Transforming Coaches
October 12, 2012
Forty-two years ago this past August, I showed up at a high school near Milwaukee for my first teaching and coaching job. I remember being introduced to the football team just before the first practice, and then just 60 minutes later, on the field, I heard a player call me “coach.”
The next day I overheard one player say to another, “Coach Roberts said . . .”
In 24 hours, I had been transformed from Jack Roberts to Coach Roberts. And it gave me a very special feeling.
After parents (and sometimes before them), the coach is the most important person in the educational process of school sports. Good coaches can redeem the bad decisions that administrators or parents sometimes make; and bad coaches can ruin the best decisions of administrators and parents.
Coaches have enormous influence over how kids think, how they act and what they value.
There is no time or money better spent in school sports than the time and money spent on coaches education. Every coach, every year in continuing education regarding the best practices of supervision, instruction and sports safety, as well as in ethics, values, sportsmanship and leadership.
The MHSAA Coaches Advancement Program should be the centerpiece of every school district’s ongoing, multi-faceted training program for coaches. We expect continuing education for classroom teachers. Why would we ever consider less for those who work with large numbers of students in settings of high emotion and with some risk of injury attended by hundreds or even thousands of spectators?
Anticipating Collateral Damage
March 23, 2018
When major college sports sneezes, high school sports usually catches a cold.
Throughout history, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has made changes in response to problems in college sports that have resulted in harm to high school sports.
Who can argue that relieving college coaches from the burden of being members of the instructional faculty did anything but weaken the connection between intercollegiate athletics and the educational mission of the sponsoring institutions? That major college football and men’s basketball coaches are the highest paid employees at many universities demonstrates the disconnection.
Who can argue that the creation of athletic grants in aid – scholarships – did anything but raise the pressures on college programs to win and to recruit hard at the high school level? Who can argue that this process got any more upright and above board when NCAA rules were changed to push most of the recruiting process to non-school venues and corporate concerns?
Who is surprised now that the corruption has moved beyond the NCAA’s ability to control and has resulted in investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and indictments followed by player ineligibilities and coach firings?
The worry now is that the NCAA and the National Basketball Association will strike again. Aiming to solve their problems, they likely will add to ours.