Sport Management Community

In several blog posts last fall, we referenced the developments surrounding the football program at Pennsylvania State University. We likened these events to recent violations cases at the University of Miami (FL) and Ohio State University, as well as the historically significant player payment scandal at Southern Methodist University, referenced in several chapters of Managing Intercollegiate Athletics. This week’s current issue update comes courtesy of Scott Wojciechowski, a senior sport management major at Western New England University from Adams, Massachusetts, and a member of the school’s varsity football program, the 2011 New England Football Conference champions. Here, Scott offers perspectives on the career end and death of longtime PSU head football coach Joe Paterno.

Late this past year news broke about Joe Paterno’s longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach who was accused of sexual molestation of boys. Soon afterward we learned that Sandusky was being indicted on felony charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of someone under 16, aggravated indecent assault, indecent assault of someone under 16, indecent assault of someone under 13, and corruption of minors. Sandusky had retired from Penn State in December of 1999 but remained a part of the Nittany Lions program, as well as running The Second Mile, a children’s charity that he founded in 1977 that reaches 200,000 kids in Pennsylvania each year (Ganim, 2011).

Next, we learned that another assistant coach at Penn State, Mike McQuery, had told Joe Paterno that he had witnessed an alleged incident involving Sandusky and a boy in a Penn State locker room shower. When news of this became public and it was learned that Paterno had known about the incident and not reported Sandusky to law enforcement personnel, many people were very upset. We learned that Paterno had told his athletic director, Tim Curley, of the incident, thinking that this action was enough and that he had done what he had needed to do. His failure to report the incident to the authorities probably contributed to his dismissal as head football coach. After Paterno said he would retire at the end of the season, the school’s Board of Trustees decided they needed to fire him immediately. In the next week the Penn State campus erupted in riots as the student body reacted to the firing of their beloved head coach, the face of Penn State football for decades.

As we did last semester, the students in Western New England University’s Managing Intercollegiate Athletics course, and I (Dan Covell), will again cover important issues in intercollegiate athletics. Throughout the spring, we will work together in researching and writing posts for this site.

First, however, an update on an issue we’ve tracked over the past year or two: The vaunted Trinity College men’s squash program (profiled in a case study in Chapter 4 of Managing Intercollegiate Athletics and several online posts since 2010) fell to Yale University last week. The 5–4 loss ended Trinity’s dual match unbeaten streak, which began in 1998 after a loss to Harvard University, at 252 matches. I first learned of the streak’s end from a video clip of the match-point win appearing on a local sports program (since I live in New England, this outcome counted as an important story). Two days later, the New York Times covered the loss on the front page, lower-right corner, of its sport section. Author Paul Wachter, who has covered this story for some time and clearly knows the sport well, noted that the win for Yale was hardly an upset, as Trinity had played Yale in last season’s national championship and had won 5–4, and the school had then lost its top four players to graduation. Trinity head coach Paul Assaiante was somewhat gracious in defeat, commenting that “there’s a lot more parity, and four or five schools have a shot at the championship this year.” Assaiante also waxed poetic when describing the atmosphere of the match in New Haven: “When you’re on the road, the crowd wears on you, like swimming into a wave. At home, you’re on a surfboard” (Wachter, 2012, pp. B10, B12). Interested readers might also want to read his autobiography, Run to the Roar (discussed here last year).

According to Wachter, Yale and others have caught up to the Bantams by copying them: that is, by recruiting foreign players. Yale head coach Dave Talbott noted that of the 18 players in the match, only 4 were American (3 for Yale).

Although a landmark event, this recent match had none of the histrionics that surfaced in 2010 when the two teams met in the national finals. After winning the match point, Trinity’s Baset Ashfaq Chaudry stooped down, and for three or four seconds yelled at Yale’s Kenny Chan. In the words of Assaiante, “Seeing Chan exiting the court behind him, Baset turns and yells at him again. … The whole story goes viral. The video of the match reaches ESPN, who places it on heavy rotation on SportsCenter, … In the first sixty hours after the incident, I get more than five hundred emails from people I don’t know. Twelve straight titles and Trinity Squash has never gotten this much attention” (Assaiante and Zug, 2011, pp. 223–224). This time, Yale did not return the favor. In the decisive fifth game of the match, Yale’s John Roberts (from Ireland) defeated Swede Johan Detter, 11–4, but the match did not result in any fireworks. “Johan’s a very nice guy,” said Roberts. Assaiante was worried, however, and after the match he stated that “I wanted to protect my guys and make sure that they showed character and class and walked out of there with their heads high.” He also struck a tone that some might describe as sour grapes: “At the end of the day it’s only a squash match. There are more important things in life” (Wachter, 2012, p. B12).

By the way, Wachter notes that Trinity can still win its 14th-straight national title; it is looking to do so by bringing in four highly touted recruits at the beginning of the spring semester, a practice to which Yale and the Ivies do not ascribe.

Check back next week as we begin to tackle more new and emerging events.

References:

Assaiante, P. and Zug, J. (2011). Run to the roar: Coaching to overcome fear. London: Penguin.

Wachter, P. (2012, January 20). After 14-year run, squash juggernaut loses a match. New York Times, pp. B10, B12.

In the second blog post of the semester, co-authored by Western New England senior sport management major Ben Donatello, we referenced the book, A Payroll to Meet, authored in 1989 by David Whitford. For a few weeks I searched on-line to purchase a copy of the book, which sadly is out of print. Having no luck, I then requested and received a copy of Whitford’s book through interlibrary loan thanks to the efforts of the outstanding staff at Western New England’s D’Amour Library. As I wrote at the time, Whitford’s book is indeed outstanding, and serves a great compliment to some of the materials and issues discussed in intercollegiate athletics courses. I had promised to provide further notes on the book later this fall. This I am now prepared to do, but my thoughts on that book have been colored by the events that have occurred in and around the football program at Pennsylvania State University, to which my student Spencer Severs referred in the post of December 8.

What kept jumping out at me as I read Whitford and kept abreast of the news updates emanating from State College were the uncanny similarities between the SMU and Penn State scandals (yes, the word is overused, but I am hard-pressed to find a better one).

This week’s current issues review comes courtesy of Western New England University senior D.J. Goyette, a sport management major from Oxford, Massachusetts and a member of the school’s football squad, the 2011 New England Football Conference champions.

The first issue this week focuses on player safety and, more importantly, how the NCAA deals with concussions. In the article, “College Athletes Move Concussions into the Courtroom,” George Vecsey of The New York Times reports that although Derek Owens, 22, is preparing to return to Central Arkansas University to resume his education, he is no longer able to play any contact sports due to a severe concussion he suffered on a punt return in a game against the University of Tulsa. Owens is one of four plaintiffs filing a class action suit against the NCAA for negligence regarding awareness and treatment of brain injuries to athletes. The other plaintiffs include recent football players, Adrian Arrington and Mark Turner, and Angela Palacios, a former college soccer player (Vecsey, 2011, p. 1).