College Park, Maryland -- Rockburn Elementary School is abuzz. Kindergarten through fifth grade, the pupils are herded into the school auditorium for the big event of the week: a visit by nine varsity athletes from the University of Maryland at College Park.
The athletes are here as part of Team Maryland -- a university-run program that combines academic work with community service, sending athletes off the campus to deliver inspirational messages to young people.
Matthew J. Haas, the director of the program, settles the school kids down and calls his first speaker, Kurtis Schultz, a basketball player, to the front of the room.
At six foot six, Mr. Schultz towers over the seated tykes. In speeches he makes to high-school students, he talks about his best friend’s death in a drunk-driving accident, and how the incident has affected the choices he has made in his own life. But here, his lesson for the day is more upbeat: He describes his metamorphosis from a tubby sixth-grader into the lean, successful athlete he is now. The kids squirm and chatter, their necks craned up to stare at him.
“Remember,” Mr. Schultz says at the end of his talk, “that’s how I made it happen for myself and you can make it happen.”
Team Maryland is a program for juniors and seniors who have earned grade-point averages of 2.7 or higher and play on any of the university’s 23 varsity teams.
Athletes who are part of the program take a semester-long class on leadership, earning half of their academic credit by giving speeches each week at local schools.
The speeches the athletes deliver are reaped from their own experiences. On a Sunday at the beginning of the semester, the athletes spend a full day working with a speech coach, who helps them identify significant events in their lives. The athletes then build stories around the events that are tied into the message that Team Maryland strives to impart to its audiences: “You Can Make It Happen.”
Team Maryland began nearly three years ago as a joint project of Maryland’s athletics department and the Center for Political Leadership and Participation. It serves as the centerpiece of Maryland’s Scholar-Athlete Leadership Program, a wider effort to integrate athletics and scholarship.
Fourteen athletes participated in Team Maryland when it was first offered in the fall of 1992. This spring, enrollment had grown to 28, with 30 others turned away for lack of space.
“There should be closer ties between the athletic department and the rest of the university,” says Georgia Jones Sorenson, director of the political-leadership center and the principal architect of Team Maryland. “Student-athletes have much more to offer than their athletic ability.”
When Ms. Sorenson created the program, she knew of no other institution that combined community outreach with a for-credit academic program for athletes. In fact, similar programs do exist, but Maryland’s emphasis on the altruistic has gained it a high profile nationally. Ms. Sorenson says she regularly hears from colleges around the country interested in offering a similar program.
Last fall, the National Consortium for Academics and Sports at Northeastern University, which helps institutions develop community-service programs for athletes, recognized Team Maryland as the best of all the outreach programs offered by the consortium’s 106 member institutions.
“It’s a model for programs at the center,” says Robert McCabe, a staff member at the consortium.
Rick Chryst, an assistant commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, sees Maryland’s program as part of a national trend toward rewarding community service. He says that President Clinton’s national-service plan, in which students would pay off the cost of college tuition by working in their communities, is an example of such a trend.
Some higher-education officials and other observers, however, are not so sure that academic credit for community work is such a good idea.
“If Maryland can arrange for credit, that’s fine,” says Keith Zimmer, assistant director of academic programs for the University of Nebraska’s athletics department. “But I would worry that giving credit might water down a little bit the motivation of why people join the outreach program.”
Athletes in Nebraska’s Husker Outreach Program perform many of the same services that Maryland’s athletes do. As at Maryland, a speech coach helps the athletes come up with stories based on their personal experiences, which the participants then deliver to groups of school kids.
The difference is that the Nebraska athletes do not receive academic credit: “They’re not getting any benefit except a self-benefit of knowing they’re making a difference in these kids’ lives,” Mr. Zimmer says.
Other observers ask why Team Maryland’s outreach program is reserved exclusively for varsity athletes.
The classroom-instruction portion of Team Maryland is available to all students, but non-athletes are not included in the public-speaking aspect of the program. Seven non-athletes took the leadership class last semester.
“Studies have shown that athletes are the kids’ role models,” says Mr. Haas, who played lacrosse when he was a student at Maryland. “I think you’d lose a little bit by mixing the groups up. Right now, the message is specialized. It’s focused.”
Mr. Haas says he recognizes, however, that Team Maryland should not over-glamorize sports, or send the message that athletics are the only avenue to success.
On several of his visits to local schools, Mr. Haas has pulled out a telephone directory and pointed to a single name, telling the students that if all the people in the book were college athletes, only the one he pointed to would have a chance to go on to professional sports.
At the end of the visit to Rockburn Elementary, Mr. Schultz and the other athletes sign autographs and shake hands. They ask the kids about their goals, their hopes for college.
“We’re not saving the world,” says Mr. Haas, gathering his group for the ride back to campus, “but we are helping our community out a little.”