Columnist Dean Juipe: Rich, smart kids excel in sports

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, June 16, 1999 | 10:31 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

It's too simplistic to look at Stanford's incredible success in college athletics and pin it on rich kids getting all the breaks.

For starters, while wealth may play a role in tapping into athletic talent, it doesn't necessarily extend to motivation and drive. If anything, youngsters raised in an upper-middle-class environment or amid extravagance are generally believed to lack the hunger it frequently takes to exceed athletic expectations.

But that belief cannot be a truism, if what has been happening at Stanford -- and several other high-profile, high-tuition universities -- is anything but an anomaly.

On Tuesday in Reno, Stanford was presented with its fifth consecutive Sears Directors' Cup Trophy for all-around excellence in athletics. The award, which was handed out at the National Association of College Directors of Athletics convention, is based solely on wins and losses.

And Stanford has been winning a lot of games in a lot of sports for a lot of years.

For the school year that just ended, Stanford had 13 of its teams finish their seasons ranked in the top five in the country. Eighteen Stanford teams won league or division titles, and its baseball team is still alive in the College World Series.

Two Stanford teams won national championships and 17 Stanford athletes won individual championships or national titles.

And this is five straight years of unrivaled athletic success for a school that is equally well known for its academic standards. There isn't any doubt that Stanford can rightfully claim to be the premier university in the country.

The mix of strong sports programs and first-rate academia must be powerfully seductive for those who can participate and afford it. Any survey of attitudes and opinion on the Northern California school's campus would have to reflect an overwhelmingly positive clientele.

Likewise, the top portion of the Sears Cup standings is dominated by big schools with no shortage of academic prestige -- or money. In fact, there really aren't any exceptions.

There's a chicken-or-the-egg thing going on here. Are the country's top athletic schools in that position because they have money, or do they have money and its many tangent resources because they're good in sports?

Whatever the precise answer, what has been firmly established is that one obviously begets the other.

This, you might then reason, doesn't bode particularly well for a school such as UNLV. While all of us living in Las Vegas would thoroughly enjoy seeing the Rebels immersed in widespread athletic achievements and in contention for a Sears Cup, perhaps the school doesn't have the necessary criteria or infrastructure in place to even fancy itself as a potential contender.

The oddity in UNLV's case is that the school has money and innumerable well-endowed donors, many of whom have been contributing to a campus building boom that has placed an accent on sports facilities.

But if the school is perceived as substandard intellectually or lacking when it comes to the merits of its faculty, it may never attract this new breed of top-flight athlete that excels in both the classroom and on the playing field.

And the documentation is in: Smart kids who come from at least a little money are dominating collegiate sports today.