Managing Intercollegiate Athletics

Daniel Covell, Sharianne Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439960
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Sciences du sport et de l'exercice

Managing Intercollegiate Athletics is the leading introduction to the management and governance of college sport.

Now in a fully revised and updated third edition, this book reveals the inner workings of athletic departments and the conferences and governing organizations with which they work, offering insider perspectives to help prepare students who are interested in pursuing a career in collegiate athletics management. Written in a user-friendly style, and containing real world cases, data and examples in every chapter, the book introduces the key managerial concepts that every successful professional needs to know, and takes the reader through the core management process and functions, from goal-setting and strategy to recruiting, finance and change management. With a strong focus on practical skills, the book also encourages critical thinking and includes interviews with successful practitioners in every chapter. This new edition includes a brand-new chapter on professional development and expanded coverage of ethical issues, diversity and social justice in sport. It contains new case studies and examples throughout, and has been updated to reflect changes to NCAA bylaws and legislation.

This is an essential textbook for any course on intercollegiate athletics and invaluable supplementary reading for any courses on sport management, sport marketing, sport fundraising, sport governance or higher education management.

The book is accompanied by updated online resources, featuring PowerPoint slides and an instructor manual.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to the Management of Intercollegiate Athletics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003153894-1

Key concepts to keep in mind while you read the chapter:

• The historical elements that influenced the development of intercollegiate athletic management.
• The concepts of organizations and management in the context of intercollegiate athletics.
• The view that management is the shared responsibility for performance of sport organizations, and why effective management is essential for the success of contemporary sport organizations.
• The development of management theories and an explanation of how these theories have impacted the management of intercollegiate athletics programs.

Introduction

From before the inception of intercollegiate athletics, and since the very first contest between teams from different schools, the appropriate role of athletics in higher education has been actively debated. While students first initiated and organized athletic programs for health and fitness reasons, the focus quickly shifted away from participation-based programs toward institution-maintained programs that sought to achieve primacy over rival institutions. Proponents of the development of “big-time” athletic programs, as embodied today by those at many National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division I institutions, cite the ability of these programs to create a sense of community among campus constituencies and to promote the institution in general, while critics note that academic integrity is often sacrificed in the pursuit to athletic success, and that institutional resources are misdirected away from academics to support athletics.

Whatever your point of view, it is clear is that intercollegiate athletics in the United States has evolved to mean different things to different stakeholder groups: Students, faculty, administrators, coaches, parents, boosters, alumni and the general public. These diverse collections seek varied outcomes from intercollegiate athletics, including entertainment, a way to create bonds with the institution, a chance for physical activity and an opportunity for professional advancement.

This book will introduce you to specific functional areas of the unique and ever-changing enterprise that is American intercollegiate athletics – as well as to the organizational and managerial concepts, practices and skills required for a career in managing intercollegiate athletics. To achieve this realistic yet challenging goal, each chapter will contain two kinds of information:

1. Specific information about one of the major operational areas specific to intercollegiate athletic management, including a segment profile and a discussion of some of the key developments and important issues relative to these areas, and
2. Consideration of one of the critical responsibilities – planning, organizing, quality, decision making, change, etc. – for intercollegiate athletic managers.

This dual focus found in each chapter will enable you to enhance your understanding of both the important functions and issues relative to intercollegiate athletic management, and the challenges and best practices of managing these programs and departments. This approach will be reinforced through an end-of-chapter managerial exercise with discussion questions that explore the relevant important legal, marketing and financial implications. What makes the management of intercollegiate athletics programs so challenging is that, regardless of the size of the school and the number and success level of programs, most institutions expect that their athletic programs meet the expectations of all stakeholders and all anticipated outcomes. What we will seek to understand in this chapter is how the system was created and evolved in light of these expectations so that those who work in the industry can understand how the unique qualities that characterized the formation of the intercollegiate athletics enterprise impact and influence its management and operation.

The Establishment of the American Intercollegiate Athletics Enterprise

From its earliest inception at Harvard College (now University, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts), American institutions of higher education sought to integrate all facets of life into the collegiate experience. Turner (1984) found that Harvard’s founders intentionally chose the English collegiate system where students and teachers lived, ate, studied, worshipped and played together rather than the European or Scottish model where students lived and boarded in the community rather than on what we would call a residential campus. This choice was based first on academic and religious principles to form a sense of community within the school. In much the same manner, intercollegiate athletics would later be used to build and promote school loyalties. This institutionalizing of non-academic student life would inevitably give rise to the college’s involvement in sponsoring, at least by virtue of its responsibility of in loco parentis, the extra curriculum, those non-academic activities that were emerging on college campuses.

Nearly a century before the advent of intercollegiate athletics, students formed literary societies and Greek-letter fraternal organizations, and organized on-campus “intramural” athletics. However, faculty usually decried athletics, as evidenced as early as 1787, when Princeton (New Jersey) University’s faculty forbade students to participate in “shinny,” a form of hockey, because it was “low and unbecoming gentlemen and scholars” (Rudolph, 1990, p. 151). Nonetheless, an annual junior class versus sophomore class shinny game there was quite popular, and students there also played “baste ball,” an early form of baseball, as early as 1786 (Sheldon, 1969; Seymour, 1989). Smith (2011, p. 17) points out that colleges had always “had lists of things forbidden … refusing a variety of activities thought to be harmful to moral character, learning or safety,” including “card playing, drinking, smoking” and sports, and that a student at Kings’ College (now Columbia University, located in New York City) was punished for swimming off campus and sentenced to confinement to his room and commanded to translate Latin for a week.

