Why Is This The Exception Rather Than The Rule?

College sports are big business. Billions, folks. Billions.

And the idea of the student-athlete at many NCAA institutions is well, backwards. It's athlete-kinda student.

But from Knoxville comes a little ray of sunshine.

Turns out that head basketball coach Bruce Pearl (who is an excellent coach, with his outmanned Vols knocking off #1 Ohio State in March Madness last year) decided to enter his team in a summer tournament abroad. Lots of schools do this, but they're mostly in Jamaica or Hawaii or some other beach vacation.

Pearl took his team to one in Eastern Europe. Concentration camps were on the agenda, most notably Terezin in the Czech Republic.

He took along a history professor from the university.
The players are required to write journals daily and expected to give an oral presentations at various stops.

And here's a quote from Mobile Press-Register's columnist Paul Finebaum's article where I learned about this:

"A basketball game was played Saturday night; a basketball game will be played today. I'll try to teach them to do a better job with their transition defense and to communicate better. But this visit to the Terezin concentration camp was probably the most important lesson of our trip. Who knows what lasting effect this will have on my players? It's my hope that when they're faced with a difficult decision of what's right or wrong, even if it's an unpopular choice, that they will make the best decision."--Bruce Pearl

Maybe it's just P.R.

But I don't think so.

And it's the perspective every coach ought to have. It should be the "norm" and not the exception. But in this case, it was newsworthy because it isn't the "norm." I wish it was.