Netters:
The August/September issue of Athletic Management had an artile which
proves again how dumb even the brightest people can be when they deal with
collegiate sports.
The Council of Ivy Group Presidents has adopted a new rule that all Ivy
League athletic departments must establish for each sport a period of at
least seven weeks during the academic year when student-athletes (how I hate
that word) on that team will have no required athletic activities. In
addition, there will be no coaching supervision of voluntary conditioning.
The details were left up to the League staff and the schools.
Leaving aside the question of how this will be worked out. it is
obvious that, as usual in college athletics, what's sauce for the goose is
not for the gander. Football and basketball players could well stand such a
vacation to catch up with the academics that are so often neglected during
their respective seasons which, these days, can last four or five months.
But it is quite a different story for athletes in individual sports,
like distance running and swimming, which 1) do not make the same kind of
demands on participants as do team sports; and 2) require a certain level of
coditioning year around.
Just one example of the difference in team and individual sports. I
recall a long ago visit to Ohio Field at New York University (the old Bronx
campus). It was in the middle of the day and, sitting in the stands was the
legendary coach Emil Von Elling. I was told he simply came out there each
day and waited for his various charges to report at their "leisure" for
workouts.
In contrast, I was at the time covering all sports in Hudson County
and the coach of Stevens Tech, a first rate engineering school in Hoboken,
(the campus once had the first railroad track in the U.S,). told me that
part of his problem was that he seldom had his team together for a practice
because of their demanding academic schedules.
There is really no reason I can think of to apply the new rules to
our sport or some of its counterparts. The cries for time off from athletes
who care about their studies have been confined to the major team sports.
They simply don't apply in our case.
Let us remember that the most celebrated athletic feat ever
connected with a university anywhere in the world was accomplished without a
professional coach on hand and was concocted and completed by a group of
young men who went on to sterling careers in various pursuits. They didn't
have to worry about getting "time off" for their studies; they simply fitted
an immortal accomplishment around them.
Ed Grant
