Photo by Thomas Hawk from flickr

The periodic debate about whether athletes should be role models (recently, think John Terry, Tiger Woods, or marketing Women’s Professional Soccer) offers much fodder for provocative discussion.  What are the obligations of sports celebrity?  Is it reasonable to expect athletes to be good at things other than their sport?  Do children really model their behavior and decisions based on tabloid reports about sports heroes?

What the role model debate usually does not offer is systematic analysis or evidence about whether athletes actually have any influence on other people’s behavior—an absence I became aware of a few years ago when working with one of my University of Portland students on a thesis project.  At that time Stephanie Lopez (now married and playing in WPS and with the Women’s National Team as Stephanie Cox) had a vested stake in the debate.  She was on the verge of playing with the US Women’s National Team at the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup in China, was in the midst of a college soccer career that would earn her the Senior CLASS Award “presented each year to the outstanding senior NCAA Division I Student-Athlete of the Year in women’s soccer,” and was even identified in an article on ESPN.com as “soccer’s unassuming role model.”

Bright, earnest, and intellectually curious, Cox wanted to try and explore whether and how elite athletes matter as role models—and she had access to a pretty good sample through her participation with the US Women’s National Team and with the Portland Pilots.  So we looked at the somewhat limited existing scholarly literature on role models, surveyed her teammates with some standard personality inventories and open-ended questions about being a role model, and tried to systematically consider what being a role model is actually about.  Cox did an excellent job with the project, but only had a semester before moving on to start her professional career.

So I went back to the original survey data and put together an article that, after the usual slow slog of academic life, was recently published in the International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching (if anyone is interested in seeing the full article and doesn’t have access to a good library, feel free to send me an email).  Which is all to say that Cox should get the credit for gathering the data, and I should get the blame for the interpretations—including the bits offered here as an attempt to contribute a small something to the debate: what does it say about soccer and society that the role model thing keeps coming up?  And what does being a role model mean for the players themselves?

The role model thing in concept?

The role model debate, while common to a variety of sports, has been a particularly prominent part of American women’s soccer.  After the dramatic success of the 1999 Women’s World Cup in the USA, for example, the original WUSA professional league was premised partially on the idea of the players as role models: “With this league,” claimed US team captain Carla Overbeck, “there will be 200 role models who are very willing to make a positive impact on some child’s life.”  And then when the league failed, Julie Foudy said, “I miss [WUSA] because young girls and boys in local communities where we were playing got to see strong, confident women as good role models on a weekly basis.”

The wisdom of emphasizing role modeling as part of a business model for women’s sports is worth debating—and interesting versions are available elsewhere (see, for example, Wendy Parker’s piece here on Pitch Invasion and Fake Sigi’s response).  But since I don’t have any particular insight into the business side of the debate, my interest is more in some good social science questions embedded in emphasizing women’s players as role models.

Why, for example, does the emphasis on being role models tend to be so much more prominent in the women’s game than the men’s game?  Sociologists think it has to do with broader social inequalities, pointing out that the disproportionate emphasis on women and on racial minorities as role models implicitly highlights individual behavior and obscures social forces as influences on success.  The idea here is that framing Mia Hamm or Brianna Scurry as role models conveys a misleading message of bountiful opportunity—success is simply about individual hard work and talent, so institutional discrimination and structural inequality can be safely ignored.

And then there is the question of why we expect athletes to be good at stuff besides their sport anyway?  Part of it is probably what social psychologists call the “halo effect”—the tendency to mistakenly assume that greatness in one domain of life should generalize to others (for an example, see this analysis applying the halo effect to the Tiger Woods situation).  But the most interesting explanation I came across suggests that it also has to do with broader social changes and the increasing attention to celebrity culture both in sports and elsewhere.

