Dan Kohn column: WIAA taking a proactive approach to steroids by using education
May 8, 2006
If Major League baseball and its Players Association thought it could sweep its problems under a rug, they are sadly mistaken.
With steroid use rampant in the mid-to-late 1990s until recently, the game needs to take a look at what the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and its member schools are trying to do.
After a bitter players strike cancelled the 1994 World Series, Major League Baseball was desperate to win back its fans.
While Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa came out of nowhere to shatter Roger Maris' single season home run record in 1998, a mark which stood for nearly 40 years, the alarms should have been blaring. When Barry Bonds surpassed that in 2001, an investigation should have been launched to see what the cause of the sudden power surge was.
Instead, Commissioner Bud Selig and the rest of the owners turned a blind eye. They were more interested in selling tickets and filling stadiums than the health of their players or the health of America's youth, the ones that idolize the game's stars.
Even after Ken Caminiti, the 1996 National League MVP, admitted to steroid use and later died from what many believe are complications caused by the steroids, baseball did nothing.
It took a book by Jose Canseco, a player with a sordid past, to get Congress involved. And even then, Donald Fehr and his Players Association were slow to get on board.
Even today, baseball's testing policies aren't as strict as say those set by the International Olympic Committee.
While Major League Baseball is trying to veer the game back in the right direction, the harm steroids have caused is immeasurable. And the game's record books are a mess because of the era of steroids.
But instead of being reactive like MLB has become, the WIAA is becoming proactive. Come next season, all high school athletes and their parents will be educated in the effects of steroid use and performance enhancing drugs.
"The whole performance enhancing issue has been before us for a number of years," Doug Chickering, executive director of the WIAA, said. "Perhaps it was heightened last year with the Major League Baseball hearings before Congress. For the past generation, we have provided our schools information on creatine and other enhancers.
"Last summer we sent to each of them a DVD as a beginning point for a visible education program. We will continue to do that. We hope to have a 60-second or 30-second public service announcement that will help educate the general public."
And unlike their professional counterparts, the WIAA has been vocal about this devastating problem for the past year.
Though the state organization will not go as far as testing athletes, which their counterparts in New Jersey are about to do, it is a definite step in the right direction.
"We don't think the testing protocol is something our schools can afford," Chickering said. "I think we're better off educating and that's what we're in, the education business.
"It will be effective and it will be a better use of school resources."
And anything that can protect our youth is a good thing.
Maybe it's about time our role models look at our teachers, coaches and student athletes and take a page from what they are doing and incorporate it into their regimen.
