Sport Ethics Issues

The Academy for Sport Leadership has started to publish our findings from a small, but important survey we conducted last year at this time. In January, 2009, we sent out an electronic appeal to Michigan high school athletic directors, asking them to urge their school coaches to participate in a survey entitled: Michigan Coaching Paths. A total of 277 coaches, 99 women and 178 men completed the survey.

One question we asked focused on how high school coaches learn about a coaching job. The majority reported that they got it via word of mouth.

So, here are some questions:

1. If high school coaches learn about their jobs...and then get them based on word of mouth, isn't that anti-competitive? Or at least noncompetitive?

2. And if getting a coaching job is primarily based on word of mouth, what does that actually mean? Whose word? And from whose mouth? ADs? Other coaches? Friends? Parents?

3. If word of mouth is the primary way coaches learn about and then get a coaching job, does that mean we are getting the best and most high quality coaches for our athletes?

Let us know what you think. In addition, you might want to learn more about the Michigan Coaching Paths Survey.

Several million of us watched the Beijing Olympics in August. A few weeks before the opening ceremonies, there was a minor media frenzy on whether the pollution and the smog in the air over Beijing would require event delays, and in some cases, cancellations of events. A few members of the U.S. cycling team arrived in Beijing conspicuously attired, not only in their sponsors' apparel, but with protective masks. They feared the bad and polluted air would harm their chances of medalling as well as their health.  And then the Olympics ceremonies began, the air cleared after a few days of rain, and the media turned instead to the spectacle and the drama that the Olympics always is.

Even so, the impact of sport on the environment as well as sustainability and global warming, are issues, and especially sports ethics dilemmas, that all the spectacle and drama of Olympics cannot erase.

There are many athletes today who are passionate about the environment. Coaches urge their athletes to get involved as team members in a range of community projects, among them those with an environmental mission. 

Yet, when it comes to thinking about the impact of playing and watching sport on the environment, coaches and athletes often forget or fail to make connections. For example, do our soccer coaches know that, according to a report delivered at the UN Conference on Sport and the Environment in 2005, that the emissions estimate predicted for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany was 250,000 tons of greenhouse gases on top of what normally would have been generated, had the event not been held there?

This is just one example. So, the next time coaches think about ways to bring their teams together by contributing to the community, consider the impact of your own sport, and the footprint it makes on the environment.