The role of coaches in high school sports

[Karl]

The role of coaches in high school sports

By Dr Lascelve Graham
Saturday, February 25, 2012

The business of recruiting students into high schools in order to boost schools' chances of winning at sports, especially when these students do not qualify on academic grounds, is an atrocity that can find its way into the system through many routes.

The desire to win is a strong motivator to all who are involved in sports at any level, and it can creep into and dominate the actions of even our best high school administrators where there are no clear guidelines that seek to protect against the potential harm involved in recruiting at this level.



The following quotation by the president of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the governing body of high school sports in the USA (similar to ISSA in Jamaica), summarises well the philosophy that should underpin high school sports:
"Winning on the professional level is required. Winning on the collegiate level has become an expectation. Winning at the high school level should be a pleasant outcome to fulfilling the true purpose of sport in school, which is to serve the complete educational needs of those who choose to participate."

Coaches are a primary source of influence on the students who are involved in high school sports. One of the reasons that high schools are so infested with the recruiting/importation bug is that coaches of professional and semi-professional teams at club and national levels are accustomed to recruiting to win. When some of these also coach at high school level, they transfer the same mentality re recruiting to win to the school.

Legendary former US football coach Paul 'Bear' Bryant in recognising the influence of coaches once said: "When the cheating starts .... look to the coach. He's the chairman of the board." Former football coach Don Faurot, a member of the USA College Football Hall of Fame, observed that "most of the evils of sports are brought about by the coaches themselves. The alumni are merely tools in the coaches' hands and never recruit a boy that ... coaches do not want".

These coaches and their acolytes pressure/entice principals to import/recruit sporting talent in an attempt to influence the outcome of sporting events. Unfortunately, too many of our principals have yielded to temptation. If high schools do not train coaches in the mission and purpose of interscholastic sports and do not provide strategies to enable high school teacher/coaches to effectively fulfil this role, we will lose entirely the educational purpose of sports in our high schools.

When high schools fill coaching vacancies, they should seek to hire individuals who not only have a background in the particular sport, but also an understanding of the educational mission of high school sports. There is an ever-increasing need to train individuals for all facets of the coaching profession in high schools, including the teaching of lifelong skills to student-athletes to help them become productive citizens.

Just as is the case with any profession, the expected outcomes will not occur without proper training of our coaches. The story is told of John Wooden a legendary basketball coach who in giving a clinic to high school coaches spent the first half of the clinic not mentioning anything specifically to do with basketball but instead focusing on what he termed the principles of his "Pyramid of Success" which had to do with traits like self-control, loyalty, enthusiasm, intentness, confidence, delaying of gratification, conflict resolution, etc, skills and attitudes that will help youngsters for the rest of their lives.

Coaches in high school sports should not be judged, assessed and rewarded only on their winning percentages, but on other equally important accomplishments and contributions.

The model for success at the high school level must remain different from that at the professional and college levels. While winning as many games as possible is a goal for all high school coaches, the final outcome of a contest is not the all-determining factor for judging success.

Success at the high school level has more to do with preparing students for their lives after sports than the number of victories or championships. Their sports experiences are intended to complement, to support and add to the learning they are experiencing in their academic programmes. Sports helps to shape these young people — contributing to what they know and the character of who they are — fulfilling the vision of our country to graduate able students who are good people. To promote sportsmanship and foster the development of good character, school sports programmes must be conducted in a manner that enhance the academic, emotional, social, physical and ethical development of student-athletes and teach them positive life skills that will help them become personally successful and socially responsible.

Youngsters must be taught how to transfer skills that they have learnt through sports to other areas of their lives, including the academic and social.

The measuring stick for successful high school coaches has to do with helping students to succeed in school and in life. High school sports provides many students a reason for being or an identity. They can be somebody and be a part of a team without necessarily being the star of the team. Hence, coaches have a glorious opportunity to use sports to capture the imagination of youngsters, something that may be more difficult in the classroom, since the youngsters have a greater interest in the sport and the coach thus has their attention. High school coaches must develop the players they have to reach their potential — both in the classroom and on the field. Sports is a microcosm of life and presents many teachable moments both on and off the field for all our students whatever their talent level. Hence, coaches and their supporters must stop going outside the school to bring in talent in an attempt to win.

Successful coaches at the high school level are those who have a student-centred focus rather than a focus on winning at any price. Principals and school boards should judge, assess and reward high school coaches based on the successful implementation of certain educational outcomes related to citizenship, life skills, learning, sportsmanship, etc. The emphasis should be on helping students recognise the proper attitude toward competition and winning which are in line with the educational mission of competitive high school sports helping students to get set, get ready and go for life.

Editor's note: Dr Lascelve 'Muggy' Graham is a former StGC, All-Manning, All-Schools and Jamaica football captain.


Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/sport...#ixzz1nW72gMdA

[Karl]

School admission and sports

Published: Sunday | March 25, 2012


Edwin Allen's Shawnette Lewin (foreground) wins the Class One girls' 100 metres final in 11.73 seconds, beating St Jago duo Melissa Williams (left), 11.83, and Chrisdale McCarthy (second left) 11.83, during the opening day at the Milo Central Championships, at G.C. Foster College, earlier this month. - Gladstone Taylor/Photographer





Peter-John Gordon, Contributor

Dr Lascelve 'Muggy' Graham's 'The numbers game in high school sports', which appeared in The Gleaner of Saturday, March 17, 2010, argues against the 'importation' of athletes into high school. There are some unstated assumptions which underlie this argument.


