Is Sportsmanship Dead?

By Jerry Kreber

Like our society, sportsmanship has really changed over the last 20 years. Today, high school athletes have many different factors that affect the way they look at treating opponents, officials, and team members. These new variables have led athletes down a dangerous path toward negativity and unconstructiveness. Not only does this develop a sense of pessimism toward athletics, but overall bad feelings about today’s younger athletes.

Advanced technology was helped shaped the way athletes treat each other. The Internet has played a large role in how students communicate. Now, chat rooms and websites offer high school students a chance to interact with one another. When used appropriately, these can be very productive in helping students develop relationships. Often, this is not a popular approach in using updated technology. Instead, many high school athletes tend to visit websites that allow negative information to be posted by members of the site. Usually, these sites do not require members to use their real names. So, athletes have a free rein to banter back and forth with absolutely no accountability for their words. Frequently, this practice has resulted in verbal or physical altercations on and off the playing field.

Parenting attitudes and actions have helped instigate increased bad behavior of high school athletes. Being a poor role model is one way parents have assisted in the influx of negative sportsmanship. For example, during a 2004 high school basketball game in Pennsylvania where a parent body slammed a referee for ejecting his wife from the game for using obscenities. These kinds of incidents have helped high school athletes view violence as an acceptable reaction to unfavorable outcomes. Behavior like this has been highly publicized in the media, causing many organizations to become advocates for better parent behavior. In fact, the International Institute of Sports for the last 16 years has promoted a National Sportsmanship Day. Many famous athletes have jumped on board like Lance Armstrong, Chris Spielman, and Jennie Finch.

Practicing a team concept is another element of sportsmanship that has deteriorated in high school athletics. Today’s players seem to have a very selfish outlook on athletic involvement. This type of attitude has trickled down from professional players through the college ranks. Now, today’s best players often find themselves on the worst teams because their attitude is not conducive with creating a winning environment. This trend provides evidence that often players put their individual wants against vital team needs. In previous athletic environments this type of attitude was not accepted in sports.

In conclusion, today’s athletes must fight off many distractions to practice proper sportsmanship. Athletes may even face peer pressure from teammates not to be a good sport during and after competition. To help remediate this increasing problem, coaches must provide proper instruction on the importance of good sportsmanship. Also, they must send a clear message that bad sportsmanship will not be tolerated within their athletic problem. By using this deterrent, coaches can hedge off embarrassing behavior of athletes in practice and game situations.

Coach Gerald Kreber played baseball at Briar Cliff College and Graceland University from 1995-1999. After playing, he served as an assistant baseball coach at Omaha Central High School from 2001-2006. In 2005, Kreber was hired as an Associate Scout for the Cleveland Indians Baseball Club. Mr. Kreber has been published in the Baseball Coaches Association’s From the Dugout, American Baseball Coaches Coaching Digest, College Baseball Newspaper (CBN), and Tom House’s National Pitching Association (NPA). Moreover, in the winter of 2007, Kreber’s work will be published in Tom House new pitching book. He has also served as a pitching moderator on Steve Ellis’s Complete Pitcher website, and provided baseball instructional material to many other Internet websites. In 2005, Mr. Kreber created his own website http://www.baseballideas.blogspot.com His website offers free baseball instruction, research, and training tips to coaches looking for different ways to maximize player development.

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