Believe it or not, winning is not everything for UCLA Women’s Gymnastics Coach Valorie Kondos Field.
“If you believe the hype of a win, it’s a very shallow feeling,” she says.
This from a coach whose teams in the past seven years have won four national championships, six regional titles and five Pac-10 championships. What, then, does she believe is more important for a student-athlete than winning?
Integrity. Honesty. Standards.
“Student-athletes who win a national championship but who don’t care about anything else in their lives — their academics or their social lives — may experience the thrill of winning, but it’s not a lasting feeling of success,” says Kondos Field ’87, sitting high in the stands of Pauley Pavilion surrounded by the blue and gold banners of Bruin national-championship teams.
To be sure, winning is wonderful, and few schools can approach UCLA’s athletic achievements. In fact, with 90 NCAA team championships as of this May — 67 men’s and 23 women’s — UCLA has won more national titles than any other school in the nation. The joy of winning was clearly evident on the faces of Kondos Field’s gymnasts when they earned their most recent NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championship April 25 before a packed arena in Lincoln, Neb.
“That jubilation, that celebration was simply because we did it; we completed the plan. We worked hard and we competed well. The win,” she says, “was icing on the cake.”
Icing, perhaps, but in and of itself, it is not success. That inner glow, rather, grows practice by practice, class by class, relationship by relationship. The most a win can do, Kondos Field says, is confirm the feeling. A loss cannot erase it.
Granted, Kondos Field operates free from the pressures of hungry sports agents, rabid boosters and big-money television contracts — those elements that can create an environment in which winning becomes paramount, sometimes to the exclusion of the collegiate ideal. Her unsullied method might appear as a lamb among wolves in the world of one of college’s revenue sports.
Yet, her approach would not be without precedent. Kondos Field’s role model in coaching — the man she phoned, victorious, from the arena floor in Nebraska — stuck to his principles for many title-free years before finally earning a national championship.
Some scholars of collegiate basketball tend to dismiss John Wooden’s success as the product of a less pressurized time. But Wooden also struggled with major challenges, including high academic requirements, practice facilities so dated that he cringed when showing them to recruits and the indignity of playing home games in high school gyms and civic auditoriums.
Wooden — who retired after 27 years at UCLA as the winningest coach in NCAA history with a record 88 straight victories and 10 national basketball titles — taught that the merits of a champion flow from the headwaters of the soul. He would say to his players: “Discipline yourself and others won’t need to,” and encourage them to “be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Character is what you really are; reputation is what you are perceived to be.”
His winning formula boiled down to a simple axiom captured in his famous Pyramid of Success: Respect yourself. Respect education. Build integrity and high standards off the court first.
College athletics seems to straddle two parallel universes. The first is the universe of conventional wisdom and expectation in which the most important question often is “How do you build a winning program?,” to which the conventional answer touts fancy facilities, sometimes-flexible academic standards and expensive coaching staffs.
Clearly this is not, and has never been, UCLA’s universe. Nor could UCLA compete on such terms. Academic standards are rigid, Pauley Pavilion is an historic facility in need of a facelift and the football team has never had a campus home stadium — and probably never will, given the school’s small footprint and its proximity to densely populated communities. UCLA’s coaching salaries have historically been below the national average for the big-money sports of football and basketball. (Ben Howland’s salary as new head basketball coach — a base of $900,000 a year and incentives that could push his income to over $1 million, paid from revenues generated by the athletic department — is the most lucrative ever offered by UCLA. Even so, it still falls well below that of many top collegiate coaches in the U.S., some of whom earn in the realm of $2 million annually.)
Then there is the universe of Kondos Field, Wooden and other highly successful coaches at UCLA and elsewhere who point to those less tangible qualities that can’t necessarily be chalked up on a stat sheet.
One effect of this philosophy is faith in the value — actually, the necessity — of high academic and ethical standards. Such standards are well ingrained at UCLA, where 60 Bruin student-athletes have been named Academic All-Americans, four have earned Rhodes Scholarships and hosts of others have received a broad variety of scholastic honors.
UCLA’s ongoing commitment to upholding these values is nowhere more evident than in the recent hires in the athletic department, starting with that of Athletic Director Dan Guerrero ’74.
Guerrero makes it clear that excellence in his program, both athletic and academic, will be an all-or-nothing proposition.
