Stars on Sports Intro: It's time for Stars on Sports! A podcast-radio show dedicated to sharing stories about our athletic program at Lansing Community College. LCC athletics has a strong tradition. 25 national championship wins! Over 190 All-Americans! 19 MCCAA All Sports trophies! Stars on Sports will introduce you to individuals that have contributed to our program success and give you the backstory on what it takes to develop it. We'll also dive into and break down the topics and issues facing athletic departments across the nation and right here at LCC. This is Stars on Sports!

Hello and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sport. I'm joined today by our assistant athletic director, Steven Cutter and our producer Daedalian Lowry. And gentlemen, each month I get a magazine called Athletic Business and I really enjoy the articles in it. A lot of facility based stuff, but there's some leadership stuff. In the beginning of the article they have, it's called a score. And they give these statistics of things going on in sports. For example, 18 million. They write down that number and that number is the mountain dollars LSU football coach Brian Kelly said the program has spent to assemble the 2025 roster. I mean, that's incredible. $18 million for a college roster. Four is a number. Four is the number of NCAA Division 1 schools as of August 25th that had to take loans for their athletic department. Michigan State was actually one of them at 12 million. And a lot of just cool numbers. 41 is the number of D1 school that opted out of the settlement. And those are things we're not talking about. But there was one in there that really stuck me because today we're going to talk about laboratory for learning. And that's kind of a phrase I've my career about educational athletics is that we're the biggest classroom on campus in high schools. So life lessons on the playing field was something that I had talked about. But in this score statistic, the number was 89. In 89, it's the percentage of more than 800 parents of high school student athletes surveyed who say life skill development is the top reason why they support their son or daughter participating in sport. 89%. 3% were nil. Which just is crazy to me that that's even a number. But the 89% is intriguing to me because that's a high number and that's what it should be. When we talk about ERO, when we talk about just how skills that you learn in athletics apply to the classroom and we'll dive into those two a little bit today, I Still don't know if that number. I think that number is too high. If you're asking me. When I think of reasons why parents support their student athlete and that's a good thing, I like that answer, but I think it's the politically correct answer. I'm not sure it's true. I think they do it. They live through themselves. They do it because they want their kid to participate, do it for winning. And the main one, the generation before me, they would play and if they were good enough, they would earn a college scholarship somewhere. It changed that. The goal was to earn a college scholarship and. And you had to play towards it. Where instead of it was the result. Coach cut. We talked about it a little bit. What do you think that number too high? Too low? You think it's right?

Well, I think numbers are numbers at the end of the day. And you, you spoke about the 18 million. And that's really only becomes a relative number when you see all the other Power 4 Division 1 schools and what they're spending on football, then the number becomes a little more relevant. When you're talking about 89%. I think the reality of it is you're right. If you break it down and think holistically. Yeah, that's what we want. We want to see them growing and getting better and finding the best version of themselves. All that sounds great, but the reality is, and I've experienced it myself coaching youth sports for a number of years, it's more about you want your child to have the most success that they can. You want your child to win and be successful. And then all the other stuff. If somebody asks you a question, yes, it's see them reach their max potential, the whole team, but it's not really about the team. It's about the individual. So that's why winning kind of gets in the way at the younger ages than the more important stuff. And sometimes those understandings, maybe even in my case, take some time to completely understand them.

Nadalia, I'm going to ask you, even though I know what you're going to say, but I want your outside perspective.

Oh, you're a mind reader now.

But real quickly, you're right. What do parents want? And it should be growth, it should be success, and that's not necessarily winning. And I think we lose that focus sometimes. But the Dalian, I mean, I tend.

To be a bit of a skeptic anytime it comes to numbers, percentages, anything like that, as far as, like, surveys and samples go, it doesn't mean that there isn't some validity to it, because there is.

But.

But I would have to agree with you. I do feel like 89% is pretty high. If I'm understanding this correctly, they're saying that I'm putting my kid into sports because I want him or her to learn life lessons.

Yep, that is exactly correct.

