The ACE 256 Experiment

Today marks the end of first week of the Spring Semester. To go along with the normal whirlwind of the start of classes, I have added the self-imposed burden of trying to completely redesign one of the courses I am teaching. The ACE 256 experiment was born out of the recognition that every, and this is really not an exaggeration, every textbook about coaching has a section about the importance of having a Coaching Philosophy. The majority of coaching courses (both for academic credit and those for certification) have students discern and then articulate their coaching philosophy and coaching interview processes include a question about a candidate's coaching philosophy. Yet, with all of this attention on coaching philosophies, there is very little actual "philosophy" in this exercise. So Exploring ways to infuse the work some of the prominent moral, ethical and political philosophers has become my quest. The first week included the introduction of the "thought-experiment" and some discussion of Utilitarianism and finally an introduction to John Rawls' Principles of Justice and

Original Position. The photo is of some one the group work that was done trying to design a format for determining a champion of college football as a project in distributive justice (side note, not a lot of distribution in most of the proposals). Next Week, more work from behind "The Veil of Ignorance."

Youth Sport & Informed Consent

Creating a blog is an idea that has kept occasionally popping up for the last couple of years. Creating  THIS blog was compelled by a confluence of events over the past couple of weeks. Briefly stated for now, those events include being asked to be part of a panel that is reviewing criteria for coaching education, stumbling upon podcasts about a range of topics from philosophy to books about sports, and recent set of meetings with youth sport parents. All of this has had me thinking in a very particular way about want it is that we think we are doing with youth sports, and what is it that we are actually doing with youth sports. The final ingredient that got me to sit down at the keyboard was listening to the 2013 Year in Review Episode of the New Books in Sport Podcast. The first segment of the episode features Micheal Oriard, former player for the the Kansas City Chiefs and the University of Notre Dame, author of multiple books on football and former Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University along with sport journalist Patrick Hruby discussing Football and Concussions as a major story line of 2013. A center piece of the discussion is Hruby's Article "The Choice: A parent's dilemma" about whether parents should let their children play football. What stopped me in my tracks was the use of the term Informed Consent during the discussion.
**Update** During my time completing my doctorate and being part of higher education, I developed a specific mental model around the term informed consent. Hruby's use of the phrase was similar to the one used to appease Institutional Review Boards where the researchers are providing the participants an opportunity to know what they are getting into and an true option of electing not to participate. Potential participants are given the expected benefits of participating in the trial and the potential risks. Armed with such information, they can make an uncoerced, rational choice about participating. In regards to youth football, the information regarding the risks, particularly as it relates to concussions and other injuries has been critical. It also appears that with this information, over the last couple of years, fewer parents have chosen football participation for their children.
Clarity and full disclosure of risks is vital, but what about the expected benefits side of the Informed Consent equation? In order for parents to make a truly informed choice about youth sport participation, it is just as vital that youth sport organizations (and with them, Coaches) are forthright about what benefits can realistically be expected. I was startled, not by the risk side of the use of Informed Consent, but by the question if we are really being deliberate about communicating what the expected benefits are and, more importantly, if we are delivering these benefits to those who do choose to participate.