Dr Graham constructs a straw man and then proceeds to destroy it. He tries to distinguish between high school and other levels of the educational system. This is an artificial distinction which is not always appropriate. Principles used at the tertiary level are also of relevance at the secondary level.

The purpose of a school is to give the best possible education to its students. The selection of the student body is itself an important tool in fulfilling this objective. This is so because the learning process is not simply from teacher to individual student, but includes students learning from each other.

Obviously, the scholastic ability of each student creates an externality for all other students. Educators discuss the pros and cons of grouping students by academic ability.

One argument is that putting together all the high-ability students allows each to progress faster and, therefore, do more in a limited time. The less-endowed students, this argument purports, would be able to move at a pace appropriate to their level and, therefore, increase their learning outcomes.

Another school of thought is that mixing students of different academic abilities allows the less able to achieve more because they are carried by the momentum of the more able.

There obviously is some truth to both arguments.

Within high schools, different approaches are used. In some, pupils are streamed by ability, and in others the streaming is alphabetic and, therefore, random with respect to ability. Assigning children to high schools purely on the basis of an examination result (a proxy for academic ability) is an application of the view that students should be grouped by academic ability.
The most extreme form of sorting by ability would be to have the GSAT results entered into a spreadsheet in descending order of performance and allocation to schools made on the basis of the following rule: the top 200 students would be assigned to the school ranked No. 1, the next 200 highest performers assigned to the school ranked No. 2, and so on.

We do not practise such a system; we allow some amount of discretion. Students and parents/guardians are allowed to exercise some amount of preference. There are many different factors which enter into these preferences - location, programmes offered, tradition (where parents went to school), etc. Some countries practise zoning, i.e., they allocate their students to public schools on the basis of where the child lives; there is no attempt to use academic ability.

Diversity in schools
Schools, as part of the educational process, would like to expose their students to diversity, since students learn from their peers. Having all the students coming from the same neighbourhood reduces social diversity, since people of similar classes tend to live together.

Our system of allowing students to choose schools outside their neighbourhoods is less restrictive in ensuring social diversity than school zoning. However, the high correlation between class background of parents and educational attainment of students, along with allocation according to GSAT results, leads to a concentration of upper middle-class students in the highest-performing high schools.

Diversity is required not only in terms of social background but also in other areas. This helps students to prepare for life. Navigation through life is not purely about academic attainment, as important as this might be. In other countries, the issue of race becomes important in selecting the student body, even if it means that a higher-achieving student of one race must give way to a lower-achieving student of another.

This issue is not only about the two students involved. The entire student body needs to learn to live in a world with multiple races, and where better to learn to do this than in school? The rest of the school benefits educationally from having minorities among them. Of course, the denied majority student feels aggrieved.

The issue for social planners is whether the entire student body is made better or worse off by such decisions.

The same argument can be made with the inclusion of persons who are outstanding in a field other than academics. Does the student body benefit from having people who are good at acting, singing or sports among them?

A student may wish to move from one school to another because one school is better able to meet his/her needs. These needs could be academic (some environments are better for an individual student than another) or non-academic (one school might have a tennis programme while another does not, or a youngster might want to be in a school with a good music programme - there are few high schools which would allow a young boy to experience the musical experience of the Kingston College Chapel Choir).

These are legitimate reasons why a student might want to change school.

According to Dr Graham, these things should not matter, and we should resort to the spreadsheet with its univariable decision rule.

Should a school not be allowed any discretion over which student it admits? If there are three children in a family attending a particular school, and a fourth is assigned elsewhere, should the principal of the first school not take this into consideration as to whether or not to admit the fourth child?

Building a strong sense of community is a part of the educational process. Building a strong attachment of students to the school is important if these students will continue to support the schools after graduation. A sports programme is important in achieving these objectives.

Dr Graham suggests that disturbing the academic pecking order is to deny someone an education in that institution. This has to be balanced against the additional resources which the school might be able to garner and, therefore, increase its ability to educate more students in the future.

No utopian solution
College sports bring in vast amounts of resources to some foreign universities, which allow them to be able to hire highly-paid world-renowned academics/scientists and to offer scholarships to many needy students. In some instances, a promising student athlete is given preference over another student with better scores. There seems to be nothing immoral here. There are X places to be allocated to Y students, and some allocation rule is required. Some amount of discretion may lead to a better outcome than a strict rule, because it is impossible to write rules which lead to the perfect social outcome.

The question of morality should not be forgotten. While it is true that a person who is allowed entry into a particular school because of some special ability will enhance the educational experience for the rest of the school population, care must be taken not to exploit such a person. That person is deserving of an education also.

A reasonable expectation should be that such a student will leave that school with an education. To simply use a child on the football team, with no concern for his education, would be exploitation.

A small faction of special skilled persons within a school population can enhance the education of all and enhance the education of future generations. These skills might not all happen to appear based on scholastic outcomes. High schools must seek to educate those under their charge as best as possible. There is no compelling reason why should be based solely on examination results at age 12.

Peter-John Gordon is lecturer in the Department of Economics, UWI. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and pjmgordon@hotmail.com.

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[Don1]

Nice lecture from the academic.

What we really need is research on the subject measuring the size and nature of the cohort..and tracking educational & other outcomes of those who transfer schools versus a control group who don't...when that data set is obtained then we can have a sensible data-driven discussion and develop a worthy solution to the problem... until then it's just yappin'

I guess that's too complicated a process for our academics and policy makers

[Mosiah]

A job for ISSA, yes?