I would say, though, that those parents who have had their children in sports for a while might see the results of that. You know, you got guys like cut here who focus in on a lot of those life lessons and make it a part of their coaching strategy. So eventually that kid. If you've got enough of those coaches out there doing that same thing, eventually that kid's gonna come home and say, yeah, I kind of learned this from the coach. And so I could see that eventually becoming a thing.

That's a good point in the sense of is it intentional or unintentional? And I think it has become more intentional of what we're trying to. The skills, we're trying to teach them. And we've talked a lot teaching leadership skills on this podcast. But very early in my career, I went to a basketball camp with a friend of mine out in Virginia. Shout out to Jeff Monroe. He graduated with my brother, played football in college, but he was a basketball coach. And he had on his shirt 32 minutes of heart. Four quarters of eight minutes meant 32 minutes of heart, and then the heart with an acronym, which I have used my whole life now, of hard work, enthusiasm, attitude, respect, and teamwork. You would call them core values. And they are core values. And those were what my first 20 years athletic administration, all at the high school level. That is what we modeled our athletic program on, that I tried telling parents and coaches that if they participated in this athletic program, those were the five things that they would get out of our participating that would help them in the classroom and in life. Understanding the importance of working hard, understanding the importance of enthusiasm, understanding the importance of having a positive or negative attitude. You know, just being passionate about what you do. I'm a big. Follow your passion. I mean, that's what's gonna get you successful in life. If you do something, you know, your. Why. Respect. And we talked about respect this morning, of how we deal with that constantly at even this level, of the different types of respect. And then again, to be successful, you need to be part of a team. So those were our five core values. It's changed some. We use Shine now, and we're gonna do a podcast on core values at some time. But right now, we do Shine you know, stars shine. So service, hard work, integrity, never give up. And excellent or enthusiasm are our shine core values. But back to learning on the field and you hit onto it a little bit that there are things they're the soft skills, I guess you would say that we use as a key phrase in leadership now that hopefully kids are learning, such as handling pressure situations, teammate conflict. The biggest one, and I think we forget sometimes is failure and adversity. And I don't think we talk about it enough, and we've talked about it a lot on our podcast. But there are a lot of mistakes that we just wash over. I mean, like batting averages when you're batting.200 or something that, I mean, you're hit, you, you know, one out, two out of 10 you missed eight times. But those are mistakes or failure that you learned from. And the big one we talk about at our level is time management. I mean, the demands we put on our student athletes, they have to manage their time because of their schedule. I mean, and you have a great graphic that you give your student athletes regarding, you know, 24 hours in a day or seven days a week that we share. Time management, delayed gratification, that it takes time to be successful. So again, we were going to talk about laboratory for Learning because again, we've been talking about educational athletics for five years on this podcast. But I thought it was just a good point with this percentage thing out there.

I will say that, you know, if you guys had been in place like when I was a younger man in high school, there's a good chance I might have actually played sports because I actually started down that road for a moment. And part of my aversion to it was the coaching style. I got in and started doing it and I was like, you know, it's 6:30 in the morning. I don't feel like being yelled at. I'm not doing this. And that was my attitude.

And that's a great point. And maybe that's why this percentage is higher, because it has changed and, you know, transformative, transactional. I talked to a student athlete a week or two ago and she talked about how her current coach is much more positive than her previous coach and not a negative. She had a great experience with her previous coach, but that coach yelled more and was harder and was, you know, more tough on mistakes. So I think that is a key factor. Why kids quit.

Well, you know, we're talking about numbers here a little bit. So number. For Daedalian, it said that 70% of kids quit sports because of One singular thing, and that is coaches.

And that number at the age of 13 and I've even seen it as high as 75% which again, they probably do other things and such, but that's a high number.

The contagious proximity too. And sometimes that isn't always a positive thing. And so you get in it and you're okay, I don't like this. This is not for me. And it doesn't have to be that you're in an environment where you're getting yelled at, but sometimes you can just kind of tell, you can read the environment and be like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. This is not fun. And at the end of the day, sports is supposed to be fun. And most of the time where it doesn't become fun is when at young ages people start putting pressure on the kids that are playing those sports and making it more. Less about the life lessons or what you called the soft skills and more about performance based results stuff.