But students persisted, for the most part because, as one Amherst (Massachusetts) College student of the day noted, such activities “served to vary the monotony, and relieve the dryness of college duties” (Smith, 1988, p. 15). Students participated in exercise regimens as a precipitate of the gymnasium movement of the 1820s, with colleges opting then to formally incorporate such programs by mid-century. Amherst was the first school to add a Department of Hygiene and Physical Education in 1860, in hopes to channel student activity to these areas. Soon, though, the movement was perceived by students as “so mechanical, so business-like” (Rudolph, 1990, p. 153). Even some presidents criticized the movement, as Paul Chadbourne, president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts), sniffed: “I would rather a man spend an hour digging out a stump than in rolling over in a shed and calling it gymnastics” (Rand, 1933, p. 129).

The First Intercollegiate Athletic Contest

In response to the disinterest in gymnastics but a continued and growing interest in physical activity, students chose instead to compete in sports such as baseball, crew, track and football. At Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, undergraduates formed a boat-racing club in 1843. As sport grew on campus, students began to look beyond the campus boundaries for challenges. But before Army-Navy, UCLA-USC, Auburn-Alabama, Ohio State-Michigan, Texas-Texas A&M, DePauw-Wabash and any of the other hundreds of the rivalries that populate the intercollegiate athletic landscape, there was Harvard and Yale University. And in what sport was this notion of rivalries born? Not in football, nor basketball, nor baseball, but in a crew race, and not on the Charles River just a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard, nor in New Haven harbor close to the Yale campus in Connecticut, but at Center Harbor on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee in August 1852. Why there? The offer to sponsor the race came from James Elkins, a superintendent for the Boston, Concord and Montreal Railroad. Elkins and the railroad company believed that spectators keen on watching such a race would secure passage on the train to the site, so they paid for the travel and week’s lodging for the two teams, who saw the junket as a “jolly lark” that was staged “for the gratification of the townspeople” (Smith, 2011, p. 1). The company’s speculation proved correct, as about a thousand spectators, including future U.S. President Franklin Pierce, watched the Harvard boys guide their boat, the Oneida, to a win in the morning’s 1.5-mile practice race. After a respite of lunch, mineral water, ale, brandy and cigars, the Harvards won the official two-mile afternoon race as well. For their efforts, the victors took home a handsome pair of black, silver-tipped walnut oars (Smith, 1988). Other crew regattas would follow, as would expansion into intercollegiate events in other sports as well. By 1870, Sheldon (1969, p. 195) reported, “athletics had won a recognized place in college life,” and by 1900,

a greater portion of the public know(s) a college almost exclusively through its athletic records, for three fourths of the news items concerning student life deal with sport … intercollegiate contests play by far the largest part in the daily life and talk (of undergraduates).

(p. 230)

Rudolph (1990, pp. 154–155) aptly summarized:

For the American college student the gymnasium, the boat club, the baseball team (and before long the track team, the football team, the cricket team) were necessary for the fullest enjoyment of life. They were the institutions in which the student embedded his values, the values of worldly success; institutions in which he clarified the nature of distance that stretched between his view of life and the view that the college purveyed … At last the American college and university had discovered something that all sorts of people cared about passionately.

Defining Organizations and Management in Intercollegiate Athletics

An organization is a group of people working together to achieve a common purpose. Organizations exist to achieve goals that individuals can’t achieve on their own. Intercollegiate athletic departments exist because the operations are far too complex, with far too many related products and services and necessary tasks, to be performed by a single individual working alone.

As shown in Exhibit 1.1, the traditional definition of management is the coordination of human, material, technological and financial resources needed for an organization to achieve its goals. Management gathers the resources – the people, money and equipment – required to make work and workers more productive. Management designs the tasks and organizes the work to be done. It ensures the skills and the coordination necessary for the kind of cooperative effort that is the essence of sport organizations. Finally, it provides the sense of direction and purpose that can unify diverse people in a productive enterprise.

Exhibit 1.1 Organization and Management Defined

Organization

• Any group of people working together to achieve a common purpose or goals that could not be attained by individuals working separately.

Management

• The coordination of human, material, technological and financial resources needed for the organization to achieve its goals.
• Responsibility for performance.

Early Intercollegiate Athletic Management

Student-run organizations operated athletic programs well into the early 20th century at many schools, paying for programs through dues-assessing athletic associations, fundraising drives, alumni donations and gate receipts. The games on the field were initially run by team captains, but over time, student efforts were augmented and eventually supplanted by support and direction from paid or unpaid coaches. The end of the era of student-run teams and programs began in 1864, when Yale hired the first professional coach. William Wood, a New York City gymnastics and physical education instructor, was brought to the New Haven campus to train the school’s crew team. The move to professional coaches helped Yale become the dominant athletic power in many sports well into the 20th century, although Cornell University crew coach Charles Courtney and Harvard football coach Bill Reid were other early notables, some earning more than the highest paid professors at their schools and becoming better known than their school’s president (Smith, 1988). The off-field managerial aspects still were run by students for a far longer period.

In the 1860s and 1870s, school administrators would only impose their will on athletic programs when they perceived that athletic matters were infringing upon students’ academic activities, but, by 1881, Princeton formed the first faculty committee to gain control of college athletics from students (Smith, 1988). One of the reasons for the formation of this committee was concern over the injuries and deaths in football, but another was the potential for publicity and cultivation of off-campus constituencies. Football in particular became popular on campuses, as “it reinforced elite standards within an educational setting … ...