Study Shows Link Between Team Spirit, Team Spirits

The stereotype of hard-drinking college jocks may have something to it. A study finds college athletes generally outdrink nonathletes.

Alcohol-control education programs don’t seem to make a difference; athletes drank more even though they were quicker to notice messages against drinking, the researchers said.

An NCAA official, however, countered that the Harvard research team was making too much of the drinking and too little of the value of the alcohol-control programs.

“Some of the findings are highly suggestive that the team atmosphere may help to promote some of these heavy drinking behaviors,” said Toben F. Nelson of Harvard’s School of Public Health. Nelson was lead author of the article in the American College of Sports Medicine journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

The study looked at questionnaire responses from 12,777 college students, including 2,172 athletes in 130 four-year colleges around the nation in 1997.

Among men, 57% of athletes reported at least one binge-drinking episode, defined as five or more drinks in a row on one or more occasions in the previous two weeks. In comparison, fewer than 49% of nonathletes drank that much.

Among women, 48% of athletes and 40% of nonathletes reported binge drinking, defined for females as four straight drinks in the same period.

Athletes overall were 50% more likely to say they usually binged when they drank.

And athletes were more likely than nonathletes to have social conditions that raised the likelihood of binge drinking, the study said. For instance, athletes were 47% more likely to say 70% or more of their friends were binge drinkers, 45% more likely to say they had five or more close friends, and 55% more likely to say parties are important, the study said.

“Drinking is a highly social activity, and it’s not very hard to get to a party,” said Henry Wechsler, the study’s senior author.

Education campaigns did not deter drinking, the study said.

Athletes reported a significantly higher level of exposure to alcohol education, but the exposure did not decrease their drinking. In fact, the bigger drinkers tended to be people who reported seeing more anti-drinking education messages. This may mean that anti-drinking messages were more common on campuses where there was more drinking, the study said. However, it also was a sign that the messages weren’t working, Wechsler said.

It will take a multifaceted approach to control the drinking, including pressure from coaches, trainers, team physicians and administrators, Wechsler said. “In our data, the strongest reason athletes give for choosing not to drink is that it interferes with their athletics,” he said.

Critics, however, think things are not as bad as the report indicates.

The differences in drinking behaviors between athletes and nonathletes generally are modest, said psychologist Kenneth Sher of the University of Missouri in Columbia. And the paper doesn’t indicate whether the athletes’ edge in drinking developed on campus or arrived with them from high school, he said.

The Harvard study “makes the problem look bigger than it actually is,” said Mary Wilfert, program director for health and safety at the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.

For one thing, most students were not binge drinkers, she said. Also, other studies have reported that nonathlete fraternity members outdrink athletes, she said.

And even though a drinking problem exists, publicizing reports that a lot of drinking occurs on campus makes the problem worse by giving impressionable young students the idea that they must drink to fit into campus life, Wilfert said.

As for alcohol-control education messages, “Harvard ignores ones that have demonstrated impact,” Wilfert said. Successful programs hammer home the idea that most students don’t drink too much, she said. Showing that binge drinking isn’t the norm encourages students to control their drinking, she said. The NCAA supports demonstration projects on this “social norm” approach to fighting alcohol abuse, she said.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has a panel of college presidents and researchers looking at how to control alcohol on campus. Co-chair Mark Goldman of the University of South Florida would not comment on the panel’s report, which is expected this summer. In general, however, multifaceted approaches seem more effective than education-only campaigns because students already know what’s wrong with drinking too much, he said.

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National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s College Drinking Initiative: https://silk.nih.gov/silk/niaaa1/about/college/default.htm

U.S. Department of Education’s Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention: https://www.edc.org/hec