And it should be fun. And I think we lose track of that because we're so focused on winning. And if we don't win, everyone's mad or blaming or focusing on mistakes that led to that result that we forget. If this stays our main focus, youth sports and sports will be much better off. If this number of 89% is true, we're in a good place moving forward. And to Daedalian's point, I want to cover some other things, but it does come down to coaching. One of my favorite analogies of a coach is what is the original premise of a coach. It was a horse drawn carriage that moved one person from one place to the next. And that's what coaches do, move people from one place to the next, move. And I would always battle like in my previous setting that when we had coaches that were teachers that oh, they can't be good at both, that they're spending too much time on coaching. I always said they are good at both. Our best coaches are our best teachers. And to your point, Dadalyn, I think we really worked hard on that, that it changed how you handle kids by reminding them that they are teachers, they are instructors, they should be look similar to how you look in a classroom in front of 30 students. And again, it's kind of just flipped the script of being a positive representation, being more controlled, more, you know, good sports is what it is. But I always believe coach equals teacher and they should resemble kind of how they model each other. So if you're good in one, you're going to be good in the other. So I believe coaches are the best teachers, but I also believe we'd have less yelling and less negative experiences if we emphasize that kind of leadership.

It's also trying to understand what's most important. Ultimately, it's the ego that gets in the way. And as parents, we want to see what's best for our children. And when they're out in the world, whether it's on the sports field or anywhere else, we want them to show a positive reflection on us and how we've brought them up. And the same thing happens when they're playing sports and they're failing. The ego gets involved and that's where the frustration from the parent side starts coming in. And then you also have the same thing on the coaching side because when the players go out to play, doesn't matter if they're 8 years old or 18 years old, if they don't do well, it's a reflection on the coaches. And so if it's all ego driven, you get pretty upset, you're very frustrated. But if you have an end goal in sight and a really big why of what you're trying to do, what's most important here, then that's where you can start seeing growth and you can start fostering that growth in others too. Understanding that there are going to be failures, there's going to be setbacks, there's not going to be great times all the time. It's about how you deal with them and how you recover from them.

And again, two point there. One, yes, athletics offers real time feedback. And you know, in the classroom it's usually assignment based or, or turning a paper and getting that feedback back where every play or every pitch or every step, you get feedback of where you are at and if you're getting better or getting worse and then still understanding that mistakes like again in my office I said sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. That mistakes are learning reps their ways of trying things or ways of doing things that didn't work or you got to figure out to get better just.

To push back on. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. I've really pushed on that statement and said if you're learning, you're winning. And so it's more an understanding that winning, it comes from the learning piece and so you don't have to lose to learn. If you're learning, you're winning either way.

And I agree with that 100%. I mean, learning is, I believe, leadership. I think learning, once you stop learning and you stop living that it's life. It's a growth mindset kind of a thing. I was just trying to play on lose. But I'm glad you differentiated that because it shouldn't be a negative kind of tone. We've talked about that learning is again, back to what laboratory of learning is what we're trying to do every day with our student athletes and with our environment at all levels except for the professional level. And maybe now when we see 18 million for LSU, that's a big business. Not necessarily educational athletics, but in educational athletics and you know, youth sports isn't a part of educational athletics, but to the percentage of 70 quit that it still has to be fun and learning because they're at the developmental stage, that they should be like trying things, experimenting things.

Eventually they get to the high school or the college level. And so that's what they've learned.

