Author: Heather Van Mullem

Protecting Athlete Wellness in the Hyper-Competitive World of Sports

Sport is captivating. Engaging in it elicits strong emotions for many people, like passion, excitement, and love. Sport is so central to many people’s lives that it impacts choices participants and spectators make about how they live. For example, practice and game schedules often determine how one’s days, weeks, and even vacations are planned. In addition, great value is placed on the role of sport in our lives. Sport is argued to be a place where people can learn and practice socially valued behaviors like teamwork, perseverance, and hard work; all characteristics also used to describe valued employees and community members. However, sport can also encourage behaviors that can be negative and damaging. For example, the culture of power and performance sports encourages athletes to play through pain and injury. Those who make that choice are often rewarded through adulation which reinforces their decision. Certain behaviors, including playing through injury, striving for distinction, accepting no obstacles in the pursuit of success, and always putting the game first, combine to create the Sport Ethic, a phenomenon that supports and reaffirms one’s identity as an athlete (Coakley, 2021).

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The elements of the Sport Ethic may read to some like a roadmap to building the perfect athlete. Subscribers to the phenomenon may well be aggressive, obedient, and fiercely committed to the team and sport, perhaps to a fault. “They will have to drag me off the field.” “All I want is all you got.” “Softball is life.” “Leave it all on the field.” These and similar statements are common affirmations of the Sport Ethic with each communicating that we, as coaches and parents, expect student-athletes to place the game before their well-being, relationships with others, and their future. That is really the core of the Sport Ethic; interrelated behaviors and ways of thinking exhibited in our actions and communications that encourage one to put the sport first. However, overuse injuries and dysfunctional work and personal relationships are potential consequences to the adoption of and over-conformity to the Sport Ethic, where the risk of serious injury is predictable in those who ignore minor injuries (Coakley, 2021).

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The Story of the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers Football Program

This is a 4-part series on the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers, a college-level football program composed of men who play and coach for the love of the game.

Part 4: Finding Their Niche

The small college football community is tight-knit and programs support one another in meeting the myriad of challenges they face in their efforts to stay viable. Many NCAA Division-III programs carry rosters of 120-130 student-athletes. As such, it’s likely that most freshman and sophomores won’t see much playing time which often results in them leaving to seek a new and different opportunity. The Loggers provide such teams with competition opportunities. Doing so helps those programs retain student-athletes and provides the Loggers with the opportunity to increase the number of games on their schedule.

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The Story of the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers Football Program

This is a 4-part series on the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers, a college-level football program composed of men who play and coach for the love of the game.

Part 3: It’s All About the Kids

Students

Lewis-Clark State College provides a supportive and affordable learning environment. Students choose it because they want small classes sizes, meaningful interactions with faculty and other students, and education opportunities rich in experiential learning. One student-athlete shared that he learned about the Logger program through a visit to his high school by an LCSC recruiter. He found that the combination presented an opportunity he couldn’t pass up – an affordable college, even for an out-of-state student, that provided a chance to play football, a sport he loved. He shared, “I wanted to play college football, but it was either go play at [a private university] and pay $60,000 or go, you know, be a roster dummy, be a practice dummy at, say, [an out-of-state school] or somewhere, and it worked out perfectly that I’d come to LC, [where] school was actually cheaper, play for the Loggers and actually play. [I] ended up starting game one and never looked back.”

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The Story of the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers Football Program

This is a 4-part series on the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers, a college-level football program composed of men who play and coach for the love of the game.

Part 2: An Idea and a Dream Bob Could Not Let Go

Bob Thorson
Bob Thorson

The Director of the LC Valley Logger Football Program, Bob Thorson has an interesting and diverse past. An alum of LC State, he has an MBA and specializes in Marketing. His early career focused on music. At one time, Bob owned a record store in Lewiston, Idaho, DJ’d, and worked in local concert promotions. Additionally, he worked at LC State as a Marketing professor. In 2012, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Surgery to remove the tumor affected his vision and sensation on the right side of his body. It was during his recovery that he shifted his focus from college teaching to realizing his dream of creating the LC Valley Loggers football program.

Raised as a Minnesota Vikings fan, Bob, at the age of four years old, began to develop a love for the game. It was his summers in high school visiting his grandparents in the small town of Northfield, Minnesota that led to him dreaming about creating a college football program in his hometown. If competitive football programs, like St. Olaf College and Carleton College, could have success in the small town of Northfield, why couldn’t it happen in Lewiston, Idaho?

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The Story of the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers Football Program

This is a 4-part series on the Lewis-Clark Valley Loggers, a college-level football program composed of men who play and coach for the love of the game.

Part 1: For the Love of the Game

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What is it about college sports that creates such loyal and ardent followers and passionate participants? Is it the allure of the high from the victory that keeps people coming back even after they suffer through the low of defeat? Is it the connection to something more than one’s self or the opportunity to create an identity around engagement in something with others? Or, is it just simply the love of a game?

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Creating Community in Online Classes: Drawing from the Strengths of Virtual Fitness Programs

The COVID-19 pandemic forced instructors to move classes designed for face-to-face delivery to remote delivery almost overnight. The shift resulted in challenges faced by students and instructors. Remote learning required students to approach their education using learning strategies differently, and during this transition, many students faced difficulties with a multitude of financial, emotional, and psychological issues related to the pandemic. In addition to being tested to adapt the delivery of content rapidly, teachers were also challenged to create and foster community in a remote learning scenario. In short, navigating this situation was complicated.

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The reality of the upcoming school year remains in question for some schools. We do not yet know how COVID-19 will change how we live and learn, but it is anticipated we will experience a new normal, one in which online course delivery is likely to play an increasing role. A frequent conversation had this past spring amongst faculty at my institution centered around the topic of how to create community in online courses. A sense of community is critically important to creating a safe and productive learning space and improving retention. Nevertheless, knowing the value of community and understanding how to create and foster it are two different things.

Photo by Department of Defense

This article shares the four elements of the Theory of Sense of Community (TSOC) (McMillan & Chavis, 1986), identifies how virtual fitness programming utilizes the four elements of the TSOC to establish and facilitate community within the online fitness environment and provides examples of strategies teachers can use to create and enhance a sense of community within online courses.

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Living a Life that Matters: Invest in Others’ Success

Michael Josephson, founder and director of the Josephson Institute, wrote a poem entitled, “What Will Matter.” In it he asks his readers to “live a life that matters” (Josephson, 2003). He describes this lifestyle as a choice:

…What will matter is not what you bought but what you built, not what you got but what you gave. What will matter is not your success but your significance. What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter is not your memories but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what (Josephson, 2003).

As teachers and coaches, we are presented with opportunities every day to invest in the growth and success of others. Opportunities to share our love for the content we teach or the activity we coach are plentiful. The environments we create for the sharing and construction of knowledge and learning are crucial to the positive growth of those we have the opportunity to work with. The conscious investment in others ultimately provides the opportunity for them to also “pay it forward.”

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