It turns out that early interest in role models by researchers and theorists was focused on the concept as limited to very specific roles.  A teacher would be a role model for teaching, a business manager would be a role model for management, and a soccer player would be a role model for the specific requirements of the game.  But a funny thing has happened over time—the concept has broadened to suggest that a role model should be an exemplar for a comprehensive set of traits that make for a good life.  It is no longer good enough for Hope Solo to be a really good goalkeeper—she now has to be a humanitarian, a fashionista, a social analyst, a business woman, a moral exemplar, a master communicator, and many other things that have little to do with her ability to keep the ball out of the back of the net.

Scholar Chris Rojek argues that these strange expectations have to do with our modern, commodified cultures of sports and celebrity: “the leading Sports Stars, in common with the leading celebrities from celebrity culture, are adopted as role models by fans and their lives are followed as parables of normative behavior.”  Why?  Because as a society we have a need to believe that the people to whom we give insane amounts of both attention and money deserve it.  We want to believe that John Terry’s wealth, fame, and England captaincy are about more than his being a really good central defender.  But, as Terry has made obvious, it is not.

The reality is that elite soccer players, and elite athletes of any stripe, are often relatively young people, still in the process of identity formation, who have devoted themselves primarily to their sport—often at the expense of education, diverse relationships, and other life experiences.  Of course, there are exceptions.  Some athletes are broadly talented, exceptional people.  But it turns out that when you survey something like morality athletes tend to come out as, on average, less developed than non-athletes.

So while I tend to think sports has the potential to do much good, it is far from an automatic process.  At an individual level there is little evidence for the old cliché that “sports builds character.”  But does that hold true for that group so often held up as role models: high level women’s players in the US?

The role model thing in practice?

Cox and I ended up surveying 20 players from the US women’s national team as they prepared for the 2007 FIFA Women’s World Cup, along with 19 players on the highly ranked University of Portland team.  We expected there might be some average differences between players from the two teams, but couldn’t find many—so in the end we aggregated them together.  We also thought we might be able to separate out some of the players as particularly exemplary role models, and asked the players, some team administrators, and groups of fans to identify players on each team that stood out.  But it turned out there was very little consensus about what constituted an “exemplary” role model—another interesting indication that while we use the term all the time, we don’t exactly know what it means.

One piece of the survey tried to do some brief personality assessment, looking at basic traits and things like “generativity,” “empathy,” and “helpfulness” that we thought might particularly dispose the players towards being positive role models.  But when we compared the players’ average scores with those of other non-athlete groups there were essentially no significant differences.  While our measures were somewhat crude, the basic finding was that the players did not have a particularly distinctive constellation of measurable traits relevant to role-model status—like any group of diverse individuals the players were high on certain traits, low on others, and it all evened out when averaged together.

Another piece of the survey asked the players about their own role models while growing up.  Consistent with the findings of other researchers, the players overwhelmingly (82%) identified their own family members—brothers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and other people with whom they have had much direct interaction.  36% also identified female soccer players as having been role models, while 21% identified male athletes (though only one of the 39 players identified a male soccer player).  The reality is that even the best soccer players mostly model their behavior off the people they interact with every day, rather than people they primarily know through the media.

A third piece of the survey asked the players about the characteristics the players associate with being a role model.  Most of these answers focused on what I called meritocratic personality traits in the article—things such as being hard working, dedicated, tough, and positive.  These responses fit with Rojek’s suggestion that sport is “one of the paradigmatic institutions that articulate and elaborate the meritocratic ideal and reinforce achievement culture.  In sport the value of individual discipline, training, teamwork, endurance, determination and ambition is potently stressed.”

Though that meritocratic ideal may somewhat undervalue the importance of opportunities, inequalities, and resources, I was most struck by its prominence in our surveys compared to responses emphasizing sports specific skills (which were only identified by 2 of 39 players).  Considering that the players are public figures because of their athletic ability and were taking a survey specifically targeting soccer players, it was interesting that hardly anyone seemed to think of the way they played the game as part of being a role model.

A final piece of the survey asked the players about how comfortable they were being role models, and how central it was to who they are as people.  As a general theme here the players felt very willing and able to be role models, but it did not seem central to their self-concept.  Modeling comprehensive personal traits might seem to be a daunting task for relatively young women in a specialized athletic role, but it’s what we’ve come to expect.  Should we?

