Other universities may have more National Championships than Loyola, but fewer of our athletes have gone to jail.

It’s crazy to see how the culture in collegiate sports has changed over time, but it’s great to see that Loyola is still setting the bar high when it comes to an athlete’s off-the-field behavior. We have to give them props for managing to stay out of jail in a city like New Orleans.

I mean, we have Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras and bars galore. Yet, somehow, they manage to stay out of the slammer.

At Loyola, instead of hearing of a basketball player getting accused of rape, you hear of them being named a Scholar Athlete.

Also at Loyola, the words ‘recruiting’ and ‘scandal’ will never be together in the same sentence. Instead of having to answer questions about sending ‘hostesses’ to high school football games to convince the athletes to play for the university, Loyola attracts, student-athletes with a good education in the Jesuit tradition.

Like the National Collegiate Athletic Association commercials that state that most athletes will go professional in academic fields rather than sports, many Loyola athletes understand they will not be professional athletes.

You won’t hear of grade scandals either.

In fact, men’s basketball coach, Michael Giorlando, encourages his players to get a 3.0, instead of settling for the league requirement of 2.0. He also makes it a requirement for freshman players to comply with a set of study hall hours.

A culture of well-roundedness dominates at Loyola when it comes to athletics. I’d bet the administration is also happy to see that Loyola is fulfilling the Jesuit mission of ‘teaching the whole person.’ The athletes at Loyola are doing just that. They hit the books as well as the showers. They get brain food in their classes and gain valuable tools like work, ethics and discipline, among other things that will aid them in the future.

Sometimes we get lost in this big cloud of competitiveness and winning that we forget the important things in life.

We don’t have a mediocre sports team, but we also don’t have racks full of championship hardware. But really, who cares if the extent of people who know anything of Loyola starts at touchdown Jesus and ends at Iggy?

What we do have are tremendous athletes who will one day become productive people who might, thanks to their experiences at Loyola, be able to turn this world in the right direction.

Eduardo Gonzales can be reached at [email protected]

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