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.
Sold Out
December 13, 2016
We are sometimes criticized for limiting the scope of school sports – for restricting long-distance travel and prohibiting national tournaments; but there is no question that we are doing the correct thing by protecting school sports from the excesses and abuses that characterize major college sports.
Across the spectrum of intercollegiate athletics, but especially in Division I football and basketball, there exists an insatiable “keep-up-with-the-Joneses” appetite.
Universities are building increasingly extravagant facilities. They are sending their “students” into increasingly expansive scheduling. But it’s never enough.
There is always another university somewhere building a bigger stadium, a fancier press box or more palatial dressing rooms, practice facilities and coaches quarters.
So-called “students” are sent across the US and beyond to play on any day at any time in order to generate revenue to keep feeding the beast.
The Big Ten knows it’s wrong, admits it, but schedules football games on Friday nights to attract larger rights fees from television.
Feeling used or abused, some of the athletes of Northwestern and then at the University of Wisconsin, talk of creating a union to protect themselves from the obvious, rampant exploitation.
And then occasionally, some college coaches dare to suggest that high schools are wrong to have regulations that reject the road that colleges have traveled, a road that has distanced athletics very far from academics in intercollegiate sports.
The intercollegiate model is not and must not be the interscholastic model. We who are sold out for educational athletics have nothing good to learn from those who have sold out for broadcast revenue.