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Paper instructions:
Sports Ethics Case Study
Background: You are the athletic director at a private high school with a highly successful athletic program. Your teams frequently dominate the public schools that are in your conference, which leads to some resentment of your programs from the community.
Your detractors frequently say that your success is due to recruiting the best players away from other schools. This is not factual; you do not actively recruit players. However, it is true that many top players in all sports transfer into your school for the educational and athletic opportunities that you offer. As a result, your varsity teams often appear to be made up of the area’s all-stars, many of whom played for other schools as freshmen and sophomores. Other athletic directors have even discussed removing your school from the conference because they feel you have “unfair advantages.”
You have been reading, with increasing frequency, about high school teams “blowing out” opponents and about the negative attention this brings to the winning team and its school. Often these lopsided scores occur in spite of mercy rules. You are growing increasingly concerned about some of the scores that your teams are posting against weak opposition.
The mission of your athletic department is:
The mission of the (create your own name) High School is to serve our student-athletes, coaches, staff and fans by:
• Displaying INTEGRITY in every decision and action
• Building and maintaining TRUST with others
• Giving RESPECT to each person we encounter
• Pursuing unity of purpose through TEAMWORK
• Maintaining LOYALTY to student-athletes, co-workers, and fans
INTEGRITY - TRUST - RESPECT - TEAMWORK - LOYALTY
These are our core values. We will exhibit them as we pursue excellence in all that we do.
Your task: Create a memo to distribute to your coaches (which you would also discuss at your pre-season meetings with coaches and parents). The memo is intended to get your coaches “on board” with the idea that, while we want to play hard and win games, we also must avoid the negative publicity that comes with a blowout.
Further, your memo should discuss the mission and values of the program. It also should discuss some things that coaches should consider in the event that the mercy rule is not sufficient to prevent a “situation.” Be specific in your expectations. It’s up to you to take the first, and biggest, step to avoid embarrassment for the school.
*The mission and values in this case were taken from The University of Nebraska
