Good Sports

To the Rev. Brian Konkol, religion and sports have a lot in common.

The college basketball player-turned Lutheran minister knows neither is completely “good” or “bad.” With sports, he might overhear vicious trash talk in the stands, only to witness high-fives, or a teary embrace, between strangers in the stadium parking lot moments later.

“It's remarkable,” he said, “and oftentimes horrible.”

As dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University, Konkol wants to continue exploring the vast spectrum of morality sports seem to provoke and, ideally, tip the scales in a more positive direction. He teamed up with Jeremy Jordan, dean of Syracuse’s David B. Falk College of Sport, and together, they devised a character education initiative to cultivate virtue in sports by focusing on a not-so-silent and yet often overlooked majority: the fans.

Examining virtue in fandom is a novel concept within a very traditional discipline called “character education.” The rising field in the college setting focuses on helping students consider how to be better people, as opposed to just better learners. Efforts now underway include those at Wake Forest University, where the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) supports related programs at dozens of institutions across the country.

On July 11, the E.C.I. announced the latest winners of its “Institutional Impact Grants,” which fund large-scale character initiatives at schools over a three-year term and with up to $1 million. “Character Development and Sport Fan Engagement,” the Syracuse proposal, was among the 33 selected.

In the fall, Syracuse students will begin to see and feel the project’s presence in a variety of areas on their home turf. Conversations about sports fandom and ethics — the grounds for teamwork, leadership, and loyalty, as well as rivalry, aggression, and exclusion — will start to appear in both existing curricula and new activities, including peer-led workshops, game-day campaigns, and speaker series.

It's an initiative fit for Syracuse, and for a grant with explicitly “institutional” intentions, because it plays into two of the school’s most unique and influential forces: spirituality and sports.

While Syracuse is not religiously affiliated, Konkol’s colleagues said his sweeping engagement on campus has made the multi-faith center he represents a core part of university life. His co-creator from the Falk College of Sport, Dean Jeremy Jordan, even described Hendricks Chapel as “the thing that kind of binds us and keeps us and holds us together.”

“That’s a real asset that probably people don’t understand unless you’ve been at Syracuse and I didn't appreciate until I came here,” Jordan said.

Sports, too, are key to school culture thanks to not only the athletic offerings but academic ones. In addition to its Division I status and some top performing teams, the university is home to both the Falk College of Sport and Newhouse School of Public Communications, which offers a sports media track.

This summer, Syracuse changed the name of what was the “Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics” to, simply, “Falk College of Sport.” The shift reflects efforts to provide an exclusive space for the study of sports, as well as advance the institution’s broader leadership in the area.

“The chancellor wants sport to be something that differentiates this university and is seen as something that’s special here,” Jordan said.

With Konkol’s specialty in what he called “service to the common good” and Jordan’s in what he called “the power of sport and what it can do,” the two deans said the decision to combine their work was a “natural” one.

“Maybe we’re coming from different sides of the neighborhood,” Jordan said. “But we definitely have found a common ground that we’re excited about.”

Others have similarly recognized the potential in sports as a vessel for character education — the opportunity to explore moral, social, and psychological development in dynamics between teammates, coaches, rivals, and self.

The difference in the Syracuse case, and what piqued the interest of grant makers at the E.C.I., is the focus on sports off the field as much as on — on the fans, instead of just athletes.

This point of emphasis was of course intentional on the part of Konkol and Jordan, who not only love sports and prefer not to see them tainted by boos and jeers but are keen to engage as many people as possible in their work. “How could we impact a larger part of our student population?” Jordan said of their thinking.

In the end, the math was simple: “We have 500 student-athletes here at Syracuse. We have 22,000 students,” Jordan said. Whether that 22,000 includes more “hardcore” or “casual” fans, he added, the goal is to engage them all.

“Being able to include everyone in the project was really important to me,” Jordan said. With a more universal approach, he imagines, the initiative could give way to “new knowledge that potentially extends beyond Syracuse.”

After all, the lessons students take away need not apply only to their role as fans. Teamwork, for example, is one of the major virtues Konkol and Jordan will encourage participants to consider because, while modeled through sports, it translates to countless other domains.

“We’re all teammates,” Konkol explained. “I'm a teammate in my marriage. I'm a teammate in my work environment, a teammate in my community, in civic organizations.”

“I do believe that there is a way in which as a fan of sport, seeing great teams at work can in turn help the observer to embody teamwork in various facets of their life,” he said.

Even as Jordan recognizes the limitations of operating this work on a single campus, he said the potential feels powerful. “I don't want to present that we're going to save the world. That's not what we're doing,” he said. “But I think there's real opportunity to apply this beyond simply the two hours or the three hours that someone is at a sporting event.”

For students who study sports media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, the character initiative will enhance training and conversations about journalism ethics already built into the curricula.

The director of the Newhouse Sports Media Center, Olivia Stomski, takes sports’ impact on fans very seriously. She began grappling with that influence when she was still just a girl and watched her single father escape into his nightly games, free of the financial and familial burdens that weighed during the day.

“Sports bring people that joy, and I always wanted to be a part of that,” she said. “But I also understood that it was a pulpit from which people teach others.”

As a teacher, Stomski is dedicated to ensuring the next generation of journalists realizes how every one of their decisions — from camera angles to replays to scripts — affects viewers. “A big part of what we’re teaching is understanding that responsibility: how media shapes the culture of fans, how media shapes the behavior of people when it comes to sports,” she said.

The funds from the character education grant will help bring new intentionality and accountability to Stomski’s efforts. “We are promising that this is going to happen, and I need to see evidence that we are doing that,” she said.

Stomski will also be involved in a longitudinal study of how students’ attitudes and behaviors change over the course of the initiative. Her role will be to consider trends in their sports media consumption — where, when, how much — in relationship to indicators of character.

Jordan said this research will be unique because it focuses, again, on sports and character among fans instead of athletes and also because it is a long-term, three-year study. “It’s exciting because it allows you to pinpoint the reason for change in the outcomes that you're seeing,” he said.

To Konkol, a job well done will look like outcomes indicating the project helped students be more intentional about their values and virtues — to whatever extent. If everyone was even a little more thoughtful, the preacher in him can’t help but believe, life on campus, and beyond, might change quite a lot.

“Dean Jordan talks a lot about ‘sport for good,’” Konkol said.

“I say amen to that.”