How Much Sports Is Too Much?

By JENNIFER JACOBSON

Laura Leonetti likes staying busy.

On a typical Monday afternoon in November, the Brown University junior attendstwo classes, runs three miles, and lifts weights for half an hour. In the evening, she watches Friends and Jeopardy and works on a 15-page paper.

She makes good grades, mostly B's, but her passion is playing second base on Brown's varsity softball team. Monday is her team's day off, but she still has her own workout to do. Most other days she organizes around her softball practices. For her, the arrangement works.

That's why she is infuriated about the Ivy League's latest attempt to ensure that its athletes are devoting enough time to their studies and the other aspects of college life.

The Ivy presidents are requiring teams to take a total of seven weeks off from practice per year. They are not alone in worrying about whether athletes are getting the benefits of a broad college experience. Members of the New England Small College Athletic Conference have banned "captain's practices" -- coachless, allegedly voluntary practices led by team captains during the off-season.

Presidents of Ivy League and Nescac institutions say that by spending vast amounts of time on the court and the field, athletes are not taking advantage of opportunities to try new things on the campus, like taking up a musical instrument, or getting to know peers who are not athletes. Thus they are not growing into well-rounded people.

"There was a sense that, in the last 10 years, Division I rules have permitted athletic activity to be year-round organized activity," says Jeffrey H. Orleans, executive director of the Ivy League. "The amount of time athletes have to focus on other things has been limited." The presidents "want to give some of that focus back."

As is often the case, the Ivy League members -- and their like-minded counterparts in the New England conference -- are adopting more-restrictive rules than the colleges they compete against. The National Collegiate Athletic Association is looking at similar issues.

Time Off From Coaches

The new plan calls for Ivy League teams to take seven weeks off during the course of the academic year. The weeks do not have to be consecutive but must be in seven-day segments, at least. During the off weeks, athletes may not participate in any required practices and may not be supervised by their coaches. Teams are not allowed to hold captain's practices or reserve practice time in facilities, but athletes can use the weight room on their own. The seven weeks also cannot be scheduled during vacations. In the New England league, athletes may not gather on their own out of season to hold practices.

The Ivy League and the small-college conference have always played by their own rules when it comes to balancing sports and academics. Both conferences far exceed NCAA rules in restricting how coaches recruit and how long seasons can last.

But in the past two years, their discussions about the balance of academics and athletics have taken on a greater sense of urgency, because of the publication of The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2001), by William G. Bowen and James L. Shulman, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's president and chief financial officer, respectively. The book argued that colleges often recruit a disproportionately large number of athletes relative to their overall student populations, and that athletes tend to cluster in certain majors, to earn lower grades, and to not take on leadership roles after they graduate.

So concerned were the New England conference presidents that they even hired Mr. Bowen, a former Princeton University president, and Mr. Shulman to study their own institutions last year. The authors' findings were similar to those of The Game of Life. Mr. Bowen and Mr. Shulman have done a similar study of the Ivy League that will be published in a forthcoming book.

The presidents are trying to halt the trends delineated in The Game of Life with various measures. Most Nescac colleges have agreed to cut back on the number of students they admit primarily on the basis of athletic prowess, and the league's attempts to dial down the intensity of out-of-season practices are supposed to cool the athletic experience. Ivy League institutions also are cutting back on athlete recruiting.

"The lacrosse team may be doing an informal tournament off campus," says Tom Gerety, president of Amherst College. "And we all have come to realize that, in that setting, there may be somebody in the group who says, 'I want to be doing x, y, and z, but I'd be a bad member of the team if I don't go along with everyone.'"

The New England league has banned captain's practices since its founding 30 years ago, but the policy has been largely ignored on most campuses recently. William D. Adams, president of Colby College, says the decision to reaffirm the ban was driven, in part, by a "galvanizing moment" -- an incident in September, when a Colby ice-hockey player was struck in the face with a puck at an off-campus practice and required facial surgery. But the incident, and the liability issues it raised, was not the main reason for the decision, Mr. Adams says.

Rather, the presidents "really believe in the seasonality of sports," says Norman Fainstein, president of Connecticut College and chairman of the conference's executive committee. "We don't want two cultures on our campus -- an athletics culture and all the other students in some other world. We don't believe that's healthy."

