Many teams and athletic departments include “loyalty” as one of the primary tenets in their mission statements. Frequently it is joined with other values like integrity, service, and work ethic.

Institutions tend to make decisions based on goals and performance rather than the values that are part of a mission statement. This is true of athletic teams, BMW salesmen and members of Congress.

Several men’s basketball coaches who are in the Hall of Fame have put their universities on probation by either ignoring NCAA rules or deliberately looking the other way while directing their assistant coaches, managers, graduate assistants, or academic counsellors to commit felonies and misdemeanors.

Only one of these coaches has been fired. (Rick Pitino at Louisville)  Goals trump values when it comes to revenue sports. Athletic departments are much more eager to embrace a mission statement when there is a transgression by a female head coach, or someone coaching a non-revenue sport, like tennis or lacrosse. God forbid, a woman’s field hockey coach pushes her players too hard or yells at them inappropriately. There is a direct relationship between revenue and coaching longevity.

The real problem comes when goals and values collide. For example, a head coach chooses to ignore that some of his players are enrolled in a bogus class that does not require a syllabus, periodic tests or, as in the recent case at the University of North Carolina, attendance.

The team cannot reach its goals unless certain players are eligible and academic fraud is one of the ways to guarantee those athletes will be on the court. This situation continued for over twenty years at UNC and yet Head Basketball Coach, Roy Williams, claimed he had no knowledge of it.

I have admired how Coach Williams has coached his teams at North Carolina and Kansas, and the genuine concern he has in the welfare of his players. He is one of the goody guys in college basketball. But I also know that it is in the DNA of every head coach to know what brand of toothpaste an athlete is using, who they are dating, whether or not they are going to class and whether or not the athlete is eating original or multi-grain Cheerios for breakfast. A successful head coach’s life is dependent upon gathering information and recognizing patterns.

This is where loyalty comes in. A head coach is asked to have loyalty to several different communities: individual athletes, the team, the athletic department, the university, the local community, and at a state institution, the people who pay taxes to fund his salary. When the battle between goals and values begin, a head coach is emotionally connected to players and the team’s goals much more so than to the larger communities.

For a coach to choose to lead with values over expediency requires him to have already made that decision before the battle begins, otherwise he will lead with emotion rather than the mission statement tucked away in a shoebox in the attic.

In a successful program, you can come to believe that the team you coach does so many worthwhile things in helping to develop the lives of the people that you are coaching, that you put yourself in position to ignore something that might derail impending success or the image of what you have helped to create.

When this happens, an All-American quarterback who has committed a felony sits out for one game against a weak opponent instead of being suspended for the season. (The argument being that suspending him for longer than one or two games would penalize all of the players who were not committing felonies.) A basketball player who breaks his hand by slamming it into the wall after practice in a fit of rage is promoted for a red-shirt year which is not designed to reward this type of behavior.

Both of those decisions may help the success of the individual teams but they also may hurt other programs in the department who lose a recruit because a family chooses not to send their daughter to a school that doesn’t recognize the larger communities that are impacted by being “loyal” to the player or to a head coach’s goals instead of creating a safe environment for their daughter.

This is not easy stuff and I don’t know of any head coach or leader who has not struggled with making the right decision every time. I once coached an exceptional player who went out drinking, came back to the dormitory and decked a fellow student who called her a derogatory name. This was on the eve of an off-season regional event that we needed to win to go to a national tournament. I benched the player for the tournament, and we were fortunate enough to win and advance. But would I have made the same decision if it had happened during the regular season?

I would hope so, but I don’t know. I was an inexperienced coach trying to establish success, and I hadn’t really even thought about mission and purpose. I was more worried that everyone would find out that I didn’t know what I was doing. With the increase in budgets, salaries, and expectations, conflicts with divided loyalties are even more prominent today.

When you look at the behavior of the house and the senate, two teams that we believe should have as their primary loyalty to do what is best for the people of our country, they appear to have loyalty only to their own political party, major donors, or in many cases their own political future. We are waiting for a team made up of prominent members of our federal government to step forward, and act like a team that is grounded to the mission tucked away in the shoe box.

We are waiting for them to embrace the values of our first team who signed their names to this mission:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

–Terry Pettit www.terrypettit.com