Moscow, Idaho – Sharon Stoll has spent her career studying the values and morals of elite athletes, and has concluded that many jocks are deficient in the moral reasoning that governs honesty, fairness and responsibility.
Stoll, a professor at Idaho, is not surprised sports pages often read like a police blotter – with news about drugs, rapes, beatings and other crimes committed by athletes.
“In sport we have moved away from honorable behavior,” Stoll said, with more emphasis on winning at all costs and material rewards.
Stoll’s conclusions are the result of a 17-year study during which 72,000 athletes filled out questionnaires designed to measure their moral reasoning abilities.
“The environment of athletics has not been supportive of teaching and modeling moral knowing, moral valuing and moral action,” Stoll’s 2004 study found, in part because there are few consequences for immoral behavior in sport.
Stoll operates the Center for Ethical Theory and Honor in Competitive Sports. The center contains the results of tens of thousands of Hahm-Beller Values Choice Inventory tests, developed by Stoll and her colleagues. It measures athletes ranging from junior high to college sports on their moral reasoning.
Stoll’s latest client is the Atlanta Braves, whose coaching staff will receive a teaching curriculum by February intended to produce better teamwork, better anger-management skills and a steroid-free environment.
Stoll and her team develop the curriculum and teach it to coaches, who then teach it to their players.
Braves assistant general manager Dayton Moore said the team will use the curriculum throughout its minor-league system. Moore said the Braves long have had a program to teach good behavior to players, but felt Stoll’s proposal was more concrete.
Moore said one key area for the Braves is teaching young players to appreciate diversity. It was former Braves pitcher John Rocker who became infamous in 1999 for remarks he made in an interview with Sports Illustrated in which he bashed gays, minorities and foreigners.
The Braves also want to impart character traits such as learning to deal with failure.
“We want to stress having balance in their lives and making good decisions off the field,” Moore said.
While athletes traditionally have scored well for values such as teamwork, loyalty, self-sacrifice and work ethic, they have not done as well in moral values such as honesty, fairness and responsibility.
That’s where Stoll comes in.
Stoll works not from an ivory tower, but from real life. In developing an earlier program for Arizona State University, players studied the life of alum Pat Tillman, an NFL player who gave up football to join the U.S. Army after Sept. 11. He died in Afghanistan.
“He believed in something,” Stoll said. “He was an honorable man.”
Stoll’s research found members of men’s sports teams scored lower in morals than individual sport athletes. The longer they compete in sports, the more morally calloused the athletes become.
That also appears to be happening to athletes in women’s team sports.
Stoll, who as a youngster was a competitive ice skater, later coached high school sports in Ohio. She got a doctorate in sport philosophy from Kent State.
The first step in working with an organization is to look at its mission statement, Stoll said.
“If you say your mission is to win, I can’t work with you,” Stoll said. “You can be vastly immoral and win.”
But if an organization values honesty and respect and responsibility, Stoll said she can help find ways to impart those values to athletes.
“Young people today are at a disadvantage,” Stoll said. “In our society, it’s not too clear what is right and wrong.”
Stoll’s courses require a coach to spend about 45 minutes a week passing the information on to students. But the time is worth it, she said.
“You wouldn’t have me coming and working with you if you didn’t have a major problem,” Stoll said.
She also is a partner in a company called Winning With Character with Randall Thrasher and Bobby Lankford, the assistant coach for character and leadership for the Georgia football team.
“We are not trying to tell kids what to think,” Lankford said.
“We want them to think about the choices and decisions they do make.”
Lankford said the main goal is to get athletes to consider two questions before making a decision: Is it honorable?
Is it responsible?
“If you can’t answer yes to both questions, you better turn and go in another direction,” he said.
Stoll’s work often focuses on dealing with women, an area in which Mike Tyson and many pro and college players have had major problems. She instructs male athletes to treat women the way they would want a sister to be treated. Athletes also are taught how to deal with women who offer themselves for sex.
“We want to develop young men to be decent human beings,” she said. “Many of these young people have no sense of what is acceptable behavior.”
