By Zachary Gross ’14, Sports Editor

From baseball to cycling, sport after sport has been hit with major cheating scandals over the past decade. The Steroid Era of baseball, known for the prevalence of performance enhancing drugs among athletes, led to the suspension of 67 players and clouds of suspicion surrounding even more, including some of the games’ brightest stars. Blood doping plagued cycling for years, and Lance Armstrong, winner of seven Tour de France titles, finally gave in to cheating allegations earlier this year. Even in the NFL, the most popular sport in America, cheating has reared its ugly head. From the Patriots videotaping Jets coaches’ signals during a game in 2007, to the New Orleans Saints giving out bounties for player injuries during games in 2011, cheating has shown to be a consistent threat in pro sports over the past 15 years.

The epidemic has spread from professional athletic teams to our schools. Even at Harvard University, cheating is a challenging issue. Just this year, 125 students in a 279-person class were investigated for cheating on a take-home final exam. The implicated students ranged from non-athletes to the co-captains of the Harvard basketball team, Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry. It is, in retrospect, unsurprising that Harvard athletes might feel the pressure to cheat: they face the competitive academic life of Ivy League schools while at the same time having to dedicate as much as forty hours a week to their sport.

If academic rigor paired with athletic commitments begets cheating, then why hasn’t Newark Academy been wracked by a similar scandal? It seems that student athletes here have a different philosophy on what it takes to succeed in both an athletically and academically challenging environment. Instead of resorting to cheating, student athletes force themselves to manage their time better, and hold morality over risky material success.

Varsity Football and Baseball player Tyler Park ’14, tried to articulate why there has been cheating at higher athletic levels but not at Newark Academy when he commented, “I don’t think athletes at Newark Academy face the same types of pressures as athletes at the pro or college level. While it is certainly difficult to balance sports and academics, with good time management it is more than possible.”

Park sees the cultural environment as the difference between a situation that breeds cheating and one that does not. Where most of the pressure on professional teams and competitive college teams is to purely succeed, at Newark Academy, the pressure to do what is right is more than the pressure to win. This causes our student athletes to seek success through working harder and budgeting time well instead of cheating.

Honor Council member and Varsity Swimmer William Ulrich ’14 agreed with Park’s sentiment, saying, “As an athlete myself, academic success does require more time management, but it pays off in the long run through good grades and athletic achievements.” Ulrich even sees the additional commitment of sports as helpful because he has to focus and work efficiently, skills that lead to good grades.

Mr. Gilbreath, the Newark Academy Athletic Director, also sees the commitment of sports at Newark Academy as a positive for helping students improve their study habits. He said, “Athletics do a good job forcing kids to budget their time appropriately,” and also mentioned, in reference to Harvard’s cheating scandal, that, “People who are inclined to cheat are going to do it regardless of whether or not they are athletes.” Mr. Gilbreath brings up the point that cheaters aren’t created by single situations, but rather by the atmosphere and the morals that surround them. Because Newark Academy promotes doing the right thing through institutions such as the Honor Code as well as through peer expectations, student athletes look to focus and work efficiently instead of cheat.

At Newark Academy, student athletes look to do the right thing when presented with stressful situations. But beware: as we have seen both at the collegiate and professional levels, the atmosphere that we have cultivated here is rare, but more importantly, transient.