and to winning and enduring rather than expressing their own individuality or paying back an slight. Self-control involves growing into an awareness of deep and abiding values and buttressing these values with the emotional coding to sustain them under stress.

Losing it is one of the great enemies of performance for any athlete or professional.

Young athletes often explode in frustration. It often is directed at themselves for failing to achieve their ideal outcome. But too often, especially with young male athletes, they explode at and blame referees, rancorous fans or opponents who showed them up, got in a hit or succeeded. They aim their anger and vexation to blame anyone but themselves.

Their past anger and acting out primes referees and other players to expect the worse. Players do not get the benefit of the doubt and will get called for fouls even if they did not commit them. Other teams target such players and goad them. They take cheap shots and talk trash and push and shove trying to goad the player into “losing it.” If the goading pulls a player of his or her game, this degrades his or her performance but also hurts the entire team.

This loss of control usually reflects a failure to take responsibility or remember the obligation to the team. The individual blames a failure on someone else. This often occurs in games when a foul is called and the player takes off on the referee. They yell and scream and get so caught up in blaming the referee that again their attention diffuses and they cannot collect themselves to be present and focused to what is going on. They play distracted and opponents take advantage of their distraction and lingering anger to provoke more distraction and anger. The same might occur when they are fouled or believe an opponent has fouled them or attempted to hurt them. 

Opponents take advantage of individuals who do not have self-mastery. A goaded player will get angry and yell and jaw and may even attempt to physically contact the opponent, which would simply elicit a foul against them. How many times have players who were hit gotten called for a foul for their retaliation while the initial “foul” is missed?

Losing control becomes a habit. People default to established patterns that reinforce future action. The longer an individual allows themselves to get angry and lose focus and act out, the more this becomes imbedded as a default action—they start to react that way out of habit and it takes conscious reflection and practice to break the habit. That habit can be exploited by opponents and distrusted by teammates and allies. Individuals excuse themselves as just being me or expressing myself or see it as an isolated incident when the reality grows into habitual responses that undermine their attention, discipline and expertise.

When a player loses self-control, she or he loses focus and s judgment. Their actions disrupt the scheme of their team, often draws penalties from referees. Angry and frustrated individuals try to do too much, free lance or seek revenge for a perceived slight.

The loss of control and focus can be contagious and infect other teammates. Fellow players are familiar with a player’s lack of responsibility and self-control. Referees are primed to look for them and penalize them. A player’s inability to stay focused and keep self-control throws off the fine tuned trust and reliance of the team. If fellow teammates expect someone to lose it, they will alter their behavior and undermine schemes because they do not trust the responsibility and maturity of a teammate.

Some players even internalize their own lack of self-control as a badge of honor. They prime themselves and become familiar with their own expected responses; sometimes making their own “explosiveness” a decoration rather than a sign of the selfish immaturity and selfishness. These actions reflect a form of egocentrism and ultra-individualism—individualism without responsibility.

The domain of self-control involves a person’s mind, perception, attitudes, emotions and body. Professional and sport excellence begins and ends with internal self-awareness and mastery. An individual must come to the moment of realization that “losing it” losing control, getting angry or blaming it on everybody else undermines effective performance and focus. This is the Archimedean point of sports ethics—the obligation to accept responsibility and control oneself. The individual learns to “let go” and get on with the game and their mission.

At the same time it requires the player to learn that they can educate their own emotions. The capacity to endure pain, the capacity to endure practice and loss and bounce back all require educating emotions to support intent and obligation to others. Players and professionals learn that emotions mark obligation but can be woven into sustained effort, endurance and resistance to mistakes and baiting. It takes emotional discipline and almost counter emotional constructs to deal with rancorous audiences, baiting players and mistakes or bad calls by referees.

The upside means that players can keep their focus upon the situational awareness around them. They do not get distracted and their focus and concentration do not stay anchored on the play before or anger at a referee or trying to make up for an unseen foul by the player earlier in the game. All of these diffuse concentration from being present to the situation before them. It distracts judgment and leads to slower decisions or decisions informed by ego driven needs rather than the requirements of the team and the play unfolding.  

