Honors first, then issues.

In case you haven't visited the Rhodes athletics website recently (www.rhodes.edu/athletics), the hits keep rolling in terms of honors for members of the baseball team. Junior first baseman Daniel Vanaman was named a second-team All American by the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA). Vanaman was also honored as a member of the All South Region's first team and the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference's first team. He is the first player in SCAC history to lead the league in hitting two seasons in a row. 

Robert Flanagan, a junior pitcher, was named third team All American by the ABCA, as well as first team All South and, for the second consecutive time, SCAC Pitcher of the Year.  Catcher Matt Beesley, left fielder Richard Hurd (both juniors), and sophomore right fielder Mason Mosby earned second-team All South honors, and shortstop John Robert Bizzell and pitcher Andy Holt, both sophomores, received honorable mention. Beesley, Hurd, Bizzell, Mosby, and Holt were also first team All Conference, along with junior pitcher Chris Catalanotto and, as mentioned, Flanagan and Vanaman.

In all likelihood, every one of these players will be back in 2008.

The "issues" involving this year's postseason include, obviously, why Rhodes did not receive a national championship bid despite its 36-10 record, which included five wins and only two losses in games with other nationally-ranked teams. That bone has been gnawed pretty thoroughly. Clearly, if a national championship is out there to be won, Rhodes is going to want to win it. One need only recall British mountain climber George Leigh Mallory's reply when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: "Because it's there."

The issue I want to put on the table is a much broader one: Should there be a national championship at all in Division III? And I want to answer that question by saying that, just maybe, the answer is no.

Why even suggest something so heretical?  Several reasons. First, national championships are an artifact of big time Division I athletics that, like other maladies of DI sports such as longer schedules, nontraditional practice seasons, and a focus on winning over participation, have trickled down to DIII. Standing vigil against creeping DI-ism is something Division III should do more of, not less.

Second, when national championships exist, they may warp the thinking of DIII conferences. An example: in preparation for the 2007 season, SCAC made a thoughtful decision to go from the previous regimen of teams playing two series, totaling five games, against each division rival in favor of single four-game series. The decision made sense because it reduced travel costs and, even more important, travel time away from campus and classes.

But check out the SCAC message board at www.d3baseball.com to see how the national championship tail is threatening to wag the scheduling dog. A major theme of recent posts has been how to get more than one SCAC team into the national championship. One culprit that has been identified is the four-game series, because it forces teams to use up a starting pitcher who might otherwise throw in a midweek nonconference game. So for the sake of winning more midweek games, some are arguing, the old system needs to be restored. That argument, and the threat to a good reform that it poses, wouldn't even arise if the national championship tournament did not exist.

Third, individual colleges also may be tempted to succumb to this kind of thinking. Once a team catches the scent of a national championship, winning can become, well, the only thing. Coaches may be judged not by how well their students do in class or develop as individuals but rather by how many wins the team posts against prominent regional opponents. Scheduling may be driven, even at the risk of unnecessary missed-class time, by the need to make sure those big games that count so much in postseason bids get played. The pressure on players to spend ever more time on the game, at the expense of other valuable activities of college life, may get ramped up. And so on.

One DIII athletic director, quoted in William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin's Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton University Press, 2003), writes: "The pressure to reach the postseason--and in some cases to compete for a national championship--often leads to many of our most serious problems: excessive practice time, missed class time, overemphasis on winning, limited time to pursue intellectual and/or cocurricular pursuits."  Another warns: "Once a Division III team has tasted success at the national level, anything less becomes difficult to swallow."

Fourth, according to Bowen and Levin, 85 percent of the NCAA's budget for Division III is spent on national championships. You don't have to think hard to think of other good uses that could be made of that money in DIII.

Finally, it's worth noting that over the years Division III has become a hodgepodge of 424 colleges and universities, some of which are small liberal arts colleges like Rhodes and some of which are large state universities. Bowen and Levin report that if you just look at the DIII schools whose name begins with the letter C, you find institutions with undergraduate enrollments ranging from 529 to 11,997. Liberal arts colleges that decide to chase a national championship face the reckless challenge of competing with institutions many times larger, and thus the added temptation to turn their programs into something even more DI-like than they should be.

Far be it from me to suggest that Coach Jeff Cleanthes and the Rhodes athletic department have succumbed to any such temptations. I am confident they haven't. But as long as national championships exist, the incentive will be there for DIII schools to do whatever it takes to pursue them, and some of those things may involve compromising the healthy balance between athletics, academics, and the other important aspects of college life.