And coaches also have. You know, I agree what you said earlier too, that I always said if every kid in your class failed an exam, something didn't go right during that lesson, or that there's some ownership on the professor. Like whenever I taught a class, I always said, I probably learn more than the students do by teaching just what works, what doesn't work. This went well. This, you know, this was a hit. Like, even when I play music at our event, I laugh like, oh, they're dancing to this one. I'll play this one again next time. Or this one didn't go over well. And, you know, different age groups. But I believe teachers are the biggest learner and coaches should be the biggest learners too. Throughout that season, as I've talked about before, I like attentional practice plan at the bottom to have notes so you can reflect what worked or what didn't work that night or, hey, this is something I gotta do the next day. And that's a lesson plan. That practice plan is a teacher's lesson plan. Syllabi, core syllabi. That's more our handbook. Our has our mission and our core values in there. What we talked about in the right context. The classroom and the playing field should be very similar environment, very similar structure. So as a coach, do you think like that, or I know you do, and I know yours is. But that just by how you do it, or that as an administrator, I'm saying you're a coach and a teacher, but are you thinking, well, I need to be a teacher or are you just. Again, the emphasis on learning is more of that.

I think it's the same as saying, I'm a basketball player or Calling them an athlete. I think the coach teacher is really a synonymous thing. And there's the different levels of teachers, there's great ones, and there's, you know, average teachers. And so what you get out of it is going to depend on how much learning you get out of it. And some people are extremely smart, but that doesn't mean that they can portray that to somebody else, that they've got to be able to relate to the next person. And I know when I sit here and I talk about, you know, whether it's parenting or coaching or ego or anything else, it's. It's not like I'm sitting here and saying, you know, I'm on the mountain. You need to kind of listen to this. Because I. I look back and I think I was a terrible youth coach. I look back at even last year, and I think I was a bad coach. And then the only thing I do know is that I'm a better coach this year than I was last year. And that from learning and growth. And that's kind of from my perspective, what it looks like. And the most important thing is to keep learning, keep reflecting on what it looked like at 8U T ball or what it looked like at 12U basketball, and learn from that kind of stuff and then start impacting others as we move along.

And I am the opposite. And again, I think, again, learning is from reflection, accountability, and intentional improvement. But when I was a youth coach, I thought I was pretty good. Like, even I coached at the middle school level because I worked hard at development skills and getting everyone playing time. Like, I would have note cards of ways, you know, and you have to throw them out the window if someone got in foul trouble or someone showed up sick, you know, but I wanted to. And at the sacrificing of winning sometimes, which I don't even think winning was important in middle school sports, but I felt if, if I did my job in practice and they all became better fundamentalists, that we would compete and win. And I think we forget that sometimes. And I think the better coaches at any level do those things about giving everybody an opportunity. Like we talk about talking to every kid every day, but finding opportunities for kids to succeed is an important part of a teacher. And building confidence. And then again, just that positive instruction and making sure they are improving and, and short term it might cost a win, but hopefully long term it builds a program. And I've talked about before that I think some of the most successful programs have had good coaching at younger level that kids have developed and developed that depth and that talent across the board instead of relying on star players per se, or trick plays per se at those levels.

It's still supposed to be fun.

Yeah, it needs to be developmental instruction. Like I've seen teams in baseball bunt every time just because they knew they'd throw an air to first base and they could run all the way around the bases. And what is that teaching kids, you know? Although bunt defense, as we've seen in the playoff lately, probably does need to be emphasized a little more. So, the dallian, we haven't talked bowling yet. Any quick lessons from bowling before we head into it?

I don't have any. I played terrible last night, by the way. Yeah, I was two games under average and one was at average. So, you know, so what? Anyway, the one thing I do want to mention, though, is if that 89% has any validity to it, the percentage of people that say that they put their kids in sports due to, you know, learning life lessons and such. A lot of it has to do with what coaches are putting out there this day as compared to when I was growing up, because that was not the vibe I got back then. And then, of course, shows, doing what you're doing, you know, things like this, podcasts, conversations, you know, whatever it is that athletics is putting out there hopefully is reaching people.

I hope so too, because that, again, is something, you know, this was not the direction this podcast was going when we started it, but I like finding topics to talk about and that's an interesting thing you mentioned about. If the 89% is true, would we have less issues with playing time? Because playing time is part of a life lesson. So that should change that dynamic if this statement is true, moving forward. Because we both know at every level, playing time's a separator and a point of contention. But if parents are more worried about learning life lessons, not playing is a life lesson.

Yeah, we should do another podcast on understanding ego and that we all have it and to understand it. Because the stuff, the field, the bad feelings about playing time, especially at the youth levels, goes back to that.