The other upside means that a player then develops a reputation of self-control and focus. This reputation not only anchors performance by other team members but referees defer more to their actions—they can get the benefit of the doubt when they do slip because this is not the expected norm.

Players who internalize their ethics of self-control and focus upon what they can control—their own values, emotions, trained memories, trained perceptions and intent—model responsibility for themselves. It becomes self-reinforcing in life.

The player no longer externalizes their anger and frustration, but turns inward not in a destructive way but instructive way. He or she learns. This stance primes other teammates and models for other teammates how to go about their business. This control and learning drives them to get better. Individuals stop blaming others during the game and after the let go and focus upon getting better, improving their own self mastery, their own perception and pattern recognition through tape and their own technique through practice. Self-master leads to self-improvement and learning.

Remembering, “I can only control myself” depends upon self-aware responsibility. Like its opposite, it can be trained as a virtue and habit of response and action. This means retraining emotions to simply pause when the explosive adrenalin and cortisol unleash in the system.

This capacity to pause and conjure up counter emotions to offset the anger are critical to balance in the game At the same time the capacity to maintain a center of calm to understand that “I am losing it” and respond by reasserting control. This involves cognitive awareness and self-discipline to reign in anger but also pulling up alternative 

emotional/physical internal model to guide behavior. This alternative model resides in memory and practice and can become a practice and internalized response. The slow and steady extension of self-mastery to controlling emotions under stress permits individuals to intentionally channel self-expression rather than assume every action and emotions possesses legitimacy.

This habit of self-mastery helps professional address another reality of life--aging. In athletics the body reaches a peak in mid twenties to early thirties at the latest. As it ages capacity declines in certain areas and younger players with greater innate capacity enter as competitors. Players who understand what they can control adapt to their own physical changes. They do not give up, but develop technique to compensate or knowledge such as greater study of tendencies or even develop new approaches such as a pitcher developing new pitchers or strong armed quarterback learning to be more precise in midrange and short passes. 

Team cultures and coach modeling build up the social capital that supports young and old players achieving and sustaining self-mastery under stress and facing stress. Team leaders reinforce an ethic of keeping calm. Team members share a supportive ethics of not giving opponents an edge by handing them easy fouls or unfocused action. Teammates rush to each other to calm down and defuse anger and conflicts before they flare.

 Coaches model this and team leaders practice it. Too many coaches scream and yell and lose it on the sidelines and then wonder why their players play out of control and get unnecessary fouls. Show me an out of control coach on the sideline and I’ll show you an undisciplined team.

At the end of playoff game a Seahawk player put it best. Their opponents had spent a lot of time “taking cheap shots” to throw the players off. He got it right, “they tried to get me out of my zone, but we stayed in the zone.”

Sports Ethics: Power Through

“I’ll just power through.” She stated it as a simple reality of how she would deal with the problem plaguing her. No longer on the playing field, my old student faced some serious emotional wreckage and career challenges. But she evoked the language of her life as an athlete when she faced the obstacles or adversity of life. Sometimes being smart or well trained or good is not enough, sometimes shit happens and a person must “power through.” I admired the clarity and courage of her approach and believe that this attribute involves a basic human capacity and requirement that any high performing person needs to call upon at certain times.

Anyone seeking to live his or her life according to a purpose needs to power through sometime. Anyone seeking to survive has to power through some time. Anyone facing obdurate obstacles in their mind, emotions or physical environment, sometimes has to power through. Notice the emphasis here upon will, upon deploying attention, mind-focused energy against obstacles to endure in a purpose. It is intimately related to “showing up.”

To be honest often the person may not even know where they will end up. All the individual knows is that he or she must get through the conflagration facing them. It is enough to focus upon getting through with integrity and body intact. The other side may be unclear but it will permit escape and new start.

