Survey: Cheating Normal Among Young Athletes

A survey of top-notch teenage soccer players found 84 percent would intentionally foul and perhaps injure an opponent to save a goal, leaving some people worried that cheating may be the norm among young athletes.

“I can’t say philosophically, in terms of what sports should be, I’m jumping for joy,” said researcher Joan L. Duda of Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. “In their mind-sets, they are seeing their behaviors as acceptable.”

Duda and colleague Marta Guivernau studied the responses of 135 boys and 59 girls at a summer soccer camp. The findings were presented at a meeting of the North American Society for Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in St. Charles, Ill.

The players, with an average age of 15, were national-level competitors for their age group.

They were asked if they would tackle the opposing team’s best player from behind while the player was dribbling toward the goal and there was no other way to prevent a score. The players were told in the questionnaire that this foul is wrong and would probably hurt the opponent. Eighty-four percent said they would do it anyway.

The example is far different from intentional fouling in basketball, which is often part of the accepted strategy to stop the clock at the end of games and doesn’t hurt opponents.

While some scenarios in the soccer study involved intentional fouls, others involved nonaggressive rule violations--simple cheating. Seventy percent of boys and 57 percent of girls felt that at least half of their teammates would cheat if the need arose, the study found.

Up to 70 percent of boys and 83 percent of girls indicated the coach was the most important influence in whether they would take part in aggressive acts that broke the rules.

The study didn’t look at whether the athletes who expressed a greater willingness to break rules actually followed through. But it did indicate that coaches have a powerful influence on their attitudes.

“Kids are more likely to do things that are illegitimate or injurious when the punishments are minor and the rewards in terms of accolades are great,” Duda said.

Experience bears that out, said Milt Cooper, national director for programs at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in Kansas City, Mo.

“The coach is the one that models,” said Cooper, a high school football coach in Oklahoma. “There is a tremendous amount of pressure on coaches to do what it takes to win. It takes the special individual to do it the right way.”

The right way is to show the players that some things are more important than sports, Cooper said. For instance, he used to bring his wife and children to practices, and stop practice to introduce the players to them. Players learned by his example that family was more important than the team.

As for rule-breaking, “My players knew right off that I would not tolerate anything that was unfair,” Cooper said. Players who violated the code were benched.

It is the coach’s job to teach right and wrong, said John E. Oullette, head of coaching for the American Youth Soccer Organization in Hawthorne, Calif.

“Players know what’s right and will do what’s right unless the coach tells them it’s OK to grab the shorts,” he said.

The trouble is that some coaches tell players to foul if needed and take the penalties as part of the game, Oullette said.

The soccer federation is training coaches on how to instill values as well as how to teach technique, and will require training of all coaches by the year 2000, Oullette said.

The organization’s Take 5 program sets up various scenarios that players and coaches can discuss for three to five minutes. In one, players are asked whether they would lie to support a friend in an argument over a play. The program teaches that players should be fair to everyone and not lie even to support a friend.

However, those are theoretical situations, and life looks different on the field when the pressure to win builds, Oullette conceded.

“We do great things with our coaches prior to the season,” he said. “The bad thing is, the whistle blows and it changes.”