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Program Priorities

January 10, 2014

Many school districts face more requests from their constituents for sports programs than they have the resources to accommodate, so they are forced to make very difficult decisions. For three decades, when I’ve been consulted, I have offered and stood by this advice.

First, I advance the premise that if the activity is educational, there is just as much potential for the education to occur at the junior high/middle school and subvarsity levels as at the varsity level. Just as we would not discriminate against one race or gender, we should not disadvantage one age or ability level. In fact, with a little less pressure to win, it is likely to see more education at subvarsity levels and more reason to sponsor them.

Second, I advocate the position that schools should avoid sponsorship of any activity for which a qualified head coach cannot be secured. Qualified personnel are, in order of priority:

  1.  a teacher within the building who has current CPR certification and completed CAP.
  2.  a teacher within the district who has current CPR certification and completed CAP.
  3.  a teacher in another district who has current CPR certification and completed CAP.
  4.  a certified teacher from the community who has current CPR certification and completed CAP.
  5.  a non-certified person who has current CPR certification and completed CAP.

I urge schools not to descend lower than this for program leadership. Coaches are the delivery system of the education in educational athletics; they are the critical link in the educational process. More problems occur than are worth the effort if the program is in the hands of an unqualified coach.

Next, I urge that schools rank sports on the basis of cost per participant, and give higher priority to sports that spread funds over the greatest number of participants.

Next, I urge that schools place lowest in priority the sports that cannot be operated on school facilities and create transportation, supervision and liability issues, and give higher priority to those conducted at or very near the school.

Next, I urge that schools place lowest in priority the sports which are most readily available in the community, without school involvement. If resources are precious, then duplicating school programs should be a low priority; doing what the community can’t do or doesn’t do should be given a much higher priority.

While I’m a fan of school sports, I recognize that an athletic program has as much potential to do harm as to do good. Programs without qualified coaches that are conducted for small numbers of students at remote venues and without comprehensive school oversight and support may create more problems for schools than the good they do for students.

Bare bones budgeting will require brutally honest assessments based on priorities like these.

Our End of the Pool

June 26, 2012

The six-year veteran CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, told Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in a June feature, “Courage in leadership is very difficult, especially in today’s world, where the media doesn’t take time to really understand you.”

We can relate to this in our work in school sports, as very many veteran sports journalists and broadcasters have retired or been downsized, replaced by staff who are fewer in number and relationships and weaker in institutional knowledge and professionalism.

Whenever I read, watch or hear news accounts concerning topics that involve our work and about which I know a lot, I can see how incomplete and inaccurate the reporting is.  This has always been true, but now is much more obvious; and this has made me even more skeptical when I read through other topics about which I know less.  How much of this is opinion, not fact?  What facts are incompletely presented?  What “facts” are just plain wrong?

In this environment, it’s risky for leaders to step out with new initiatives; and it’s even riskier to defend the status quo, for the establishment is routinely presumed to be wrong by media who now often lack subject-matter depth and historical perspective.

Still, it remains the leader’s role, according to Jim Collins in Great by Choice, to not just predict the future, but to go out and create it anyway – in spite of criticism by media who have little experience swimming in our subject matter and who are merely wading into the shallow end of our deep pool.  Sometimes creating the future means doing something new and different; but just as often – perhaps even more so – it means defending something whose existence helps to maintain the very essence of educational athletics.