Teams and players face the challenge to power through when they face adversity, serious adversity. Notice the emphasis here upon “power.” This does not mean the player or team does not use its mind and plan and adapt. But at the core, the challenge facing a person who must power through requires an emphasis upon the internally organized and deployed power to endure in face of pain and adversity and keep going even when things get worse rather than better.

Powering through assumes that a person or team will get through it. But the “it” and the end are not clear. Often it means just getting through the adversity. It could be as bad as being in the middle of a melt down by a team or a huge thumping where a player or team is simply outmatched or not on its game. They are getting beat. They probably will not be able to win no matter what they do; but they must continue to be present, continue to perform and be loyal to each other and their goals and team culture. They play with integrity even when the plan is falling apart and the game is being lost.

It may mean powering through a bad spot or touch of adversity. Maybe a series of mistakes or a serious injury that takes away a critical player or a good friend during the game. It may mean a sudden jolting change in the dynamic or the game, the balance of power or talent or just losing momentum and suddenly playing from behind.

In all these cases, it recalls almost Nietzsche’s will to power. Not in its demand for dominance, but in the sense that Nietzsche believed that the force for living and growing could be harnessed by a person and directed inward and emerge as a form of self-mastery. This requires the internal person to expend immense attention and energy to forge a steady ability to overcome the desire to quit or give up or stop trying. It means the person or athlete can endure the pain or loss or push back from the obstacle they are facing. Often the battle is never seen, maybe the body movement gives evidence, but the real battle occurs internally in the mind, focus, intention, will and cognitive capacity and organization of the person.

Enduring pain and pushing or fighting back against the sapping fear of failure or desire to give up takes huge amounts of internal energy and will. It requires focused attention and concentrated action to organize and move body and mind in an intentional manner. This can be as direct as pushing your legs to keep moving forward when you are tackled in football to tossing the ball and smashing a serve when a player is down and has missed the first serve.

Powering through flows naturally from the central aspect of athletic and achievement based ethics—intentional integration of mind, body and emotions for a purpose. Powering through means a person is capable not just of overcoming physical limitations but also of putting aside distractions or being distraught to stay on track for a goal, even when aspects of a person’s body or mind or emotions may scream to not try, to give up, to just stop. It also means the goal may fade, become fuzzy or reduce to just getting out alive or soul intact.

The challenge can be as daunting as facing mental anguish or the dark radiance of depression to just get up each morning, get dressed, eat and show up for work. To do the work and relate to others requires some aspects of powering though. It can be as overwhelming as facing six months of rehabilitation work to restore an ACL or torn Achilles tendon. Each day demands doing exercises, often with little perceived return, but the athlete or person must show up and do the exercises and endure, persevere and face set backs and bad news, but keep going. Most of these days of

overcoming injury or emotional pain call for powering through.

It depends heavily upon the ethic of self-mastery but also of the loyalty and training that go together in athletic achievement. Often it requires the support of fellow players or coaches or advisors who can give encouragement and help and advice and constructive criticism in technique or buffering to sustain the effort. Going through the physical or emotional therapeutic journey depends upon strong, consistent and supportive therapists and friends.

This triumph of will of powering through centers strong athletic achievement and virtues. It demonstrates what coaches call being “mentally tough.” But tough is not enough, it requires not just standing up amid the turmoil but forging an intention to act and then calling upon all our resources to act despite the odds and even when we do not feel like it.

Power through has its own dark side. The emphasis upon just power, just getting through to the goal can result in serious loss and injury. The Achilles temptation always arises when will to power drives powering through. Nietzsche knew this as well as anyone. Sometimes a person should not “play through the pain.” Sometimes the limits of endurance physical and emotional have been met and it is time to stop, rethink, renew and maybe even change purpose.

Powering through is not sufficient and left untended by reflection and good advice and support, it can lead athletes and people down paths where injury can get worse and isolation can lead people to implode.

Another danger of powering through is that an athlete or person can get isolated in their pain. It can become the loneliness of the long distance runner. Athletes and people need a “little help from my friends” and experts to get through these trials. Like all aspects of ethics, powering through is important but needs to be tempered by mindful consultation with friends and teammates and coaches and experts. Support can matter as much as will.

