BGSU Stroh Center Rap celebrates donors and features student talent [video]

I think this is such a cool idea to produce a rap video about the Stroh Center donors. I'm also very impressed by the talented student performers: Mikey "Rosco" Blair and Rachel Willingham.



My favorite line is, "his name is Schmidthorst, 83% consonants; if you disrespect, you have to deal with the consequence."

Student Athletes in Transition: Avoiding Post-Retirement Identity Difficulties

This post can either be used as a handout or an outline for a presentation on the topic of avoiding post-retirement identity difficulties during student athlete transitions. (It wasn't intended to be an academic paper, which is why my citations are very brief and not properly formatted).

I created this handout while I was in the M.S. Sport Behavior and Performance program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. At the time, I was recognizing signs of post-retirement identify difficulties in myself, and researching this topic really helped me grasp what I was going through.

Personal Description Activity

Activity: Describe yourself in a list of 25 things. You only have a few minutes so write the first things that come to mind.

**AFTER COMPLETION OF ACTIVITY**:

After you have completed the activity, look at the first 5 items. Although you were not instructed to list the items in order of importance, the items you listed first are most likely the ones that you consider the most important or descriptive—because they were easiest to come up with. Example: you probably won’t see “I like apples” in the #1 spot, but “I’m a football player” seems more important to list first.

What is Identity?

Identity is defined as a multidimensional view of oneself that is enduring and dynamic, which means our identity is both stable and changing at the same time. How can this be? How we view ourselves is made up of a number of dimensions (like the things you listed in the activity), that have a fairly stable order of importance. However, the importance of each item can also be affected by other factors.

Stable and Changing: Think of your identity at practice, the most important dimension at that time is probably your role as an athlete. However, when you are taking an exam, your most important role is (or should be) your identity as a student. Both of these smaller parts make up how you view yourself as a whole—your identity.

Identity Narrowing

When one dimension of your identity takes priority over the others for a long period of time, it can become dominant or preferred. This can happen when the dominant dimension (athletic identity for example) takes control in other daily situations. Where you live, when you eat, when you sleep, who your friends are—pieces of who you are that become associated with athletics can make your athlete identity dominant.

Identity Narrowing can be a good thing because it helps strengthen the dominant identity which can lead to increased motivation and focus, a more appropriate schedule for daily activities, improved goal setting, and group cohesion on an athletic team.

On the other hand, think of investing in the dominant identity as putting all your eggs in one basket. Focusing on your identity as an athlete can help you during sports, but it may be athletes who identify strongly with the athlete role in particular who experience post-retirement identity difficulties.

What are Post-Retirement Identity Difficulties?

Post-Retirement Identity Difficulties are problems that arise after a transition (in this case retirement from competitive athletics) because of the loss of a major portion of identity. This loss may be expressed as an emotional, cognitive, or behavioral change.



Identify Difficulties Following a Transition

Emotional	Cognitive	Behavioral
Depression	Unable to focus	Alcohol or drug abuse
Feeling anxious	Unable to make decisions	Anti-social behavior
Feeling isolated	Denial	Eating disorders
Frustration	Loss of confidence	Trouble sleeping
Anger		Can't seem to get things done

Pearson and Petitpas (1990) predicted that transitions would be more difficult for athletes who:

• exclusively based identity on athletics.
• have a gap between level of aspiration and ability.
• are inexperienced with transitions.
• have limited ability to adapt due to emotional or behavioral deficits.
• lack supportive relationships.
• lack resources to cope with the transition.

This means that athletes with an exclusively dominant athletic identity, who are inexperienced with making decisions during a transition, and lack support or resources either from friends or members of the athletic department, may show more signs of difficulty adapting to their transition out of athletics.

The transition is also more difficult for athletes forced to retire early, or when the decision is out of their control—such as when the athlete is cut from the team, injured, or is ineligible. These transitions are usually more abrupt and leave the athlete less time to progress through the stages of transition.

Stages of Transition

Every athlete goes through the retirement transition after the completion of their athletic career—it is a time marked by a significant decrease in the amount of time spent competing in a particular sport, a decrease in the level of competition, or a time when the athlete stops being an athlete all-together.

Hopson and Adams’s (1977) process model addresses emotional and self-esteem reactions that go along with the transition. Stages can be thought of as a downward spiral followed by an upward climb in self-esteem and emotional reactions.

Each stage is marked by an emotional task that must be completed before moving on to the next level.

Emotional Tasks (Hopson and Adams, 1977)

Stage	Name	Description	Emotional response
1	Shock and Immobilization	End of career, involuntary transitions are more disruptive.	Feeling overwhelmed or shocked
2	Minimization and Denial	Desire to make the transition feel less important or deny the truth to minimize negative feelings.	Frustration, depression, anxiety, denial
3	Self-Doubt / Depression	Former athlete will begin to doubt their ability to provide for themselves.	Sadness, fear of the future, anger, loss of self-esteem
4	Letting Go	Individual reaches a critical point of acceptance of the event and begins to look to the future.	Let go of negative emotions, begin upward climb
5	Testing Options	A time to explore new options. A burst of energy and adopt a new way of looking at things.	A sense of moving forward, excitement and exploration
6	Search for Meaning	Reflect on the “rollercoaster of emotions” in the previous stages. Active participation in changing thoughts, behaviors, feelings.	Make sense of what has happened and attach new meaning to their experiences.
7	Internalization	Integration and renewal, exploration brings new ways of behaving and thinking.	Individuals are well adjusted and have learned new skills for coping with future transitions

Take-Away Message

The more you know about the retirement transition from competitive athletics, the more prepared you will be to face the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral challenges. Here are some additional tips for dealing with the transition:

Become a Life-Long Athlete – Just because you are no longer competing for your college team doesn’t mean you have to stop playing sports all together. Participating in a club or community sports program is a great way to stay healthy and to meet people with similar interests.

