Consequences
September 28, 2012
In “the good ol’ days” order was kept, not just because people prayed in school or taught morality (if that’s possible), but because students understood there were consequences for breaking rules. Practical consequences. If you do this, that will happen. Definitely. And no fancy footwork by your folks or their lawyer would get you out of it.
It would have been unheard of for the parents of a boy or girl who was disciplined out of one school to petition the administration of another school to waive the transfer regulation to allow the youngster to participate in athletics immediately at that school, and then to engage an attorney and go to court when the second school performed its responsibility by saying “No, not for one semester.”
This student could have learned a tremendous lesson for life: you’ve got to live with the consequences for your actions. Instead, what the youngster learned was that if you don’t like the consequences of your actions, then sue.
I don’t think we do the MHSAA, schools, or – most importantly – our students any good if we keep bailing them out of the boat of consequences.
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.