The role model thing in an ideal world?

It might seem obvious to suggest that soccer players should primarily be models and reference points for their soccer abilities, but that goes against a pervasive cultural discourse.  Still, in trying to systematically analyze that discourse, it strikes me that for both the players and the fans it would be useful (and maybe even liberating) to recognize and reflect on the ways the popular concept of athletes as comprehensive role models is more of a social construction than a real experience.

Towards that end, one of the most thought-provoking perspectives I came across in this research came from sport philosopher Randolph Feezell.  He points out that well-intentioned efforts to hold up athletes as comprehensive role models and moral exemplars puts them in the position of implicitly endorsing values they often have not reflected upon, and distracts from a more appropriate appreciation for their physical and athletic abilities.  Feezell suggests that even well-intentioned programs placing athletes in non-athletic settings for purposes of community service are problematic—they reinforce the misleading notion that athletes are morally special.  From this perspective, soccer players should be presented to the community as models of athletic excellence.  Period.

Of course, that may not be realistic—the cultural discourse of elite soccer players as role models is probably not going anywhere.  And that is not entirely a bad thing.  Women athletes in particular have done much to destabilize gender stereotypes, and everyone—soccer players and otherwise—can do with reminders about the importance of social responsibility.

So the point here is really just to try to think about the role model thing with a bit more precision.  I know, for example, that Stephanie Cox during her time with the LA Sol made an effort to work on a mentoring program where players went to work with school children directly and regularly—using their status as part of a quiet habit rather than a marketing abstraction.  And as a teacher I’m impressed when any of my students, athletes or not, make earnest efforts to engage their communities for the better.  But as a soccer fan I know that should not matter as much as the simple reality that Cox is a really good left-sided defender.  Expecting anything else seems to say more about society than it does about soccer players or about the game.

The day the Women’s United Soccer Association died, I called Tom Stone, the ever-quotable head coach of the Atlanta Beat, who was grappling with the fresh reality that he was out of a job.

This was just days after his team finished second in the WUSA in 2003 and shortly before the Women’s World Cup, which had been moved to the United States from China because of the SARS outbreak. There had been optimism that event might boost WUSA’s sagging prospects, just as the groundbreaking 1999 Women’s World Cup gave birth to the idea of a women’s pro league.

But on that fateful day nearly six years ago, reports trickled in to my former newspaper office that young soccer-playing girls in the Atlanta area were howling with sadness. Their ponytailed heroines no longer had a league of their own.

Befitting his innate wit, Stone didn’t demur:

“If their parents had brought them to games more often,” he quipped, “all those little girls wouldn’t be crying today.”

The reasons for WUSA’s demise were attributable to a business model that didn’t work, even after tens of millions of dollars had been expended, executives were replaced, television deals reworked and star players accepted hefty pay cuts. Some have argued that the social message WUSA was trying to get across — with an overt, if benign, endorsement of “girl power” — turned off potential fans in other demographic groups. To hard-core sports lovers, here was another example of a women’s sports entity feeling the need to become a cause.

Not enough people came to WUSA games, or watched them on TV, to adequately attract advertisers and sponsors needed to keep the league afloat. Stone’s prognosis was correct, and pulling the plug was strictly a business decision.

A few years later, as Women’s Professional Soccer was being organized around a slimmed-down approach, commissioner Tonya Antonucci was very clear about her priorities. While the subject of gender in sports was unavoidable, the emphasis would be on making professional women’s soccer stick.

You don’t have to be a fan of the over-the-top methods that gargantuan enterprises like the National Football League employ to understand that pro sports in America — as well as major college athletics — is all about . . . business. For niche sports like soccer and women’s athletics, it’s about staying in business.

All of this should be quite obvious.

Yet there have been protests against veering away from the idea of women’s sports as a social cause. A heated response to Chicago Red Stars  CEO Peter Wilt’s rather mild explanation of WPS philosophy on this point was drenched, typically, in dreary ideological twaddle:

I’ll bet Soccer United Marketing has some talented people who could think up an appropriately edgy marketing campaign based around girl power, women’s rights, or feminism that would push all the right buttons for getting people into the gate. Male and female. Niche or mainstream.

