Students have the chance next semester to take a sports history course from an improbable source – the administrative head of the state’s public university system. LSU System President John Lombardi is teaching a course next fall on the history of intercollegiate sports in America. The undergraduate-level course is provided by the history department and is aimed at juniors and seniors. This semester, Lombardi teaches a graduate-level course on university management. Lombardi said he has been developing both courses for many years in an interview with The Daily Reveille Jan. 18. “The sports course is another course I’ve been teaching for a long time,” Lombardi said. He most recently taught the course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2006. “The format will be similar [to how it was at Amherst], although the reading and other materials are updated to include new readings and new issues,” Lombardi wrote Tuesday in an e-mail with The Daily Reveille. Lombardi stressed that the course is a history course and does not focus on current events or events tied particularly to LSU. “This course focuses on intercollegiate sports from 1900 to the present across the nation. It does not address local contemporary sports, although some of what we study may have relevance to local events,” Lombardi wrote. Lombardi said he approached the history department to be able to teach the course. Since he is already paid to be system president, he said teaching the course is a “freebie.” “I said to my department chairman, ‘I need to contribute something to the department. How about this course? Does it work for you?'” Lombardi said. Lombardi’s current graduate-level course focuses heavily on reading, essays and e-mail discussion. Lombardi said the intercollegiate sports course next semester also contains e-mail discussion groups, which he moderates. “The reading is reflected in the discussion and in the student work,” Lombardi wrote. Steven Latuso, executive director of Louisiana High School Rally Association, is a student in Lombardi’s university management course. He said although the sports course is an undergraduate course, it is not “uncommon” for an instructor to require a lot of discussion in an upper-level course. “Humanities are based on an interaction between students and faculty,” Latuso said. “It will be pretty similar to any other upper-level history class.” Blake Winchell, enrollment adviser, is also enrolled in Lombardi’s course. He said Lombardi is capable of both personal interaction with students and a standard lecture. “He knows exactly what he wants to talk about,” Winchell said. “He knows it all so well.” Lombardi said he handles this course differently than his graduate-level course. “The [intercollegiate sports] class has a lot of visual materials for each lecture, and of course the class is much larger,” Lombardi wrote. Lombardi said some students who are sports fans may be surprised at what they may learn in the course. “It’s a lot of fun because everybody thinks they know everything there is to know about sports, but actually they don’t,” Lombardi said. “They think we invented this last week,” he said. “I have to explain to them, ‘No, we invented this about a hundred years ago.’ “This is how it developed into being what it is, this is how it works with intercollegiate sports and this is why it is what it is.”
—-Contact Ben Bourgeois at [email protected]