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?
Late to the Game
November 8, 2016
The Michigan High School Athletic Association’s Task Force on Multi-Sport Participation has learned that school sports are in competition versus non-school youth sports, not only programmatically but also and more fundamentally, philosophically. School sports sees child development quite differently and has as its mission developing the whole child.
Non-school youth sports business interests have convinced consumers (that’s parents) that early and intense specialization with private lessons and personal trainers, and lots of travel and tournaments is necessary for a child’s athletic interests and ultimate happiness. That is sometimes true ... once in a very great while.
What is much more often true is that specialization in a sport that is too early and too intense stunts a young person’s physical literacy, which often leads to less well-rounded athletic ability, a more sedentary lifestyle and poorer health in later life.
The theme of the Task Force recommendations to the MHSAA so far is that we have to reach youth and their parents earlier in life if we hope to compete for their hearts and minds.
When 80 percent of youth drop out of organized sports by the age of 13 – usually because they have been left out or become burned out – we’ve missed the kickoff if we start talking to them in 9th grade about the benefits of multi-sport participation and the school sport experience. In fact, the game is more than half over by then and our messages fall on deaf ears. We are absolutely correct with our message but appear out of step and out of touch to those who have only heard the sports specialization speech from youth coaches and their commercial interests.