Okay, again, great conversation, priests, both of your inputs. I sure hope that number is right. I sure hope we work toward that number because I truly believe sports would be a more positive environment if we really understand that they are classroom learning labs and learning life lessons, which I hope I have led by and lived my life showing that because I am a learner. If you look at all my skill tests, learning is my number one thing. So I focus more on learning Than the mistakes part of it. And teaching life lessons, because that's why I'm in this business. So I thought that was very interesting, seeing that statistic in the last week. That was not the number I thought I'd see. And I thought there were other things that were. Thought parents were more important in that. So. All right, pumpkin, you like it or you don't like it? Okay, I'll start.

Like to look at or eat.

But that's a good point because I like pumpkins. I like. I mean, we need pumpkins in our yard. I like when people have pumpkins. I like my kids should send us pictures of them decorating pumpkins for their dorm rooms or their home apartments. And I don't know where they got that from, but I guess that's what we do in our family. But I love pumpkin pie, too, which is weird because I'm pretty picky on my pies and fruit pies and such. I'm not sure I like pumpkin in anything else, but I like fall food. We talked about chili on our latke. You missed that. We'll have to come back to that one with you on chili. But I like cider. I'm not a big Apple person, but I like caramel apples.

Are we hitting on cider or pumpkins?

Both fall foods. So pumpkin first. You didn't seem to like pumpkin when I looked over there. When you. No. No pumpkin pie for you. No pumpkin seeds?

No.

Interesting. I like pumpkin seeds, too. Now that I think about it, they're messy getting them out of there. But what about you, Daedalian?

I am a one and done kind of guy when it comes to pumpkins. So, you know, like pumpkin pie, I'll have one slice because it's the holidays. Once I'm done with that slice, I really don't need any more pumpkin pie for the rest of the year.

Really.

Pumpkin seeds I don't really care for at all. You know, I'm not even gonna say. Maybe I might buy one and then be done with it. The one exception to that, I will say. But it doesn't have to do with the fact that it's pumpkin is pumpkin donuts. I do like pumpkin donuts.

Me too. Me too. I like pumpkin donuts, cider donuts.

It doesn't really have to do with the pumpkin. Has to do with the donut, because I like the donuts.

But though the flavor to it, it does.

It's got a vibe.

Do you buy pumpkin to put in your yard or have you in your.

I do like decorating pumpkins. I'm not really big on pulling the guts out of it, but you know, you know, it's fun.

Do you guys have pumpkins?

Oh, yes, we do.

Okay, so you're more like him. You'll have like a. So at Thanksgiving, we'll wait for the Thanksgiving pie question. But.

But that's exactly it. That's when I have it. I have that one. And done.

What other pie would you have at Thanksgiving?

Well, see, I feel like we might use that.

We will. So don't answer that. We'll use that in a month. All right. Back to cider, though. Do you like apple cider?

It's okay.

I like it. It's not great. I don't. I take more a glass and enjoy it.

The other thing I just thought of is pumpkin spice spice latte. I will have one of those every.

Once in a while.

I don't. But that is such a popular thing right now that the media has covered that. How big? Pumpkin lattes or coffee that really become Apple cider.

Apple cider.

Yeah.

Yeah. I like apple cider well enough.

Not apple juice.

Can't stand apple juice.

I don't like apple juice either. I'm not a big Apple person. But I do like having at least one jug of apple cider in the fall.

Well. And that's it. It's again, one and done. You know, it's like getting several gallons. No, I'm not. Not.

Do you like apple cider cutter?

It's okay. Okay. I'm loving.

Does your family have it?

Of course. I'm loving Daedalian. One and done right now.

Is that a podcast? One and done. That might be the feature of our food podcast for the whole segment, but always good stuff. Gentlemen, favorite part of the week, but until next time, go Stars.

Stars on Sports Outro: Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ studios. Engineering and production assistance are provided by Daedalian Lowry. You can listen to this episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand at LCCconnect.org to find more information about our athletic program, visit LCCstars.com thanks for listening. Go Stars!