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?
Common Good
November 23, 2011
During the first week of July in 1995, I read an editorial by Judith A. Ramaley, president of Portland State University in Oregon, that seems as appropriate for today’s events and public policy environment as it was then. Perhaps even more so. Ms. Ramaley wrote:
“I used to think that character is how you behave when no one is looking. For most of us that may still be true. For public figures, however, character is how you behave when everybody is looking . . .
“. . . Nearly a century ago when President Woodrow Wilson was still a college professor, he said: ‘A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street corners or the opinions of the newspaper. A nation is led by a man who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into common meaning; speaks not the rumors of the street but a new principle for a new age; a man for whom the voices of the nation . . . unite in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.’”
As our “modern” nation heads into the heart of yet another election season, with earlier and earlier primaries leaving little separation from the last acrimonious campaigns, it is this quality above all others that I’m seeking to find in the candidates for public office: the uncommon heart and mind to unite us for the common good.