Several years ago, the author taught a course called First-Year experience. A student named Sean mentioned that he played "water pong." Sean, a high-achieving student who was also a member of the lacrosse team, explained that water pong was a game with the rules of beer pong, using water rather than beer. Sean volunteered an explanation of his athletic coach's rule: during the forty-eight hours before an athletic competition, he could not drink any alcohol. Sean explained that "if he was caught with a beer in the dorm, he just gets a fine, but if his coach hears that he drank before a game, his coach will make him run until he pukes." This classically behaviorist answer didn't sit well with that the author's idealistic version of what college education truly should be, but it got him wondering about the role of emotional attachment to behaviors, the consequences of such attachments, and what educators do to create that emotional attachment. In this article, the author relates how the episode with Sean reminded him of other, more positive stories of coaches and their ability to emotionally engage their student athletes for good and ill and the lessons all educators can take from that. He contends that coaches, faculty, and administrators bear a responsibility to know where emotional significance already exists in lives of students and employ it appropriately for students' intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development.