Ulterior Motives

As captain of the school swim team, you’ve been asked to deliver an informative speech to the school’s alumni during homecoming week detailing the team’s past three seasons and hopes for the future. You’ve outlined a short, simple speech that notes individual members’ personal bests, team achievements, and the coach’s laudable efforts to recruit promising high school athletes. When your coach reviews your speech outline, she asks you to include more about the many scholarships that the school makes available to athletes.

You know that the coach has many motives for asking you to include more information about scholarship money. She’s hoping, first and foremost, to convince alumni to support the team financially, in order to entice more financially strapped but talented swimmers to choose your school. But you’re feeling torn: you know that most of the money that goes to your school’s sports programs is devoted to the larger and more popular basketball program. You’re also feeling annoyed because four years ago, the coach recruited you as a high school scholar-athlete with a partial scholarship that she promised would grow to a full scholarship the following year. The full scholarship never materialized, and now you’re about to graduate with huge student loans that you had thought you’d be able to avoid when you chose to attend this school over others that courted you.

As team captain, you’re proud of your team’s record and eager to inform the alumni about it. But you also don’t want to give them information that you feel is somewhat misleading. What should you do?