What do you expect?

What we are seeing today in big time professional and collegiate sports is no surprise to me. It is the result of a broken sports system and a society that has comprised basic standards of behavior. As coaches and sports administrators we are responsible for what we are seeing. Sport does not exist isolated or separate from society. As coaches we often proudly point out that sport is a microcosm of life, if that is the case should we be surprised by the aberrant behavior we are seeing in top athletes? We have created several generations of athletes with a distorted sense of their importance, not to mention never having to account to any semblance of reality in regard to their behavior. We begin the process young by entitling the stars, allowing them to miss class, miss practice and violate teams rules as long as they deliver performance in the game. It gets worse in the recruiting process where immature youngsters are wined and dined and pumped full of inflated opinions about their self-worth. This all coupled with the decline of the family makes what we are seeing very explainable. This does not make it right or acceptable. As coaches and athletic administrators we need to put development of the person above winning. We must stop accepting this deviant behavior as normal. We need to hold the athletes to a higher standard. A standard of behavior that is expected of a good citizen in the normal world not the distorted world of big time sport.