UAH: President's Blog

The role of athletics in a research university

I attended the NCAA meeting in Nashville, Tenn., in mid-January. No other event that I have attended as UAH president has brought together so many diverse people interested in the education of students: presidents from major and minor, public and private universities, current and past sporting icons, faculty representatives, athletic directors, student representatives and many others. (I should start by recognizing Professor Brent Wren from the College of Business Administration for his willingness to serve as our faculty representative to the NCAA). One thing that has impressed me more than anything else was the set of rules that the NCAA has in place for the mentoring of student athletes and monitoring their progress (or lack thereof) in the classroom and the lab. Now, if only we had the staffing levels and the financial resources to give the same kind of one-on-one support and mentoring for all our students, what could we do in terms of increasing our retention rates and reducing our average time to graduation?

As a varsity athlete several decades ago, I learned as much from my sporting experiences as from my academic classes. Timeless values such as personal dedication to a goal, the importance of teamwork, how to gain from losing and how to win with grace have all been invaluable lessons in my life since I left the rugby field and the running track. So, I am an ardent believer in the opportunities and challenges that intercollegiate and varsity sports bring to a campus while acknowledging that it must not supercede the primary educational mission of the university.

My impressions are that Division II is ideal for UAHuntsville and, in this division, men’s and women’s basketball and softball are our flagship sports and the track and cross country teams are developing outstanding reputations. So, we are going nowhere else. Division II embodies the right balance between academics and sport such that the phrase “student-athlete” is not an oxymoron. The universities and colleges making up Division II range in size from less than 500 to more than 25,000 students and yet they all manage to compete in the same league and agree on the values and standards of the league.

The statistics from the Gulf South Conference (GSC) in which we play are reassuring in terms of the graduation rates of student athletes, which are often better than the student body as a whole. This is true at UAH where the latest academic-success statistics are for the freshman-cohort in the class of 2000-2001. In this class the 6-year graduation rate for all UAH students was 44 percent and for UAH athletes was 62 percent. At UAH, we also beat the GSC average in terms of academic success, graduating students above the average percentage for the conference in every sport but one. For example, the GSC average for men’s baseball was 68 percent and UAH’s was 80 percent. For women’s basketball, the GSC average was 84 percent but UAH’s was 100 percent. While we can take pride in these statistics, we should also note that this performance is to be expected since we are the only (Carnegie-classification) research-intensive university in the GSC. Accordingly, UAH’s admission, retention and graduation standards should be higher than those of our partners in the GSC. Last year 35 out of 250 student athletes (~14 percent) at UAHuntsville had a perfect 4.0 GPA and these scholars will be appropriately recognized at a forthcoming event. All our coaches, athletics staff and particularly our faculty, who work hard to accommodate the extraordinary demands placed on the personal time of student athletes, can take pride in all these academic achievements. It is also worth noting that last year in the GSC there was only one disciplinary action against one individual from one out of the 16 universities; contrast this statistic with the situation in many Division I schools.

The only sport in which UAH plays outside the GSC is ice hockey, which is our sole NCAA Division I sport. We have neither the resources nor the student numbers to compete successfully in multiple Division I sports. At UAHuntsville, it is clear that our hockey program has the history, the experience and the record to show that, with the right coaching staff and the right players, we can compete at the very highest levels. At what other sport could we hope to compete strongly against Notre Dame and beat Yale? I intend to work with Athletic Director Jim Harris and Coach Danton Cole to ensure that we continue to recruit and retain the very best hockey-playing students who graduate on time with above-average academic records. We will continue to improve our hockey program to become even more competitive at the very highest levels.

One last word about football; extraordinary amounts of time are spent at the NCAA and at football playing institutions dealing with this minuscule fraction of the total student body, playing a facility-intensive sport that, in most cases, results in financial losses to the university. The time spent on football by these institutions is out of all proportion to what I see as the mission of UAH (my next blog will be on our mission statement). There is more than enough football in Alabama at the top level as well as at intermediate (and lower) levels to satisfy the most ardent fans. Adding another team will not make any significant difference to the quantity and will certainly not raise the quality of football already available at, e.g., A&M, UNA, UWA, USA (soon!) Troy, UAB, Auburn and UA. So let me summarize: we have one Division I sport, ice hockey. Every other sport will remain Division II and football is not on the horizon. Let’s take what we’ve got and make it better, not introduce another sport which will only drain resources from the broad range of excellent women’s and men’s athletics that we’ve worked hard to create over the last 40 years.

GO CHARGERS!

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