In the end like all dimensions of athletic ethics and performance ethics, power through supports and sustains. But it builds more deeply upon purpose and integrity. This means it can drive to achieve, but needs to be tempered by the wisdom and support to know when to change direction and purpose.

Stopping Offers to Children I & II

The New York Times has belatedly discussed a long time practice in college athletics of offering college athletic scholarships to grade school children. This is not new and has slowly gotten worse as coaches have reluctantly driven offers down to lower ages just to stay in the game of recruiting. Parents desperate for economic certainty, kids, young and excited and awed, and coaches driven by recruiting zero sum games, just make it worse. It's an ugly problem and easy to solve, but the NCAA process stymied by athletic directors fearful of enforcement issues and losing their comparative advantage of attracting young kids have twice in the last ten years stopped the reforms. I am republishing below an analysis that I did four years ago and things have only gotten worse.

As excited college freshman pile onto college campuses to begin team practice this month, it brings to mind one of the more gruesome corruptions of the NCAA process. All these eighteen year old freshman have been aggressively recruited  by college coaches since they were early teens. An epidemic grips college colleges leading to wrong-heaed early scholarship offers to children ages 13-6. Thirteen year olds still in grade school have home visits  Everyone hates it, no one has done anything about it until now. Coaches wrap up recruiting seasons two years prior and are already raiding freshman while keeping watchful eyes on seventh and eight graders.

This is wrong. Everything we know about neurological development tells us that 12-16 year olds are not ready cognitively or emotionally to make life -altering decisions about where they will go to college. Yet the dynamics of modern recruiting push coaches against their better judgment to extend offers to kids earlier and earlier. When one prized recruit gets an offer at age 13, others follow to show the recruit love and avoid disrespecting him or her. Tracking coaches over six years I am amazed at how many of them who were appalled at the idea when it snowballed about seven years ago are now comfortable, resigned, but comfortable with the idea. 

Early decisions make a mockery of any academic pretensions the NCAA has for its student athletes. Informal offers extend to kids before they enter high school!! No one has a clue how they will do academically. Offers to freshman and sophomores with less then fourth semesters of early high school work reflect the same contempt for the academic aspect of student athletes.The whole process is wrong for the kids and makes hypocrites of college athletics, given what college athletes is evolving into that takes works.

From a purely athletic standpoint, early offers are absurd. With very very rare exceptions, student athletes have not reached their full emotional or physical potential as freshmen and sophomores let alone eighth graders. It’s hard to assess work ethic let alone academic commitment or acumen. Intermediaries have more influence at earlier ages. Early decisions generate more mistakes and mismatches that  lead to more transfers later. Alot can happen between 13 and 18. Students grow up. Young athletes burn out; lose motivation or gain it; characters change; injuries occur; puberty intervenes. 

The early decisions create serious inequalities. Unofficial recruiting visits and camp participation drive the whole process. This gives decided advantages to kids whose parents can afford to take them on visits to schools or pay for camps. Significant advantages also accrue to geographically nearby and urban schools since kids and not so well off parents can have easy unofficial visits. The unofficial visit plays into the hands of AAU and club coaches who can conveniently arrange tournaments in geographic areas for prize recruits to make unofficial visits they could not afford. This further increases their role as handlers for high profile athletes.

The whole early recruiting mess is driven by strong forces.  Coaches are obsessed with avoiding competitive disadvantages. Many coaching associations have condemned the practice and urged coaches to stop. But as is often the case, given the competition for athletes and demand to win, if just one coach making a very early offer, this sets off a downward age spiral. No coaching association has successfully stopped this trend with self regulation. The need to avoid losing competitive disadvantage is just too strong.

