[361] The Organization of American Amateur Sport Efficiency to Entropy

The pervasive theme of the recently released report of the Presi-dent’s Commission on Olympic Sports (PCOS, 1977) is that American amateur athletics are in a state of entropy by not being able to garner sufficient organizational and financial energy to maintain effective operations. However, the report’s call for unified control of amateur sport in the form of a Central Sports Organization (CSO) is an oversimplified solution which does not take into full account the actual organizational reality of amateur sport. Poor organization and underfunding are only symptoms of larger problems, namely, overorganization and the demise of local-national control of amateur athletics. American amateur sport has evolved to form an expansive interlocking network of organizations and associations which depend on athletics for their livelihood or survival. As a result, an excessive portion of a declining athletic resource base goes to maintaining the network even if it means a compromise of the original participatory goals. This network forms the &dquo;amateur sport establishment.&dquo; Second, the network has developed inter-locking ties with international sport governing bodies to the extent that local control of amateur athletics is considerably re-at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 9, 2016abs.sagepub.comDownloaded from [362] AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST duced. Both phenomena are the result of an almost compulsive desire for productive efficiency, or winning. While conducive to productivity, the consequences of these developments are very serious, particularly from the standpoint of the loss of public legitimacy and other key resources that provide the energy which amateur sports require. Clearly the Olympics, intercollegiate, and interscholastic ath-letics, and even voluntary, nonscholastic sports such as Little League and Pop Warner have chosen to abandon the emphases on character development, participation, and education in favo