FROM THE EDITOR: Yes, Sports Matter

Subhede

Mar 20, 2026

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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As Atlanta grew into a world-class metropolitan area between the 1970s and the 1990s, Tom Cousins built the skyline that gave the city its character.

Reticent, soft-spoken, and media-averse, Cousins was not an easy person for a journalist to gain access to. After months of communicating via phone and email with those who ran his nonprofit work, I scored an interview with him.

The interview didn’t happen. After flying to Atlanta, Cousins had a change of heart.

One month, and a return trip to Atlanta, later I finally secured the interview. But not before Cousins nearly backed out a second time.

What changed his mind?

“Mr. Davis plays golf.” That’s the message his assistant had learned during my second trip down. That brief message brought us together. (Read the story that came from it — “A Civic Hole-in-One.”)

The game mattered to Cousins on many levels. Mostly, however, it was the metric by which he measured the character of the people he allowed into his life.

Before hiring new business associates, he would join them for a round at the vaunted East Lake Golf Club. How a person handled success and failure over a round, whether they would improve a ball’s lie if they thought Cousins wasn’t watching, told Cousins what he needed to know about who they were as a human being.

“Why would I trust my money and my projects,” he told me in 2004, “if they can’t control themselves over a round a golf — the only sport in which the players are trusted to call it straight.”

Separating Excess from Value

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of modern-day athletics. The amount of money that will be bet over the next three weeks on the NCAA Men’s and Women’s National Basketball tournaments — legal bets are projected to top $4 billion — has done a lot to undermine the tournament and the game.

The NCAA may announce on banners that it’s celebrating student-athletes, but when Division I players are making millions — my beloved Tarheels have a roster that costs $14 million — and coaches’ salaries place them in elite tax brackets, well, these kids aren’t in college to wrestle with macroeconomics or philosophy.

Legalized sports betting is also undermining lives. Young men in particular are being ensnared in a world that revolves around easy betting on every aspect of collegiate and professional games. The result? We’re raising a generation of gambling addicts.

But it’s important to separate the excess of sports from the value of sports.

And nowhere has the value of sports been more evident than at the University of Mary Washington this year.

Under the leadership of Coach Marcus Kahn, the Eagles have put together a dream season as exciting and as heart-stopping as anything one will see on the major networks carrying the Big Boys yesterday and today in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

Thursday night, they went toe-to-toe with the high-scoring University of Chicago Maroons and beat them at their own game. Saturday night they face the defending national champions for a spot in the national championship game.

What’s lost on many, however, is that Mary Washington — not High Point University that posted a stunning upset over Wisconsin on Thursday afternoon, nor Virginia Commonwealth University which toppled those same Tarheels mentioned above Thursday night — is a better representative of athletics than the relatively few numbers of players and teams who grab the biggest spotlights and the richest paydays.

In 2024-25, some 8.3 million high school students took part in varsity sports. More than half of all high school students in the country. Of those, just 6% will go on to play college ball at any level — Division I, II, or III.

Of those, only about one-third play at the Division I level.

In other words, only a tiny fraction of kids who start out with Division I dreams — full right scholarships, NIL licenses, and primetime TV coverage — will ever play at that level.

They’re going Division II — a little money, and with few exceptions little if any national coverage — or Division III. Not only are there no athletic scholarships at the Division III level, athletes have to qualify academically to attend.

And that is no easy task at schools like UMW’s opponent on Thursday night — the University of Chicago — which is among the most-selective universities in the country.

So why do student-athletes do it at the Division III level, and why should we care?

Building Citizens

Competition gives meaning to our lives.

And nothing teaches us better about competition than competitive athletics.

Whether it’s in the Anderson Center on the UMW campus where 2,000 people fill out the gym, or the Lucas Oil Center in Indianapolis, Indiana, where 2,000 people wouldn’t even be noticed, it takes courage to step in the arena and put everything on the line.

Errors are seen by everyone. So are your successes. There is no place to hide. You aren’t graded on how hard you work in practice or how you do in the classroom by those in the stands, but simply on what happens any given game.

Athletics teaches people to run toward those situations, not cower from them.

While fans rise on the fall on the fortunes of their teams, for the players it’s all about competing. Given the choice between competing and losing, or winning and sitting, there isn’t an athlete breathing who wouldn’t choose the former.

The lessons these athletes learn along the way help explain why those who participate in high school and college sports will, on average, live healthier, more productive lives.

They’ll also be more engaged in their communities, more likely to volunteer, and less likely than the general population to suffer from mental health issues.

And this is why we should care as a society about athletics.

It builds the types of people who build strong societies.

And it exposes those who know nothing of what it means to sacrifice for a team or handle defeat with grace. Indeed, they’ll cheat before they lose.

Enjoy the Final Four.