Winning...By Any Means Necessary: Valid or No?

As a sports enthusiast, I see the "winning...by any means necessary" adage played out at the pro, college, and even youth sports levels. Recent examples -- performance-enhancing drug (PED) use, rampant recruiting violations, getting someone else to take your SAT, and even lying about your age to get a second run at a HS basketball career -- have led me to believe that either punishments are too lenient or we're in the midst of a generation of individual shallowness and critically low self-esteem.

In our youth sports, I often wonder what drives a coach to ditch kids who have been working hard for him all season for blue-chippers at the end of a long basketball season just so that he/she can be better positioned to win a trophy? Is this somehow related to trophies that they didn't win when they were 13? Are they counting on their team's performance to improve their job prospects or social status?

In the college ranks, John Calipari is a winning coach who continues to leave violations and sanctions in his wake as he does whatever it takes to get the best "one and dones" (top-ranked players who go to college for a year only to fulfill an NBA requirement). Wouldn't be a problem if his blue-chip freshmen were actually scholar athletes with credentials that qualified them to be enrolled as students in the first place. Sadly though, I haven't heard any outcries from his current or former schools about the (lack of) academic performance by his star players. I guess the agreement is to overlook academics if the wins keep pouring in...

Have we all forgotten Dexter Manley's teary-eyed admission to Congress that he couldn't read? Who was at fault in his case? His high school? Oklahoma State University? Society?

The time has long come for us to set a standard to ensure that our next generation is decently educated and prepared to earn those millions of dollars. I'm not focusing on the professional ranks only because they're too far gone to include in this discussion. However, as for the youth through college ranks, we seem more than happy to throw these kids on a global stage and then gawk and point if/when they fall into legal or financial crises.

Are we, as a society, saying "wait until they're 18 so we can exploit these kids -- for our entertainment -- legally"? If it's your kid, then do you care that the "system" is not set up for them to finish their degrees in a timely fashion for life after playing basketball? Guess we could always say that many of the top athletes will sign contracts that will make them financially secure for the balance of their lives. Too bad that the NBA is littered with stories of star players who have filed for bankruptcy due to the simple fact that no one taught them how to manage the people who managed their money...

By the way, most Division I universities offer classes for that.