The Golden Rule
October 24, 2014
Competitive athletics are filled with rules. They include contest limitations and eligibility, conduct and playing rules. But apparently the “Golden Rule” is not one of those rules.
In competitive athletics, teams look for competitive advantage, which is often at odds with the spirit of “Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.” Seeking competitive advantage sometimes devolves from a legitimate attempt to exploit an opponent’s weakness to rule-shading gamesmanship and, in its worst form, to blatant cheating. Do unto others what you can get away with.
Furthermore, in competitive athletics, emotions often run high – both among participants and spectators – and this leads easily to overheated partisan perspective, lack of good reason and loss of behavior that is respectful of others’ beliefs and feelings.
It’s hard to treat nicely people who act nasty. It requires, in fact, a supercharged Golden Rule that says “Do unto others better than they may do unto you.”
It’s hard to treat people better than they treat you; but if there were ever a place where there is more opportunity to do so, it’s in competitive sports where people are blinded by partisanship for their team or their child. Perhaps it’s only a political election campaign that presents as tough an environment for the Golden Rule.
Years ago in a radio commentary, Character Counts’ Michael Josephson said: “People of character treat others respectfully whether they deserve it or not. I’m reminded of the politician who refused to get in a name-calling match with an opponent, saying, ‘Sir, I will treat you like a gentleman, not because you are one, but because I am one.’ Sure, it’s hard to treat people better than they treat us; but it’s important to realize what’s at stake. If we allow nasty, crude and selfish people to drag us down to their level, they set the tone of our lives and shape us in their image.”
Correctable Error?
May 30, 2017
A decade has passed since the court-ordered change in several sports seasons for Michigan high schools. Ten years has brought resignation more than satisfaction; and yet there remains hope in some places that the new status quo is not permanent, at least for those sports seasons changes that were and are seen by many people as collateral damage in a fight over seasons for girls basketball and volleyball.
Actually, the lawsuit sought to place all girls seasons in the same seasons as boys, like college schedules. The federal court did not require simultaneous scheduling; but the court did bring the intercollegiate mindset to the case. It determined, regardless of other facts, that the intercollegiate season was the “advantageous” season for high school sports. And the principle upon which it approved the compliance plan for high school sports in Michigan was that if all the seasons were not simultaneous for boys and girls, then there should be rough equality in the number of boys and girls assigned to “disadvantageous” seasons.
So, for example, from the federal court’s perspective, fall is the advantageous season for soccer, winter for swimming & diving, and spring for tennis. As for golf, the court opined that, even though it’s not the season of the NCAA championships, maybe fall was the better season. The court began with tortured logic and ended with hypocrisy.
As a result, in the Lower Peninsula, regardless of the preferences of the people involved, girls and boys had to switch seasons in two sports to even up the number of boys seasons and girls seasons in what the court had determined were disadvantageous. Schools thought the switch of golf and tennis for the genders was less injurious than switching soccer and swimming.
In the Upper Peninsula, because swimming and golf are combined for the genders in the winter and spring, respectively, the court’s option was to switch boys and girls seasons for either soccer or tennis. The schools chose soccer as the least disruptive change.
As people count the damaging effects and think about challenging the court-ordered placements a decade later, they must understand the court was looking for balance, for having the genders share the burden of participating in disadvantageous seasons. Moving Lower Peninsula boys golf to join girls in the fall and/or switching Lower Peninsula boys and girls tennis back to what was preferred and in place before judicial interference would recreate the imbalance the federal court conjured up and sought to remedy.
Those of us involved see many advantages to conducting fall golf for both genders in the Lower Peninsula and switching Lower Peninsula tennis seasons for boys and girls, no matter when colleges schedule those sports or how impractical the court’s logic and how inconsistently it was applied. Nevertheless, correcting the court’s errors could be both contentious and costly.