Posh Pipeline: Gaining College Admission at Any Cost

The President of prestigious Beacon University is dealing with a nationwide scandal involving its admissions and athletics operations. For years, a network of corrupt admissions consultants, standardized test proctors, and college coaches operated a lucrative underground pipeline into top universities, and it has recently infiltrated Beacon. Under the piercing scrutiny of global media attention, the President must develop a strategy to lead Beacon University through the turbulence caused by an FBI investigation and criminal prosecutions associated with the scandal.

Scandal in College Basketball: A Case Study of Image Repair via Facebook

The purpose of this case study was to determine what image-repair strategies the University of Louisville employed immediately after the announcement of an FBI investigation involving multiple universities and college coaches taking bribes in order to steer high-profile recruits to certain agents. Specifically, this case study examined the image-repair strategies used on the University of Louisville’s official Facebook page and the comments made to those posts to gauge public reaction to the university’s image-repair strategies. The University of Louisville primarily employed the image-repair strategies of transcendence, bolstering, stonewalling, and a newly identified strategy referred to as rallying, or unifying and “moving beyond” the scandal. Three themes emerged from an inductive analysis of users’ comments, including support, rejection, and scandal. The high volume of support indicates that many users were receptive to the university’s attempt to reduce the offensiveness of the scandal through the use of bolstering and transcendence.

Do No Evil, See No Evil, and Hear No Evil

This chapter shifts the focus from the players to the coaches. After the basketball scandal broke in January of 1951, colleges, with the aid of many writers, were quick to label the players' misdeeds “criminal” and to attribute them to players' lack of moral values and flawed characters. Yet the blame for the pervasive corruption in college athletics did not rest on the shoulders of the athletes alone. The chapter argues that the college coaches, administrations, and other such authorities were also in part responsible for the gambling issue, although unlike the players, they were largely able to escape the taint of scandal. Thus, this chapter argues that how basketball coaches made their choice to ignore game fixing reveals the essential role their passive complicity played in the size and shape of the scandals.

Nutritional Knowledge of College Coaches

Nutrition is recognized as an integral component to achieving optimal athletic performance. Even with the increase in sports nutrition research, athletes continually exhibit a lack of knowledge, which is cause for concern (Jacobson & Aldana, 1992; Jacobson, Sobonya, & Ransone, 2001; Rosenbloom, Jonnalagadda, & Skinner, 2002; Torres-McGehee et al., 2012). Moreover, coaches are a primary source of information to their athletes, but research is limited regarding the adequacy of their nutritional knowledge. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the nutritional knowledge of college coaches using the validated 88 item Sports Nutrition Questionnaire by Caryn Zinn. Twentyone coaches from a Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institution in the southeastern United States participated. The sample consisted of 16 males and five females. Sports represented were basketball (n=5), cross country and track (n=5), football (n=6), soccer (n=2), softball (n=1), and volleyball (n=2). Results revealed college coaches do not have adequate nutritional knowledge. Only one participant obtained a score about 70% (M=55%). Results indicate coaches may not be an appropriate source of information to their athletes but more research needs to be conducted in the area to further assess collegiate coaches’ nutritional knowledge.