Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Character Impact of Sports
Character development in athletics is not a new topic. It has been the most highly touted banner for athletics since athletics have been around. Therefore it is not hard to learn quite a bit about this topic and get intrigued by it. For instance, athletics were made a part of British boarding school curriculum on the basis that they taught the same number of lessons, if not more, than activities in the classroom. These lessons were very different though than the ones American sports emphasize. The British version focused on leadership qualities while Americans focused on team-building qualities. In more recent sport history, it has been shown that the very nature of a sport can cause character erosion. This probably won’t come as a shock to anyone but even though the rules are heavily enforced in both sports, football has a higher number of low character incidents than golf. A great impact on character development has been the development of coaches being able to choose athletes at the higher levels of competition. Coaches will often not draft or recruit a player who will not represent their team or school in a way that does not involve a high level of character. Tony Dungy, former coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Kelly Graves, basketball coach at Gonzaga University, and former West Point football coach Dwight D. Eisenhower are some examples of those coaches.
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I think this is an good topic because i am an athlete so id be interested in knowing what you come up with.
ReplyDeleteA thought I might add would be to talk about how much money an athlete makes and how that changes his character for better or worse. Also maybe gives cases of bad character in sports and how they were dealt with.
ReplyDeleteMost normal sports fans just pay attention to the game day related information about their favorite teams and that’s all. Looking at sports from this perspective is quite different and I am intrigued to see what you make of it. One thing I personally would like to know for professional athletes is how much of an impact does their salary have on their and their teammates character?
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting because i know that some big colleges dont care how an athlete acts they just want to win! This should be interesting to see what kind of information you come up with.
ReplyDeleteI believe this will be an excellent topic for you. It seems as if you already have a lot of useful knowledge pertaining to sports. You might also be able to include the whole steroids situation.
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