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International Student-Athletes: Setting Up for Success
At the session “Issues Concerning International Student-Athletes Through Graduation,” attendees heard first-hand from foreign athletes about the challenges of coming to the U.S. to study and play a sport. Mutsa Nyakabau, from Zimbabwe, a biology and chemistry major at George Mason University who runs track and cross country, provided an enlightening account of his own experience. Here are some of the insights from his story:

• Programs recruiting international student-athletes should understand that in developing countries, limited Internet access is still a major barrier to communication. In some places, even electricity can’t be taken for granted. For Nyakabau, submitting time-sensitive required forms and other information electronically was difficult, and patience and persistence were necessary virtues.

• “Electronic culture shock” is a growing phenomenon among student-athletes from developing countries, who may be used to completing schoolwork on paper and unaccustomed to communicating via e-mail or accessing course materials online. While most athletic programs take steps to ensure language proficiency, they may not consider the importance of computer literacy in today’s academic environment. Arrangements for tutoring or other assistance with computers can be invaluable. Nyakabau recalled that even learning to type was a struggle at first, and assignments that classmates spent 30 minutes on would take him several hours.

• Cultural differences can come in many forms. For example, Nyakabau said his Zimbabwean upbringing taught him to be passive and reserved, so he wasn’t inclined to seek out help and resources on campus even when he needed them. Having someone in the athletic department who understood this aspect of his personality, and took the initiative to offer him various forms of assistance, helped him take full advantage of available opportunities and benefits.

• Since international students are starting their American life from scratch, one specific financial challenge is establishing credit. Nyakabau experienced this problem when he first tried to purchase a cell phone, and it can affect other areas of student life as well. Guidance from someone who understands the U.S. financial system is a valuable asset.

• Because of Zimbabwe’s tenuous relationship with the U.S., Nyakabau had to return home after two years and renew his visa (most international students receive a visa for the full length of their educational stay). Since his athletic department did the necessary research, it was able to help him through the renewal process and ensure it didn’t violate any NCAA rules against providing special benefits while doing so.

How important are factors like these when welcoming international student-athletes to your campus? Nyakabau told the story of a former roommate—an international athlete who struggled greatly to assimilate after arriving on campus. Over three years, he spiraled downward into depression, and eventually left school and returned to his home country. While most international student-athletes have much happier outcomes, it’s worth remembering that there are many challenges and pressures when studying and competing in another country, and the athletic department’s level of preparation goes a long way in shaping the international student’s experience.

Why Ban Performance-Enhancing Drugs?
Here’s a question that arose from the session “Rules Limiting Athletic Performance or Prohibiting Athletic Participation for Health Reasons: Legal and Ethical Considerations”: Why does the NCAA prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs?

Most people associated with NCAA institutions—athletes, coaches, administrators—take for granted that banning steroids and other drugs is good policy (though they sometimes quarrel over specifics). But have you ever considered the broader ethical question of why such a ban is accepted? The answer is more complicated than you might think.

Presenter Matt Mitten, a professor at Marquette University Law School, posed that question, and offered some interesting “devil’s advocate” arguments to the stock answers:

• It’s harmful to the athletes. That’s true, but many aspects of athletic participation involve the risk of harm, yet are not banned. Hits in football, for instance, lead to hundreds of concussions, broken bones, and other potentially serious injuries, but they’re an accepted part of the game. Furthermore, the long-term physical harm of steroid use is still a subject of debate in the medical community. The long-term harm of multiple concussions, meanwhile, is well established.

• It’s an unnatural form of performance enhancement. That all depends on how you define “natural.” One could argue that the space-aged training equipment found in modern weightrooms, the advanced nutritional products and supplements available to today’s athletes, and other types of permissible performance enhancement are just as unnatural.

• It creates an unlevel playing field. Would anyone argue that the playing field in college athletics is level, with such great disparities in resources between institutions? Furthermore, some athletes would say that biological differences (body size, hormone levels, VO2 max, and other physical characteristics) create inherent inequalities that performance-enhancing drugs can actually help mitigate.

