ISM has published before on athletics and character development, including an athletics checklist for schools to employ. However, there seems to be a changed environment for athletics, certainly in the United States. Some schools seem to be getting to the point in secondary athletics (with its trickle-down impact in middle school) where they must make a decision regarding this question: To what extent are we going to allow our school to be driven off course (off mission) to meet the perceived competitive needs of our own and the next (college) level? Just as some schools are (appropriately) moving away from a mass curriculum/testing version of education encapsulated in Advanced Placement,1 so ISM believes that schools need to think carefully about their obeisance to college athletic pressures and focus on their own school cultures.