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NEWS

The Chapel Hill News , May 2, 2001

Seminar puts focus on education, teamwork, and civility

Author: Dave Hart; Staff Writers
Section: The Chapel Hill News Page

CHAPEL HILL -- When Dean Smith ran the North Carolina basketball team through its paces, Matt Doherty recalled, he would have the players huddle up while he went over his points of emphasis.

"He would talk about our upcoming game and go over the things he wanted us to do," said Doherty, who played for Smith in the early 1980s and now coaches the Tar Heels. "Then he'd turn and say, 'Mike, how'd you do on that English test you had today?'

"It was a way of showing us that he was up on our grades. It told us that he considered, and we should consider, our academic work important."

That was one of the lessons Doherty, Smith and a host of other prominent athletic leaders discussed Monday at the Friday Center in a conference on sportsmanship and ethics in sports. More than 500 middle school and high school coaches, administrators, parks and recreation officials and others attended the daylong seminar; more than 1,000 others were turned away because their registrations arrived after the meeting was booked solid.

The event was called "Pursuing Victory with Honor," sponsored by the Josephson Institute of Ethics.

Panelistss and speakers addressed a number of issues, from taunting and cheating to hazing and performance-enhancing drugs. But the dominant theme was that the primary goal of coaching young athletes is to teach and model ethical and sportsmanlike behavior.

"Professional sports is business pure and simple," said Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute. "Developing the character of the athlete is not the objective of pro sports. That IS the objective of rec, college, high school and middle school sports."

Speaker after speaker emphasized that those lessons persist well beyond the athletic field and are far more important than wins and losses.

"Coaches are first of all teachers," UNC Chancellor James Moeser said. "That is a responsibility not to be taken lightly. A great deal of the behavior we're seeing in youth sports stems from what young people see at the college level.

I worry when I see trash talk, taunting, rude and abusive behavior by fans. We certainly want young people to play hard and compete with intensity. But we also want them to respect their opponents and to play by the rules -- and not just the letter of the rules, but the spirit of the rules.

"Whether we like it or not, competitive sports embody our values as a culture. We can no longer say, 'It's only a game.'"

Among the speakers and Panelistss were Smith, Doherty and former Carolina men's basketball coach Bill Guthridge; UNC women's basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell and women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance; UNC director of athletics Dick Baddour; N.C. State women's basketball coach Kay Yow; NCAA basketball official John Clogherty; former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne; Charlie Adams, executive director of the N.C. High School Athletic Association; Lin Dawson, athletic director at N.C. Central; and actor Tom Selleck, who, tongue-in-cheek, identified his profession as "philosopher."

During the panel discussions, Josephson, striding the floor in front of the Panelistss like the lawyer he is, peppered the participants with questions, many of them targeted at some of the fine-line issues that arise in athletics. Many tactics -- faking injury in order to gain a timeout or let a better shooter take a free throw, building up the chalk on foul lines in order to keep bunts fair, surreptitiously grabbing an opponent's jersey, placing the band behind an opponent's bench to make it difficult to hear the coach -- may not be specifically against the rules, he said. Does that make them acceptable?

"If we accept that taunting is a part of the game, then let's do it right," he said facetiously. "Let's make taunting part of the coaches' responsibility and do it to its highest level of proficiency.

"When you're working out whether a tactic is appropriate, ask yourself if you're willing to do it overtly and teach it as part of the game. If you send the message, 'Get away with what you can,' that message will resonate far beyond the court."

East Chapel Hill High tennis coach Lindsay Linker said the conference underlined the importance of teamwork and creating a sense of respect for the opponent.

"Tennis is mostly an individual event," Linker said. "So for me, one of the challenges is making it a team sport."

Linker said that giving young people the sense that they belong to a team and are responsible to it can help coaches reinforce the ideals of good sportsmanship.

In a session with two legendary coaches - Smith and Nebraska football's Tom Osborne -- both men outlined the need to build an individual's sense of responsibility to the team.

"I've always said that basketball is the ultimate team sport because everyone could score," Smith said. "From day one, I preached unselfish play."

Smith said he also tried to emphasize the importance of academics. He dismissed the idea of recruiting young athletes whose only interest in college was as a springboard to the pros.

"I told recruits that if you're not interested in getting a degree don't come here," he said. "I would assume that one of their goals is to graduate from the university."

Doherty admitted that it is not always easy for young athletes to keep their minds on the lasting value of academics when the gold ring of victory dangles before them. He recalled his freshman year at Carolina, when the 1981 Tar Heels advanced to meet Indiana in the NCAA title game.

"I had a Spanish midterm the next week," Doherty said. "The night before the game, I was looking at my Spanish textbook. I read the same paragraph three times, and all I saw was Isaiah Thomas."

Reporter Kirk Ross contributed to this story.

Caption:
Coaching legends Tom Osborne, left, and Dean Smith sat down Monday afternoon for a seminar on sportsmanship at the Friday Center.

Staff photos by Grant Halverson