Professor’s new interactive program reinforces values for athletes, coaches

by Tom Tozer

An interactive program on sportsmanship for players and coaches—that has already helped reduce ejections in high-school football games by more than 60 percent over three years—has been adopted for use by the Sun Belt Conference with high expectations for the same positive impact at the college level.

Sun Belt players and coaches now must complete the "RealSportsmanship" platform as part of their requirements for competing within the conference. The Sun Belt commitment is for five years.

"RealSportsmanship," an interactive, reality-based platform, was developed by "Learning Through Sports, Inc.," founded by Brian Shulman, an entrepreneur and former all-SEC punter for Auburn University in the 1980s.

Shulman, who thinks the Golden Rule applies as much in competitive sports as in everyday life, originally developed sportsmanship platforms for high schools in Alabama and Mississippi. Over three years, there was a significant drop in ejections for both players and coaches.

Shulman’s educational Internet programs on sportsmanship for K-12 athletics caught the eye of Sun Belt officials, who asked if this kind of program could be tailored for the collegiate level.

They sought the expertise of Dr. Colby Jubenville, associate professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance and director of the Center for Sport Policy and Research at MTSU, a Sun Belt Conference member. Jubenville shared their vision for a college-level interactive platform on sportsmanship and civility. Focusing on the coach-athlete relationship, Jubenville subsequently created the "RealSportsmanship" platform.

"My research indicates that this is the one relationship that resonates the most with each athlete," Jubenville explained, "so when we built ‘RealSportsmanship,’ the core of it focused on this innate relationship."

Jubenville said he recognizes the enormous challenge in creating and implementing this type of platform. It has taken him two years and a herculean effort to educate athletic officials that there is value in values; it also has required the good faith and financial backing of his friend Shulman.

"In the complex college athletic landscape today, intertwining dollars and egos with core values and then connecting them to appropriate behavior—with an emphasis on the importance of the coach-athlete relationship—is much easier said than done," Jubenville said.

"I applaud (Sun Belt Commissioner) Wright Waters for having the vision to commit dollars to this and not simply rely on a poster and a public-service announcement to change behavior, not just in football but in every conference sport," Jubenville noted. "… Obviously this is not going to solve all the problems, but it’s a first step, and it creates dialogue.

"We owe our athletes a life off the field," he continued, "because for most of them, that’s where life will take them."

In a late 2009 story issued by the Sun Belt Conference, SBC Commissioner Waters said the program prepares players and coaches with the tools to think first when confronted with a potentially hostile situation on the field of play.

"Young adults can certainly benefit from the training this initiative contains because, in many cases, they either haven’t been directly confronted with these scenarios yet or haven’t thought them through from multiple perspectives," Waters noted, adding that older adults can benefit from the training, too.

Jubenville said the Sun Belt Conference officials charged him with making the program interactive and putting it online.

"When we began to build this concept, the focus was on making it interactive and reality-based," Jubenville pointed out. "I think we have accomplished that with the first generation of the platform.

"After many years of teaching, it has become clear to me that athletes have a better understanding of core values when they are placed in the decision-making process," he continued. "So I connected values to behavior. It’s important for coaches to tie concepts to behaviors in a way that athletes understand. ‘Learning Through Sports’ has a solution that has worked on the high-school level, and now we can begin piloting at the college level."

While in the last few months of completing his doctorate at the University Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Jubenville helped launch a football team at Belhaven College in Jackson, Miss., develop a sports-administration undergraduate program and ended up his second year of coaching with a 7-4 record. At one point, his team was ranked 17th in the nation by the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

"I’ve observed that teams take on the values of the head coach," Jubenville said. "When I started to build ‘RealSportsmanship,’ I looked at how core values could be established in such a way that everybody else sees them, connects with them and wants to be a part of them. I think one problem we have today is that our culture values things, not concepts. The concept of using values to tie a community together is difficult to see early on, but when we look back, it is what usually defines communities and makes them great. The challenge for me was taking those ideas and implementing them into college athletics. So I asked myself, ‘How do you create a framework that makes people focus on the idea that there are values and we will hold you accountable?’ That’s the simple premise behind ‘RealSportsmanship.’"

The interactive program asks questions on the front end, then presents a pre-test, followed by more questions and a post-test. Jubenville and colleagues will look at this "experiment" to see "what impact it has on the realities that athletes face."

Those realities include issues of drinking, partying, sexual activity, cheating in class and gambling, among others. Test-takers are asked to reflect on their experiences and how different decisions have led them to where they are now. Each section or platform engages the participant in real-life experiences of athletes and coaches using text, narration and imagery.

"When the coach or student has completed the ‘RealSportsmanship’ platform, he or she should have a better understanding of how to connect knowledge to new situations they face and acquire the confidence to think differently about their roles as a leader on their team at their university," Jubenville said.

For more information about the program, contact Jubenville at 615-898-2909 or jubenvil@mtsu.edu. To view the "RealSportsmanship" platform, go to www.realsportsmanship.com/test, click on "Students," select "University of Denver" from the list and enter the username "kb123" and password "kobeis1."


From the Feb. 8, 2010 edition of The Record, Vol. 18/No. 15.