A wake-up call for athletics

Another school sports season is fast approaching and with it a return to that familiar cycle of youthful triumph and heartbreak, of sportsmanship and camaraderie on exuberant display, and of hard-earned lessons that can be carried into adulthood.

Yet the most undesirable elements of scholastic sports will soon be in evidence, too, bellowing insults from the bleachers, pacing in grim-faced rage along the sidelines, and a general souring of the experience for lots of impressionable kids in the process.

They represent the worst in kids’ sports nationwide, these overbearing sports parents and fans and win-at-all-cost coaches, and their numbers have grown dramatically in the last couple of decades. So much so, in fact, that they’ve become the focus of a pioneering Maine initiative designed to help raise the aspirations, academic performance and satisfaction of student athletes, and to encourage more kids to experience the lifelong benefits of sports. Called “Coaching Maine Youth to Success,” it’s a worthy project and long overdue.

It began when educators such as Robert Cobb, dean of the University of Maine’s College of Education and Human Development, noticed a couple of disturbing trends among coaches at Maine’s schools. Not only were they leaving their positions in ever-increasing numbers because of confrontations with parents, nearly 70 percent of them had no professional connection with the academic mission of the schools in which they worked.

Cobb and his colleagues knew it was time to identify the contributions that school sports should be making to the academic achievements of students, in accordance with the new Learning Results standards. An 18-member panel, co-chaired by former Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese, solicited opinions from students, coaches, athletic directors and other school officials about how sports might become a more rewarding experience for everyone involved.

The surveys culminated in a conference last winter that drew 300 participants from 87 high schools and 24 middle schools. Its goal was to define the characteristics of a healthy school sports program. To Cobb’s surprise, everyone at the conference cited the same litany of problems standing in the way of that ideal.

Athletes complained of meddlesome parents who manipulated the system to gain advantages for their children, of coaches who played favorites at the expense of other kids, and of the winning-is-everything mentality of some schools and communities.

The students said the increasingly negative comments and inappropriate behavior of many parents and fans took much of the fun out of the games. Many felt an undue amount of pressure from adults who harbored unrealistic expectations about their youthful skills and who viewed middle school, high school and youth programs as the route to a free college education. Still other kids admitted they’d been at times so disillusioned with school sports that they had considered giving up organized athletics entirely.

The panel recognized the troubling responses as a wake-up call, and so should the rest of us who know firsthand the extraordinarily enriching role that sports can play in a child’s life. All the research has been distilled into a blueprint of sorts, due out this fall, that’s designed to help schools voluntarily create programs that can better serve student-athletes.

It’s hard to imagine a school in Maine that wouldn’t embrace such a win-win proposition.