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Schools should provide educational majors in professional athletics
By JASON WHITLOCKThe Kansas City Star
Rush desperately wanted to make the same mistake Chalmers and Arthur made, leaving for the NBA draft a year too early and 12 months before he was ready to make the difficult decisions it takes to transition smoothly into a pro career.
Luckily for Rush, he blew out his knee last summer before suffering the same humbling draft fate as Arthur and Chalmers, who fell to late in the first round and early in the second round, respectively.
What happened to Chalmers, Arthur and even Kansas State’s Bill Walker (a late second-round pick) serves as yet another example that college basketball and football players could use more career-educational assistance from the universities they attended.
Yes, they are young men and they’re responsible for the poor decisions they make. But NCAA schools could do more to help them.
OK, this will not be a repeat of the rant I made a couple of months ago about the need for high school academies for talented football and basketball players. I still very much believe in that concept.
But today’s rant will focus on a simpler tool that could benefit athletes. Universities should offer educational majors in professional athletics. Had Chalmers and Arthur been enrolled in KU’s hypothetical school of professional athletics with an emphasis in basketball, I believe they not only would’ve made more intelligent decisions but also been more enthusiastic about staying in school.
A kid who wants to be an architect can study architecture, a musician can study music. But a basketball player can’t study his discipline and receive academic credit for it. And we wonder why so many of these kids have no interest in school.
You can teach all the educational disciplines — math, English, science, etc. — through athletics. You can teach kids to think critically by properly teaching them the sports world. All the responsibility of preparing Chalmers and Arthur for the NBA (and life) should not have fallen on the overworked shoulders of Bill Self and his coaching staff.
They’re in a poor position to do it anyway. The players are skeptical of a coach’s advice for several reasons: 1. They don’t know if the advice is in the coach’s best interest or the player’s; 2. Players rebel against coaches the way a teenager rebels against a parent.
I’m not suggesting that a Kansas professor should have counseled Arthur and Chalmers to stay or leave. I’m saying they should’ve spent the past two or three years in a classroom being educated on all the intricacies involved in professional athletics.
Had this taken place, I don’t believe Arthur would’ve declared for the draft and allowed his AAU coach Jazzy Hartwell to captain his pre-draft preparations. Missed workouts and rumors about a kidney ailment damaged Arthur’s draft stock. He came off as immature and terribly unsophisticated by waiting until a week before the draft to announce his retention of a legitimate agent.
Pro-sports executives can’t stand dealing with agents and hate the influence agents hold over players. How do you think a GM feels about an AAU coach, especially one with a history as shaky as Hartwell’s? He was also the captain of Shady’s shady Baylor-one-day-Kansas-the-next remix press conference.
Perhaps had Chalmers been immersed in the study of athletics, maybe he would’ve been more in tune with all the intangible and tangible benefits of being a four-year player at KU, one of the school’s top-five all-time scorers and a national-champion hero.
Mario’s college career would be more financially valuable in this area when he’s 35 and 45 and 55 had he stayed at Kansas all four years. I realize that Chalmers’ father, an assistant coach at Kansas, quarterbacked Mario’s bad decision. Parents can certainly be ill-informed and biased, too.
The problem right now is that too many of these kids look at school as a punishment. It’s something they do to remain eligible. Their minds are not engaged. If we made school about educating them in the profession they’re going to pursue, maybe they would develop an appreciation for learning. Maybe they wouldn’t want to escape campus so quickly and prematurely.
They’re not all going to be blessed with a knee injury that saves them from embarrassment.