Parents also have a strong incentive to end uncertainty. The world of club sports has made youth sports an economic investment for parents, and the return is a college scholarship. Parents, guardians and club coaches all collaborate in an economically driven dynamic to start kids earlier, get them exposure and access to college coaches and get scholarships The early offers seal the deal and provide the payoff and certainty for the investment. Many club sports tout themselves to parents as road to a scholarship and tout their own connections to high profile coaches. 

Finally myriad college recruiting services make a living from rating, following and hyping athletes. These services increase parental involvement and knowledge. They generate excitement and energy around athletes and parents, and this can be fun for awhile. The recruiting services, however, turn parents more aggressive in seeking scholarships and manipulating the system. The services make money and visibility. The media feeds on it with their breathless coverage of recruiting hyped press conferences. The average football or basketball recruit now holds their own press conference breathless attended by sycophantic bloggers and recruiting services to announce their commitments.

For the past several years different coaching groups like Lacrosse and Soccer have proposed rigid recruiting calendars for their sports. The NCAA balked at making sport specific legislation and wanted more information, so they died. Additionally everyone claimed that banning early offers was unenforceable and this tended to break any deal proposed. Now things have changed. I will discuss this in the next entry.

The whole early offer dynamic is driven by colleges who press coaches relentllessly to to win now. Colleges seldom give the coaches the four to six years they need to develop a strong culture and pipeline of athletes committed to their system. When teachers like myself bemoan the absurdity of offering college scholarships to 13-15 year old, I have to remember that the Presidents and athletic directors motivate this corruption by their hair triggers on coaches.

No sane coach would make an offer to a fourteen year old. It might make sense in rare cases and in rare sports, more Olympic women's sports where body shape maturity arrives earlier and in a few exceptional basketball cases. But to be honest, many sports coaches have no real ability to predict the development ceiling or work ethic and certainly not academic potential of an 8th. grader or freshman. The dynamic gets the most media coverage in basketball where coaches like Mark Few at Gonzaga or Tim Floyd would make offers to seventh and eight graders. But the real rush occured in sports like women's soccer, gymnastics and volleyball. The problem is not relegated to the high profile sports but permeates all the sports, even teams we do no normally associate with money obsessions. As one coach told me, "I simply can't let her stand out there with an offer from another school without signalling my interest. Otherwise I am out of the running with her parents."

Even football is now being infected. For obvious reasons the coaches wanted to see more age and body development, but now the sport sponsors national eighth and seventh grade tournaments.Seventh and eight grade football players have their own national tournament where offers cascade down on children, granted big bodied children, who have not attended high school so a 13 year old now has a full offer from Hawaii. The apocryphal story of USC's offer to a 13 year old quarterback will become increasing common violating not just an academic pretenstions but any reasonable sport logic. All the coaching associations despite repeated announcments have failed to stop or even slow down the practice. The inimitable Tim Floyd formerUSC paragon of recruiting integrity summed up the logic when he offered a scholarship to a 13 year old to stop Duke and others from getting the young man.

The real solution is blunt, direct and clear. All offers of scholarship aid before the first day of class in second semester of the junior year of high school should be illegal and subject to a major violation—the prospective student athlete would be declared ineligible to attend the violating school. No waivers would be allowed; no appeals allowed. We could add penalties for coaches, but the key is to sever the attendance from the offer. This gets at the issue of parental certainty because they can no longer rely upon the certainty of any unofficial offers. It takes away the publicity and glory from the family and young athlete when all the such offers are illegal and could prevent the athlete from attending the school.
There are two keys. Make the oral offers illegal. Make the penalty loss of the student athlete. The coaches have to see real penalities and the parents have to see real loss of uncertainty to break the chain.

This reduces the coaches’ incentives to make informal offers because they lose the athlete. The media dynamic changes because unofficial offers now become big news as violations, not big news for kids and parents and recruiting services. This approach turns the media into a watchdog rather than parade dog. Since the official ldmedia with rare exceptions will not follow this up, the NCAA and regulators will need to rely upon the blog reporters who spend immense time watching other schools for violations and tracking high profile recruits as part of their niche.

