The University of Texas’ flagship campus will open a sports-leadership center that will help coaches instill strong character in high-school players and teach college athletes how to manage their money better, officials said on Monday.
The announcement comes at a time when college athletics is under intense scrutiny nationwide for off-field behaviors including sexual assault and for academic shortcuts aimed at keeping athletes eligible to play when they aren’t doing college-level work.
The university’s president, William C. Powers Jr., acknowledged the turmoil swirling around college sports in announcing the creation of the Center for Sports Leadership and Innovation.
“We want to do something positive about it rather than just imposing disciplinary action when something goes wrong,” Mr. Powers said.
The center will work with high-school coaches to develop a training and certification program that helps them detect and intervene when players exhibit troubling or violent behavior. A pilot program will focus on high-school football and girls’ basketball.
“As a society, we should be doing everything we can to leverage the enormous popularity of athletics to develop leaders and cultivate integrity,” Mr. Powers said in announcing the center. In addition to teaching teamwork and discipline, he said, sports can be “a force for good.”
The announcement of the new center occurred on the same day local news sources reported that a grand jury in Travis County, Tex., had indicted two former Texas football players on sexual-assault charges in connection with an on-campus incident with a female student in June.
Texas’ head football coach, Charlie Strong, who has emphasized the importance of honesty and treating women with respect, suspended both players indefinitely in July and then dismissed them from the team in August.
The center will also develop a financial-literacy program for the university’s athletes. Financial professionals and former athletes will help teach the students how to manage loans, credit-card debt, and other financial matters. Those skills will be useful for anyone, including the vast majority of college athletes who don’t go on to play sports professionally.
But the course could also benefit the smaller subset of high-profile players who might cash in on their athletic skills. A one-hour pilot course will start in the fall, “potentially coinciding with anticipated legal rulings about compensating student athletes,” the program’s announcement says.
In August a federal judge ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association had violated federal antitrust laws by unreasonably barring high-profile athletes from earning money off of the use of their names, images, and likenesses. The NCAA has appealed the decision, which, if upheld, could allow some football and basketball players to earn thousands of dollars a year in deferred compensation for the commercial use of their images.
The new Texas center will also encourage students and faculty members to develop case studies in which athletes make decisions involving employment contracts and social behaviors, among other things.
The center will be led by Daron K. Roberts, a former student-government president at Texas and an NFL assistant coach who is also a humanities lecturer at the university.
The president’s office has allocated $300,000, mostly from the university’s Longhorn Network, to pay for the initial three years of the program.
