Students cite sports’ problems

A couple of troublesome trends among the coaching ranks at Maine’s schools over the last several years strongly suggested that there might be deeper problems affecting the state’s interscholastic sports programs.

Not only were disillusioned coaches leaving their positions in ever-increasing numbers because of confrontations with parents, but nearly 70 percent of them had no professional connection whatsoever to the primary mission of the schools in which they worked.

“We were noticing that more and more of the high school coaches were not teachers and so had no role in the educational programs,” said Robert Cobb, the dean of the University of Maine College of Education and Human Development. “The percentage was even higher in the middle schools, which clearly affects what a school is trying to accomplish with sports and academics.”

Consequently, Cobb decided it was time to clarify the contributions that school sports in Maine should be making to the academic achievements of students in accordance with the Maine Learning Results.

“Seeing a high turnover rate among coaches and a diminishing number of them who were not teachers at their schools seemed to be a threat to the overall educational outcome we wanted,” Cobb said. “We realized we had to examine the whole direction of sports in our schools so that it wouldn’t spin out of control.”

The result is an ambitious, federally funded initiative called Coaching Maine Youth to Success, which began last October as a way to help raise the aspirations, academic performance and level of satisfaction of student-athletes and to encourage more kids to know the lifelong benefits of sports.

With a $397,400 grant from the U.S. Department of Education – which expects Maine’s unique initiative to serve as a national model – an 18-member panel has been soliciting opinions from students, coaches and school officials about how sports can become a more rewarding experience for everyone involved.

The survey process culminated last month with a Maine Sports Summit, in which 300 participants from 87 high schools and 24 middle schools around the state spent five hours trying to define the chief characteristics of a healthy interscholastic sports program.

Cobb, who is directing the yearlong project with former education commissioner J. Duke Albanese, said Monday he was most surprised not by the problems cited at the conference but by the fact that everyone seemed to readily identify the same ones.

When asked what they considered to be the most detrimental practices in school sports, for example, the student-athletes said bad attitudes and a lack of respect among players soured their experiences on the playing fields. They complained of meddlesome parents who too often play politics, of coaches who favored the best players over the rest of the team and of the win-at-all-cost philosophies at their schools and in their communities.

The students also cited the increasingly negative comments and inappropriate behavior they’ve noticed among the fans and parents who turn out for their games and said that playing on a team was not always as much fun as it should be.

“Many of them said they feel a tremendous pressure put on them by fans and communities that become so invested in their local sports teams that they place unrealistic expectations on them,” Cobb said. “One student from a community Down East said she was so embarrassed by her fans that she thought about dropping out of sports entirely. A lot of adults are having an increasing stake in their kids’ performances nowadays and see sports as the preparation for an athletic career rather than preparation for life or simply to have fun.”

Cobb said too many parents think of middle school, high school and youth sports programs as the route to a free college education for their kids, when the truth is that only about three percent of high school basketball players can ever hope to get a Division 1 scholarship. Cobb has even heard of parents elsewhere in the country hiring quasi sports agents who, for hefty fees, steer young athletes to those high schools that can help them realize their big-time scholarship dreams.

“The kids are aware of all the time, money and energy their parents have invested in them as athletes,” Cobb said. “Many of them feel trapped by it and say they don’t want to play sports any more. The pressure is too much.”

Armed with a mountain of opinion about the best and the worst aspects of interscholastic sports, the panel now will begin translating the information into a blueprint of sorts, designed to help schools create programs that can best serve the interests of their student-athletes. Schools that choose to adopt the guidelines, which should be completed by early October, must then establish policies to enforce them.

“Right now, Maine school policies are mostly silent regarding how their sports programs should function and about such things as standards of spectator and coach behavior,” Cobb said. “But so many times in our sessions we heard school officials say they are looking for guidance and that they know how important these issues have become.”