Coaches will immediately say, well, coach X will cheat anyway and just say "well, if you keep you keep your grades up, I will offer you a scholarship in two years." It of course violates the whole spirit of the law and what coaches believe they should not be doing. But I can live with this conditional. First, it no longer gives the parents or the athlete the level of certainty; second, the conditional offer is not a guarantee and makes the athlete sill open to recruiting from other coaches; third, it reminds the student athlete that they have to go to school, attend class and get good grades in core classes or no offer can occur. More than a few coaches will invent sophistical ways around, but the offer will not longer have the full guarantee and will cut the umbilical chord of certainty for parents or the sense of obligation from the athlete.

Coaches should have a strong incentive to self-police and report on early violations; unfortunately the coaching fraternities have incredibly strong rules against informing on each othe. The culture against snitching that their own teams accept, pervades the coaching fraternities. No one wants to be known as a snitcher and to some extent it gives them mutual dirt on each other. It's odd given how many good coaches get hurt by the coaches who violate the rules. In some of the fraternities the coaches will go after those they don't like, but most will keep silent when they learn of the illegal offers. They might make a personal call to the offending coaches, but coaches like Caliperi and his ilk are immune to peer pressure. It's a big mistake modelling for their own players how to cover up cheating on the team. I think some of this is career protection, people are afraid of not getting hired if they get the reputation, but it brings down the entire profession.

Ironically the recruiting services will be big winners because the recruiting uncertainty will linger, and they can invent new categories to try and figure out what a student athlete is thinking. It would take aggressive and high profile NCAA pursuit to create those examples. The informal blog sphere will follow these with microscopes and the most information about violations would come from the informal medi, not the mainline media.

Thankfully the NCAA Recruiting and Athletics Personnel Issues Cabinet has courageously come out with very similar proposals. The committee had to fend off immense opposition. The constant refrain was it is impossible to monitor. The Cabinet correctly concluded that early offers mock the academic mission of college athletes and with pesistence and courage made the proposal. It will face a lot of opposition especially as coaches who hate doing it but are now accustomed to it claim it will hurt them and be unenforceable. The coaches present a classic case on getting accustomed to what you know is morally wrong.

The rule is simple, clear and enforceable. The new approach will not be pleasant. Initially it will create a climate of recrimination and coaches watching coaches like hawks, but they already do. The rule takes away the incentives of parents and media to go for early offers. Above all it respects the academic and personal development of the student athlete.

This clear and obvious idea was defeated when the athletic directors goaded by coaches decided that the idea was "unenforceable." The process eroded support at the conference level and then guaranteed defeat at the top level. So the mockery of academics continues despite the ethical unease of coaches who feel as if they must do this to even "stay in the game." Until the athletic directors are willing to risk doing the right thing and let self-enforcement take its natural course, this insane and unethical practice will continue.

Community Building: Sports and Super Bowls in Seattle

When sports works, I believe teams can foster community and identity in regions and across time. Living in Seattle through the Seahawk’s exciting and uneven climb to the 2014 Super Bowl reminds me of how forging community bonds through sport can work.

A good friend of my son’s captured this on a post on her Facebook last week. It captures the feelings that create connection and solidarilty across the generations, races, genders and geographic patchwork of the region:

“The city is on fire. I have never been so excited, never had so much hope. WE as a COMMUNITY, whatever the struggle, we are here as one! It takes a certain type of human to survive here; the weather itself is a staple to our namesake. Let's show the country and fuck it, the world what the possibilities are when you BELIEVE.”

Walking through my neighborhood downtown Ballard yesterday I waded through a sea of blue and green (lime green of all things). The Starbucks baristas eyes were lined with blue paint and the letter 12. Numbers 11 and 3 adorned half the people sitting on the street—Marshawn Lynch and Russell Wilson  respectively. Businesses were festooned with blue banners emblazoned with the 12 for the 12^th man.