Know your Support Network – No one is planning on having a difficult transition, but just incase it’s tougher than you thought—know who you can go to for guidance: coaches, peers, counselors, academic coordinators, career development personnel.

Transferable Skills – Apply your competitive identity to other aspects of your life such as your career or job search. You’ve learned a lot more from playing sports than just the game itself.

Ideas for an alcohol talk with a college athletic team during Fall Semester

I was recently asked for some ideas for a pre-season alcohol / responsibility talk with an intercollegiate athletic team. I thought I'd share what I wrote in that email with the interwebs in case someone out there is looking for that same information...

For a talk with a college athletic team, I would emphasize how they should watch out for each other like a family. They should also respect each other if they choose not to drink. A divided team runs the risk of splitting social activities into the group of drinkers and group of non-drinkers.

Also, emphasize how the seniors and captains should be role models. On teams with a drinking culture, the seniors and captains usually drink the MOST which is counter-intuitive - but this also shows how they have the ability to influence team behavior. Even if members choose to drink during the season, see if they are willing to have weekly alcohol-free activities (like Movie Night every Friday). This will not only increase their bonding and communication, but will at least take one night of drinking out of the equation.

Tell them how long alcohol can stay in their system the day after drinking, and can have a huge impact on their muscle recovery - so every time they drink after a workout, they are throwing away hours in the gym or on the field! Paint the picture that excessive drinking is what teams do when they aren't serious about their sport. Challenge them to rise above what the typical college social scene might include, because they aren't typical college students. They have elite status, they are here for a reason, and they are better than that.

The easiest way to change drinking habits is to not develop them in the first place, so they should start in with alcohol-free group activities right away when the school year starts. Individual choices become the team's business, especially on team sports. They should get on each others' cases about things they are not OK with, and it shouldn't be the coach's job to regulate their choices. The team is a family and a machine that only works as well as its weakest member.

This is the kind of stuff I would talk about, hope this helps! Go ahead and challenge them. They are likely competitive individuals, and will be very optimistic about taking the sport seriously right at the start of the year - so try to sustain that optimism!

How many Frappuccinos does it take to fail an NCAA drug test?

As all NCAA athletes are warned, caffeine IS on the NCAA list of controlled substances. That is to say, it’s not banned outright, but acceptable maximum levels are set to control for possible performance enhancing effects.

I couldn’t find acceptable testing levels directly from the NCAA, (should it be this difficult to find?) but WebMD, among other sites, seem to agree that the NCAA maximum acceptable level is 15 mcg/mL (micrograms per milliliter) in urine. All I could find from the NCAA’s drug testing program website are a list of banned drug-classes, not specific testing levels.

Ok, so we know 15 mcg/mL is the upper limit for caffeine levels in urine. Now how much caffeine can you drink before you reach that level, and what does that mean in terms of Starbucks Mocha Frappuccinos? WebMD says coffee has around 100 mg/cup, and that it would take someone around 8 cups to reach the limit. So according to WebMD, 800mg at once is the limit. I’m guessing that means within an hour or so – since it takes around 45 minutes for caffeine to be absorbed into the bloodstream – but WebMD doesn’t really specify. Therefore, according to Starbucks beverage nutrition information, it would take 4.85 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos within an hour to fail an NCAA drug test. By the way, all those Venti Fraps adds up to 2,424 Calories and 82 grams of fat.

The Richard Stockton College Athletic Training website provides some more specific information. According to their site, 500 mg of caffeine in one hour is enough to fail the drug test. That’s only 3.03 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos! I have 3.03 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos for breakfast!

But wait, according to their own calculations, the Stockton College site says that 100 mg of caffeine equates to 1.5 mcg/mL in urine, and 200mg of caffeine equates to 3.0 mcg/mL, etc. Following this trend, you would be allowed 1000 mg of caffeine before reaching the 15 mcg/mL level. If this is correct, you could drink 6.06 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos (3,030 Calories, 103 grams of fat) in an hour before failing your drug test.



Play it safe
Based on numbers found on the web, you could probably drink somewhere between 3 to 10 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos in an hour and still pass an NCAA drug test. You might consider just having one Venti Mocha Frappuccino – I mean, come on, it’s a Venti.

A note about half-life
Caffeine is metabolized in the liver. The half-life of caffeine – the time required for the body to eliminate one-half of the total amount of caffeine – varies between individuals. According to Wikipedia, the half-life time depends on age, liver function, and other medications taken. The estimated half-life for healthy adults is 4.9 hours, and up to 10 hours for women taking oral contraceptives. That means you can have 6 to 20 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos as long as you take a break 10 hours before your test. 20 Venti Mocha Frappuccinos would contain 10,000 Calories and 340 grams of fat.

This article is a cross-post from Kast-A-Way Blog