• Other athletes would feel coerced into taking steroids to “keep up.” Athletes make countless decisions regarding their own performance every day. Armed with the necessary knowledge to make informed choices, each should be able to decide for him or herself what combination of nutrition, exercise, training, and performance aids will maximize their success while creating an acceptable level of physical risk. Coercion already exists in college sports in other forms, such as pressure from teammates and coaches to train harder in the weightroom, practice harder on the field, and take other steps for the good of the team. Dealing with these pressures and making individual decisions is simply part of being an athlete.

Considering those arguments, how do we justify supporting the NCAA’s ban on performance-enhancing drugs? What is the philosophical and ethical basis for anti-steroid rules?

Mitten concluded that the clear moral, legal, and ethical justification for the NCAA’s steroid policy is this: Based on the association’s mission, athletics is not simply about outcomes of the field or court. NCAA members see athletics as an integral part of their educational mission, and for that reason, excellence is viewed not as an outcome, but a process. College athletes excel when they work hard, make smart decisions, follow the leadership of their coaches, and properly balance athletic goals with academics and other priorities. By creating a shortcut to the desired outcome of athletic success, steroids undermine this process of pursuing true excellence.

Bringing Faculty On Board
Are you satisfied with the level of interaction between your athletic department and your school's academic faculty? Do faculty members see athletics primarily as a distraction from the school's educational mission? At a session entitled "Helping Faculty Understand the Value of Integrating Athletics," panelists discussed ways to help faculty become more supportive of athletics. They also discussed the benefits of making an effort to do so.

At Division III Neumann College, Dr. Sandra Slabik, Professor of Sports Management and Faculty Athletics Representative, started a program in which each team has a faculty mentor (they're called Team Chaplains at Neumann, a Franciscan school, though Slabik noted the concept could work equally well in a secular environment). The faculty mentor attends home games and some practices, and is even encouraged to join the team on one of its road trips.

As a result, faculty gain a greater appreciation of the commitment, dedication, and hard work that goes into being a college athlete. They also see first-hand the educational and character-building role that sports participation plays in the lives of those involved. Slabik said the program has made great strides in improving athletic-academic relations on her campus—once a few faculty members had good experiences being connected with a team, word quickly spread about the value and impact of athletics.

For panelist Dr. Brenda Cates, a Professor of Mathematics at Division II Mount Olive College and also a Faculty Athletics Representative, faculty ignorance of athletics was a major hurdle. Mount Olive is located in central North Carolina, and she remembers professors asking why the school's sports teams spent so much money traveling to compete against far-away opponents, when they could easily take a bus to nearby Duke and UNC. Clearly, she decided, some education was in order.

Cates started by gathering all the information she could to make the case for athletics as a positive force on campus. This included statistics on athletes' average GPAs, how many had received All-Academic honors, and graduation rates. She also compiled enrollment data to make the point that at enrollment-driven institutions, athletics is an important recruiting tool that helps the school's bottom line. In addition, she showed how it's a major factor in increasing diversity on campus, particularly by attracting international student-athletes who might not otherwise have ever heard of Mount Olive.

She rounded out her argument with details about the NCAA and Division II in particular: its mission, its academic eligibility standards, and the many programs it uses to enrich the lives of student-athletes. Armed with all this information, she created a PowerPoint presentation and showed it at a campus-wide faculty meeting.

Since her presentation, Cates said she has noticed an impressive change in the way faculty view athletics on campus. Professors have become more responsive in talking to coaches about athletes' classroom performance, and the overall relationship between athletics and academics has improved greatly. Faculty members have even squared off against student-athletes in a charity basketball game, raising funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Want more ideas like these? Athletic Management covered the topic of faculty-athletics interaction in the cover story of our June/July issue last year. You can read that article, "Making A Connection," by clicking here. It offers practical advice on making faculty members a bigger part of your program and helping them understand the value that athletics adds to your college or university as a whole.

Greg Scholand is an Associate Editor at Athletic Management. He can be reached at: gs@MomentumMedia.com.