Neighborhood houses replaced Christmas light with blue and green Seahawk lights—this is a good thing to fight against the winter grey. Giant banners with the Seahawks wonderful logo, born of Northwest Indian art, or 12 pop up in yards, busses, cars and random street corners., People yell “go hawks” to random strangers who respond in kind.

People like me always write about the “soft power” benefits of athletic teams for building a sense of community. These last five weeks of Seahawk mania spread a remarkable tide of good will and festive hope and fear across the region. It confirms my own beliefs. People smile at each other as they wear silly colors. Race, age, class seem to meld across the “go hawks” signs and gestures people salute each other with.

I don’t want to sound too romantic—I know only too well about the profit and marketing and violence that is woven through the reality of modern professional football. I know sports is ephemeral, as is art and love and even toothpaste.

But I don’t care and I believe it matters. Watching and rooting for fine athletic competitors gives people a chance to appreciate the power, beauty and intelligence that humans can display. This experience encourages people to unite together and share a common set of emotions and dreams and language. These opportunities are rare.

This long crazy march to a championship game covers six months of increasing intensity and attention from people. It can go the other way, I know as a Mariners fan people just ignore or pretend the Mariner’s don’t exist by the second month. However, here are the ways that sports teams and success can help build community and identity.

1.    It creates a shared memory for people that people in the region and families and friends and school kids live through and recall. They remember it and refer to it in conversation. It marks a time of shared hope or despair. It marks a period where people focused on the same goal regardless of their other differences. It becomes a reference point to remember fondly and remind each other that we share a common place and memory and that we can have a future together.

2.   The forging of the memory itself creates a social bridge, language and common reference that invites people to speak across boundaries. It can diffuse hostility and distrust or just uneasiness. A social space where a safe and engaging language and content exists is rare—“how about this weather?”—these connections are precious and need to be bolstered wherever we can find them. I realize that part of the population will never “get” sports and this language can exclude them. Given how few and polarizing many other languages can be—think religion—I am happy for this limited but real social space and bridge.

3.   Sports teams manifest symbolic unity in ways seldom offered. People can share “their true colors.” They wear uniforms and jerseys and paraphernalia  that creates a symbolic connect and unity across divisions. These symbols tell you that no matter how different the other person looks or seems or where they live, you share this one point of emotional reference and attention in common. It bridges the differences, opens a conversation and diffuses distance.

4.   This solidariy invites people to express their support in so many ways. People become active participants to express their social commitment—how is that for an academic mouthful? Think about all the variations of costumes and body paint of the fans. People see themselves as participants in the process. The fans scream and yell and create minor earthquakes here in Seattle. They impact the game. Others pray or sit backwards or wear their winning jersey; we participate in this process and not just passively watch it. Social media amplifies the intensity and craziness of the participation for good or bad.

5.   People devote time, energy, effort, ingenuity and intelligence to express their support. This can go deep. I can find twenty Seahawk inspired cocktails in one bar walk through Ballard. Seahawk inspired meals are served, merchandise occurs on street corners and Nordstrom’s, who knew you could have a Seahawks nutcracker?  We turn this into a sacrament that we live, wear or eat.

On a personal note the Top Pot Seahawk donuts with blue and green sprinkles are really important.

American culture can fracture into micro-communities and segregate in so many ways, that opportunities to build shared experience and shared goals and emotions across these ever splintering groups should be treasured and enjoyed. Following a sports team offers a good if sometime silly way to experience and build bonds that may seem ephemeral but establish memories and connections that can last for long periods of time. I still can remember when my Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota twins to win a Super Bowl and of the Kansas City Royals won the World Series. I can tell you where I was and how I watched the games. My family and regional friends all share the same moment, the same experience, the same references as we age and grow apart in so many other ways.

After consultation with friends I will be wearing my same jersey in all its blue and lime green glory unwashed for the Super Bowl. All the supporters will all be at one with our shares aspirations and shared feelings of joy and sorrow—Whatever the outcome, we have chosen to share a common emotional bond and connect in conversation and symbol with this team and “our” team. It has helped forge the “we” that modern life so easily forgets.