Interpreting as ‘politics’ the response to a worldwide pandemic misses the mark … by a long shot.
So often in education, if an adult makes a poor decision, students or athletes suffer the consequences. And that is something I have experienced personally.
In the early 1990s, I was part of an administrative team working on merging boys’ and girls’ independent schools. I was responsible for helping students get to know each other better. To achieve that outcome, I created a variety of events for the students. One way was to hold regularly scheduled pizza parties for the students from the same class. All went well until I ordered thin crust pizza for one gathering of about 150 teenagers. Bad move! I learned that thin crust is not as filling as a regular crust, and many students went away hungry.
I know that is a mundane illustration of how an administrator’s decision can affect students. But other examples are anything but mundane. In this piece, I will focus on college sports, baseball in particular, and discuss a recent event that has captured headlines around the country.
And in sharing my analysis with you today, I will begin by asserting something that I believe strongly, namely, college coaches are educators.
And, as educators, they are responsible for many parts of their student’s lives. In doing so, coaches walk a tightrope between doing too much and doing too little. As one of my coaching mentors, Bob Moore, taught me, “There is a six-inch difference between a pat on the back and a kick in the butt.”
All of this brings me to Coach Elliott Avent, head baseball coach at North Carolina State University. If you are not aware of the team’s phenomenal win streak this year–against heavy odds, I might add–you can read up on details via Google. Wins and team record don’t interest me here, but Coach Avent’s words do. I refer to what he said following his team’s COVID-related removal by NCAA order from the College World Series due to infections among the players.
According to multiple news outlets, Coach Avent was asked if he encouraged or required his players to be vaccinated. His answer? “My job is to teach them baseball, make sure they get an education and keep them on the right track forward. But I don’t try to indoctrinate my kids with my values or my opinions. Obviously, we talk about a lot of things, but these are young men that can make their own decisions, and that’s what they did.”
Any educator worth their salt knows that we teach our students more than baseball, physics, or Beowulf–and that understanding is one of the many beautiful and noble aspects of teaching.
Very much involved is teaching students how to analyze, consider, evaluate, and, then, come to independent conclusions. A good teacher does not indoctrinate. A good teacher instructs and encourages students to be aware of their world.
When asked if he was vaccinated, Coach Avent said, “I’m not going to talk about that. If you want to talk baseball, we can talk baseball. If you want to talk politics or stuff like that, you can go talk to my head of sports medicine, Rob Murphy.”
Wrong! It appears that Coach Avent is unaware that his job involves more than teaching about and coaching a sport. Because of that, Avent failed his players in a significant role, namely, as a mentor!
Baseball is not played on an island and, by not being responsible for their welfare as it pertains to the wider world, COVID entered Avent’s baseball bubble and burst it. Unfortunately, it also burst it for players, fans, the university, and the sport. Shame on Coach Avent!