Mr. Shulman of the Mellon Foundation applauds both conferences for sticking to their principles. "The natural inclination of people who play sports -- to throw themselves into what they do with great passion -- is a great thing," he says. "It also should be the charge of those who run academic institutions to send signals about what they see is the right balance." Asked why similar limits are not placed on the student symphony or the campus newspaper, Mr. Gerety says that "these activities, on the whole, have not presented a large problem for us." Students in those activities are not "falling behind in their classes," he says. "We don't feel they pressure one another to ratchet up the newspaper. It seems to be self-limiting."

Athlete Discrimination

Many teams at Ivy and Nescac colleges are excellent, even though they do not offer athletics scholarships. Williams College has won the Sears Directors' Cup for the most outstanding athletics program in the NCAA's Division III four years in a row; Princeton finished 21st in the NCAA Division I standings for the Sears cup last year; and other teams in both conferences regularly compete for national titles.

That's why many athletes attend those colleges, and they are unhappy at the thought of cutting back on their dreams.

Larisa Kindell, a senior and co-captain of Wesleyan University's swimming team, says the new policy discriminates against athletes, on the mistaken assumption that "athletics interferes with academics." In fact, she says, the skills and traits athletes must have to excel in sports and to balance their complex lives -- "discipline, time management, and motivation in general" -- contribute to their academic success. "If I didn't have swimming, a place to release my academic stresses, I don't think I'd be as effective in the classroom or studying at night," she says.

Ms. Kindell, along with her co-captain, had devised a schedule for weightlifting, running, and swimming for her team's off-season, and had held a couple of weeks of captain's practices this fall, before the presidents stopped them. She says that even though there was no pressure on her teammates to attend out-of-season captain's practices, which are voluntary, the players would show up because, "at the college level, it's obviously something that's important to you, that you want to get better at."

At Brown, Ms. Leonetti's softball team has already held one rest period in September, one in October, and a third the week before Thanksgiving break. Team members will not officially practice together until February 1. The policy does not ban informal practices: During the team's seven-day break in October, she went to the field a couple of times to hit grounders with some teammates and to work with the catcher on throwing out runners at second base.

"We athletes wouldn't have chosen to come to an Ivy League school if we didn't care about our academics," says Ms. Leonetti, who is organized enough to have prepared a notecard of talking points for an interview with a reporter. "We've had to manage our time our whole lives. ... It's like they're punishing us for trying to be successful at more than just our studies."

Norma Taylor, the women's tennis coach at Brown, worries that coaches at colleges that do offer athletics scholarships and do allow students to practice year-round will now succeed in recruiting players away from the Ivy League.

David T. Roach, Brown's athletics director, says that part of the premise behind the seven-week rule -- that athletes lacked the time for activities besides sports -- was a "somewhat misguided" assumption. Athletes already do many things besides sports, he says, citing a Brown baseball player who acted in two plays last fall and spent six hours a day in rehearsals.

Outside the two leagues, coaches are skeptical about the new rules. Russell O. Hellickson, head wrestling coach at Ohio State University, says he doubts that getting more of the "typical" college experience will necessarily help students who are serious about their sports. "They don't need to spend more time on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday going to parties and getting drunk," he says.

Presidents of both conferences will meet separately this month to review how the rules have played out on their respective campuses. Mr. Orleans, the Ivy League official, says he would be surprised if the presidents changed any aspect of the seven-week rest period.

Andrea Savage, Nescac's director, says its presidents will "hopefully reach common guidelines" on applying the captain's-practice ban and on what is permissible out-of-season athletic activity. Douglas J. Bennet Jr., Wesleyan's president, says he thinks the ban will stick indefinitely. "I see no reason to change" it, he says.

The two conferences' restrictions foreshadow a larger debate in the NCAA about whether athletics are preventing students from becoming well-rounded people. Presidents of large institutions have been discussing whether to toughen restrictions on voluntary off-season workouts, which often are not voluntary for athletes who want to stay on a team. During the past two years, three football players have died in off-season workouts, and "student-athlete welfare" is now a major topic of conversation in NCAA circles.

The problem is simple: Athletes want to practice their sport as much as possible. But nobody has quantified how much is too much.

Although they are best known for their academic prowess, most members of the Ivy League and the New England Small College Athletic Conference have very strong sports programs, too. Here's how each institution finished last year in the Sears Directors' Cup rankings for Division I (for the Ivy institutions) and Division III (for Nescac colleges). Colleges are ranked based on how their teams finished in national and conference championships.

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Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education