Nonfaculty Coaches
June 18, 2012
Since the so-called heyday of school sports in the 1950s, when you could count on more talk in a community about its few high school teams than about all the college and professional sports teams in the country combined, some things have improved – diversity and safety, for example; but some things have not met the high ideals hoped for in educational athletics.
During the explosive growth period of school sports in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls programs were introduced or reintroduced to schools and well-established community programs were added to the school sports curriculum, schools in almost every state had to backpedal from the ideal that only trained educators – certified teachers – could coach interscholastic athletic teams. (In Michigan, except for two years in the mid 1950s when certified teachers were required, the rules only urge that coaches be certified teachers.)
While the number of sports and levels of teams have greatly expanded these past five or six decades, the coaching pool within the faculty of a school district has not. Furthermore, teachers’ salaries improved so much that coaching stipends became less necessary to supplement teachers’ incomes, so teachers “volunteered” less readily to serve as coaches for a second and third sport.
Moreover, the coaching demands for one sport increased out of season, interfering with a person’s availability to help coach second and third sports during the school year. This was commonplace in the sports that moved from the community into schools, but the out of season demands have increased significantly for traditional school sports as well.
There is irony that community youth sports programs not only have provided school districts with a pool of informed and interested people to serve as coaches, but they have also increased the demands on coaches so much out of season that coaches must specialize in a single sport and therefore are less available to assist with the many different sports and levels of teams that school districts struggle to provide students.
It is estimated now that more than half of all high school coaches do not work in the school building where they coach, which can create communications challenges for schools. A smaller but growing number of high school coaches do not work at all in the field of education, which can create philosophical problems as well. Not always, of course; in fact, many nonfaculty coaches are a rich and increasingly indispensible blessing for school sports.
The Usual Suspects
December 30, 2016
It is difficult to find a year when the 11-player Football Finals of the Michigan High School Athletic Association involved more teams from southeast Michigan than appeared at Ford Field in 2016. In fact, just two counties (Oakland and Wayne) produced seven finalists. But then two counties on Michigan’s west side (Kent and Muskegon) supplied four of the 16 finalists.
Four of Michigan’s 83 counties producing 11 of 16 finalists in the 11-player championship games doesn’t’ feel like a statewide event; but one team from the Upper Peninsula, another from the Leelanau Peninsula in the northwest portion of the Lower Peninsula, and a team located along the Michigan/Ohio border remind us how large and diverse our state really is.
The 2016 MHSAA 11-player Football Finals consisted of many of the “usual suspects,” including two teams pursuing their fourth straight titles and one team seeking its third consecutive championship. Four of the eight 11-player champions from 2015 returned in the attempt to defend their titles in 2016, and two of the runners-up in 2015 were back to try to reverse their fortunes from 12 months earlier.
What is being demonstrated here in Michigan high school football is the trend seen in many other states. That is, as the number of classes or divisions of tournaments expands, the more often you see the same teams in the final rounds.
The surest way to have the “usual suspects” on championship day is to put them in tournaments with fewer schools. And of all MHSAA tournaments, the football playoffs have the most divisions with the fewest schools in each. The result is predictable.
This is a cautionary tale for those who desire that the number of classifications and divisions be expanded in MHSAA tournaments for other sports.
Meanwhile, we are keeping an eye on the tournament format in a neighboring state that places schools into divisions for larger schools after they are too successful over consecutive years in the classification that fits their enrollment. Those in Michigan who have been assigned to review such policies have complained that such “success factors” penalize future students because of the achievements of previous students and/or because such factors do nothing about “chronic success” by schools in the largest classification.