“The greatest challenge,” he says, “is to maintain an intercollegiate athletics program at the highest levels of performance while still graduating student-athletes who maintain high standards for academic achievement.”
Finding someone who understood the necessity of achieving that balance was critical to Guerrero’s selection for the job. Says Chancellor Albert Carnesale: “Dan will do an outstanding job. He knows that an athletic program must be successful in the classroom as well as on the field of competition.”
Pete Blackman ’62, J.D. ’67, administrative vice chancellor and chair of the committee that selected Guerrero (and who was himself a player under Coach Wooden from 1958–’62), says the new athletic director — who is an inductee in the UCLA Baseball Hall of Fame — understands the nature of UCLA athletics.
“Student-athletes are just that — both students and athletes — and here, in the historic tradition of UCLA, they have been students first,” Blackman says.
Among Guerrero’s tasks in his first year at UCLA was hiring new head coaches for football and basketball. His choices — Karl Dorrell ’87 for football and Howland for basketball — again reflect the prevailing wisdom at UCLA and Guerrero’s own commitment to having people on board who will recruit athletes who meet the profile for what is necessary to be successful both as students and as players.
At his inaugural news conference, Dorrell said his primary goal as new head football coach is “to reestablish UCLA’s tradition and our integrity in our football program.” Not that UCLA has been without integrity in its football program, “but I want to bring it to the front of the page instead of in the middle.”
Howland had similar words when he was introduced as the new head basketball coach: “Our players will graduate. That emphasis starts right here with me.”
Howland comes to UCLA from the University of Pittsburgh, where former interim Athletic Director Marc Boehm raves about his “unique and special way of getting those kids to go to class and take pride in their schoolwork.
“He cares about their future,” says Boehm of Howland’s relationship with his athletes. “That’s what this is all about.”
It's counterproductive, Bruin coaches say, to emphasize athletic achievement without likewise encouraging high standards in other aspects of a student-athlete’s life. They ask: How is it even possible to run a college program as if it were not at a college?
Kondos Field is quick to point to a salient statistic: In her 20 years at UCLA (she began as an assistant coach and choreographer in 1983), gymnasts have made better grades during their competitive season than during spring quarter, when they have more free time. This, she says, demonstrates the importance of structure and expectations.
“We have proven over and over again that our young adults feel much more successful when they are acting responsibly. Our latest recruit told me that was one of the biggest reasons she decided to come to UCLA, because I was the only coach in the country with whom she spoke who actually talked to her about these things. She wanted that structure, and she wanted to be held accountable.”
Kondos Field’s squad is not, to be sure, the only team on campus that successfully balances academics and athletics. Women’s basketball, golf, track and field, soccer, softball, water polo, swimming and volleyball all have high graduation rates, as do men’s baseball, golf, track and field, volleyball and water polo. In fact, according to the 2002 NCAA Graduation Report, 86 percent of all UCLA student-athletes who have completed their eligibility — those who play their college careers at UCLA without leaving early — ultimately graduate from the university. That puts the Bruin graduation rate 4 percentage points above Cal and a percentage point ahead of USC among teams in the Pac-10 Conference. When UCLA’s graduation rates for all student-athletes who entered as freshmen in 1995–’96 (including those who left the program early) are compared against all NCAA Division I schools, the numbers are outstanding: The Bruins boast a 73-percent graduation rate in that category — the third highest in the Pac-10 — compared with 60 percent for Division I as a whole.
Gymnast Onnie Willis is a prime example of Kondos Field’s principle that structure and accountability are essential to the overall success of the true student-athlete. In 2001, Willis won the NCAA all-around title; she was Pac-10 all-around champion in 2002; and this past season earned the 2002–’03 Honda Sports Award as the nation’s top female collegiate gymnast. Her days during the season start with early-morning workouts followed by classes, physical therapy, practice, more treatments, dinner and homework. Weekends are for meets and travel. She participates in meetings of the Bruin Athletic Council twice a month, and as a team mentor she meets regularly with younger athletes. All this, and she still maintains a 3.67 GPA, is an Academic All-American, an Academic All-Regent and an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship recipient, and she plans to graduate in 2004 with a major in psychology and a minor in education.
“Why do I do this to myself?” she asks. “To be at a university like UCLA and to know you are part of its awesome tradition is just something you’ll never forget and no one can take away from you. The hard work and dedication and all that is just part of it.”