The recent travails of the more established Ladies Professional Golf Association and the Women’s National Basketball Association should be instructive to activists and those who see the world strictly through the prism of gender. As business ventures, they’re both on shaky ground, and that’s all that should matter to anyone claiming to be an advocate for feminism or women’s sports.

The venerable LPGA, more than 50 years old, is undergoing turmoil following the forced resignation of Carolyn Bivens, the tour’s first female commissioner. Players balked at her management style and are rightly worried about the loss of sponsorships and television exposure triggered partially by the recession.

Ever since its inception 13 years ago, the WNBA has attempted to be “appropriately edgy” with a mix of activities to attract fans across the board. Between individual teams marketing to lesbian fans and league-wide efforts to crusade on behalf of breast cancer awareness, the WNBA has been admirable in fashioning itself as a rather enlightened organization.

But social enlightenment does not pay the bills. The long-term viability of the WNBA is in some doubt because its benefactor, the NBA, is facing financial obstacles and potential labor strife. The WNBA has reduced roster sizes and folded its winningest franchise, the Houston Comets. The best team in the league this season, the Indiana Fever, might not be around much longer:

The social aspect (of women’s basketball) is wonderful. But in times of recession, tough business decisions must be made. Teams are saving money in many ways, and one is staffing. If you have a choice where to put your marketing staff effort, it’s on the NBA team, not the WNBA team.

A decidedly non-female sports league, the Arena Football League, has gone out of business, unlikely to return. The economy ultimately claimed it after it operated on the margins of tight finances, gimmickry and public indifference for years. Women’s sports and soccer in North America exist on the same fragile ground.

Are sports and social initiatives intertwined outside of women’s sports? Absolutely. FIFA’s ballyhooed pledge to stamp out racism in soccer is noble, if largely ineffective. On college basketball telecasts, ESPN relentlessly promotes cancer research in the memory of Jim Valvano. And the community-minded selflessness of athletes like NFL running back Warrick Dunn is a powerful example of how the sports world can contribute to worthy causes.

But demanding that a fledging league like WPS shoulder the burden of advancing such things like an anti-rape movement is absurd. WPS has had enough difficulty launching during a recession, experiencing lower-than-expected attendance figures and attracting corporate donors. People go to sporting events to be entertained, not to attend a “Take Back the Night” rally. WPS is right to promote personality players like Hope Solo and should take heed of the need to improve the product it puts on the field.

The women’s sports movement in America was borne out of the politics of feminism in the 1960s and crystallized with the passage of Title IX in 1972. Its strongest legacy is in college athletics, which have not been shielded from the recession but are not going away anytime soon. (Stone, now at Texas Tech, is not the only former WUSA coach currently in the college ranks.)

Professional sports, however, is a dicier proposition. A generation ago, Billie Jean King expertly blended feminist activism with her vision of a more lucrative future for female tennis pros. She used her business savvy and personal passion to accomplish this and has been justly lauded for her pioneering efforts.

It’s a combination that T. Fitz Johnson, owner of the expansion WPS Atlanta Beat franchise, sounds like he might try to emulate, but in a manner that fits the times, and the paying customers he’s trying to attract. The original Beat inspired his soccer-playing daughters, and renewing that enjoyment for others prompted him to get involved. Speak to him for just a few moments and it’s clear he’s rather zealous about this.

But as a successful entrepreneur, he also understands that his latest venture has to be more than just a nice thing for girls and women to call their own, much less for activists to hoist as a crucible for a “post-feminist America.” For WPS, “what’s relevant to its own existence” is not the promotion of social issues but succeeding as a business.

Because if it does not, little girls will be crying again, and they may not get another chance to cheer.

Wendy Parker is the writer and creator of Atlanta Soccer News and covered the WUSA, soccer and other women’s and college sports for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.