"Alcohol doesn't just slow your reaction times, impair your judgment, and give you hangovers. It also kills brain cells, distorts your appetite, and, perhaps worse from an athlete's point of view, dehydrates you. Drink a few beers the night before a practice session, and the neurons that make your muscles work won't fire properly when you're running those drills.

"We'll try to keep this lecture short, team, but we hope you'll believe what we're telling you. You're here to play, you're here to get an education, and if you're planning on doing much drinking in the process, you're in the wrong place."

The preceding is pretty much the message that coaches and other staff in the UMass athletic department try to deliver not like Marine sergeants, but as empathetic counselorsto the athletes in their charge. As baseball coach Mike Stone observed recently, "Alcohol is a concern on campus, and the athletes are not immune."

UMass is unusual among universities in that its Health Services and Athletic Department employ a full-time health educator who is also a certified alcohol and drug abuse counselor: Robin Harris, who directs the university's Athletic Health Enhancement Program. She offers coaches and athletes advice about how to deal with young egos, adjustment problems, homesickness and other health related issues, including alcohol.

 

"Every year," said Harris this spring, "I have confidential meetings with recruits"athletes who are considering coming to UMass"and I tell them, 'If you like to smoke dope, if you like to drink, don't come here, because you won't be able to do it. Somebody's going to get on your case about it.' And I tell them, "You don't have to believe me. Ask the players on the team."'

One piece of advice Harris gives to coaches is to avoid a simplistic, if-you-drink-you're-off-the-team rule. Such a rule, she reasons, means that if one player has a problem with alcohol, the other players are less likely to tell anyone.

Stone agrees, adding, "If you say they can't drink, they will. You need a different approach. You need to educate the players about why it's a problem."

Former UMass athletes recall that rigid rules about drinking were rare. "We didn't have anything specific," says Milt Morin '66, a football tight end who after leaving UMass was the Cleveland Browns' number-one draft pick and played ten years in the NFL. "It was a reactive thing. If rumors got around that somebody was drinking, he'd be called into the office. I remember one or two players who would abuse alcohol, maybe in the off-season or after a big game. Even the pros can be like that. But if the circumstances of someone's drinking were detrimental to the team, he'd be kicked off. I don't remember anybody being kicked off.''

"I don't recall that much needed to be said about drinking," says Tom Derderian '72, who was among the top scorers on the UMass cross-country and track teams. "It was obvious: athletes don't get drunk. Everyone knew that. Binge drinking was something people did in fraternity houses." Derderian is quick to second the idea that when athletes abuse alcohol to the extent of attracting attention, the problem should be dealt with immediately and strictly. He recently resigned from his position as a coach at Salem State after the college's athletic department chose not to punish some hockey players who had gotten loudly and conspicuously drunk on campus.

"One thing I remind everyone," says Harris, "is that for an athlete, drinking is a double-edged sword. If any other college kid gets drunk in town, it's no big deal. If it's an athlete, the papers report that it's an athlete, and the coach finds out." On that note, a problem Harris often confronts is that some athletes see drinking together as a means of team bonding. "I ask them, 'Does it really help?' and the response is, 'Yes.' Then I ask, 'Are there people on the team who don't drink?' and they say, 'Yes,' and I ask whether those on the team who don't drink feel like part of that bonding, and they say, 'No,' and they think about it."

Harris holds confidential meetings with players who seek advice about what their training rules ought to be, or who are concerned about a teammate who may have a drinking problem. Derderian describes this latter case as the drinking problem you don't usually hear about. "This is the guy who's a suppressed, or depressed, alcoholic. These would have been the guys I remember who were peripheral to the team, who were around, came to a few practices, then drifted away." If such athletes have alert teammates, they may find their way to Harris.

Harris also meets with coaches. Among other things, she said, "We talk about the captains, who are often the most popular kids on the team. Coaches have to look at why that's so. If it's because they're the big partiers, we have to be ready for the fallout. I put pressure on the captains, and they know it. They're the role models."

In general, the image of the hard-playing, hard-drinking athlete is a fiction at UMass. "We never had any time for drinking," basketball guard Beth Kuzmeski '97 recalled recently. "From October to March, anyway, we never had the energy! Only select few would ever drink in the first place, and when you've played a game in Philadelphia, then gotten right onto the bus and come home at 2 a.m. with classes the next morning, you don't want to do anything." According to Kuzmeski, explicit directives from her coach were unnecessary. "And I never, never thought a player was hampering her performance by drinking. If she were, the coaches would know."

Where coaches lay down rules, Harris recommends that these be very specific. Several teams follow the so-called forty-eight-hour rule: no alcohol within forty-eight hours of a game, a practice or a weight-training sessionwhich covers most of the season. Many remind the athletes that the forty-eight-hour rule applies only to players who are twenty-one or older, while those under legal age are expected not to be drinking at all.

"Our coach reminded us about the forty-eight-hour rule," said a current varsity lacrosse player this spring," and he also said, 'I'd really appreciate it if you guys would show a little will power and not drink for the whole season.' Quietly we may have said to ourselves, 'Yeah, right,' but we can understand the forty-eight-hour rule, because drinking can affect your performance."

Harris says she takes pride in the fact that often athletes will come to her and say, "Hey, I could get away with drinking in high school, but I can't get away with it here. What's the big deal?" This kind of awareness, together with the heightened scrutiny under which athletes find themselves, seems to help keep drinking from being a major issue for the UMass sports program.

"Are athletes squeaky clean?" asked Mike Stone. "I don't think so. But I don't know of any specific drinking problem."

"Education works," said Harris. 'The kids know what to do, where to go, if there's a problem. They know what crosses the line, they know how to respond."

-John Stifler `92G