Fans want a winning team. And college fans in particular are never reticent to hold the feet of a coach or administrator to the fire if their team is doing poorly, filling letters-to-the-editor columns and online message boards with vituperative screeds.
Expectations among fans and boosters for some Bruin sports, says Donald Morrison, UCLA’s faculty athletics representative to the NCAA and the William E. Leonhard Chair in Management in The Anderson School, may need revision to match the realities of UCLA’s position as an institution that sets high academic and ethical standards for all its students, including athletes, thus self-limiting the pool of top candidates from which it can draw.
But even in an environment in which academic excellence is as vital as athletic prowess, Guerrero asserts that Bruin teams have a realistic shot at glory on the field as well as in the classroom.
“I believe that we can have a program that can be consistently among the best in the country,” he says. “Our programs should, on a continuous basis, be able to vie for Pac-10 and national championships.”
Offensive tackle Bryce Bohlander also believes that setting high academic standards for athletes doesn’t mean diminishing the quality of UCLA’s teams on the field. In his view, academically deficient athletes aren’t the ones you would want as teammates.
“If you’re not a good student coming into college, that kind of says something about your character,” says Bohlander, who vowed when he was recruited to complete his degree in four years. He did, graduating this spring with a degree in political science and a nice fellowship package for graduate school.
Rather than asking fans to lower expectations, perhaps more should be made of the high expectations that exist in the invisible areas — at practice, in class, in social conduct. When those kinds of expectations are at the forefront, coaches say, the championship banners will go up for everyone to see.
“Those who hire you as a coach are wanting winning teams,” says Wooden. “They’re thinking of scores. But I believe those scores can be a by-product of these other things.”
And maybe more of an effort should be made to educate fans that building a winning team — or rebuilding one from a team that has had a disappointing season or two — doesn’t happen overnight.
It didn’t happen overnight for Coach Wooden. It took him 16 years to hang that first championship banner in 1964 (a season his team finished with an unbeaten 30–0 record).
They were 16 arduous years, and it didn’t help that UCLA had not yet built Pauley Pavilion and the basketball team was moving around courts at Santa Monica City College, Long Beach City College, Venice High School and Downey Civic Auditorium, among other places. With no real place to call home, Wooden recalls, recruiting “was very, very difficult.” It was made more so because then, as now, academic standards were higher than at many rival schools.
Wooden, however, came to recognize that those standards were actually a plus for him as a coach.
“It took quite a while for me to get it into my own head, but because our entrance requirements were more difficult, we were getting a better class of individual … players who were easier to work with and easier to coach to play as a team,” he says.
Even with UCLA’S high academic standards, there are exceptions. Applications for admission by potential varsity athletes are treated differently than applications from other students. Such applications — along with those from musicians and others with special talents — go straight to the Special Action Admissions Committee and its chair, Tom Lifka, UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor for student academic services.
According to Lifka, a gifted athlete who does not meet UC eligibility requirements can be considered for special-admit status if the committee believes that, given appropriate resources, he or she can succeed academically at UCLA.
Athletic Department Director of Academic Services Kim Barger says she would love to have had a class the caliber of UCLA’s special admits in her previous jobs.
“Our special admits look a lot different than other people’s,” she says. “Most schools would kill for those kinds of profiles. UCLA is not for everybody. It takes a special person to be able to compete at this level athletically and academically. I don’t think UCLA is willing, either as an institution or as an athletic department, to sell out.”
While its higher academic standards may rule out some prospects, UCLA’s academic tradition attracts others.
“There’s not a better school in the country when it comes to combining academics, athletics and social opportunities,” says Michael Sondheimer ’77, associate athletic director for recruiting.
The standards set by UCLA and other top-tier institutions seem to be taking hold nationwide. Beginning in August, all NCAA student-athletes will have to meet significantly higher standards for eligibility and academic progress. Such a change should help to reduce the academic/athletic divide between UCLA and some of its competitors.
Whether it closes that competitiveness gap or not, Wooden says it doesn’t really matter. What’s important, he believes, is for the institution and its programs to continue reaching and emphasizing those things that are within its control.
“Just never cease trying to be the best you can be,” he says. “That’s under your power and the other things aren’t.”
Wooden’s simple truth. What a difference between the hype of a win and the satisfaction of true success.
