Sports initiative sparks debate over local control, uniformity

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ORONO – A little more than two months ago, a leadership team representing SAD 5 got down to work on one of the most important pieces of the University of Maine’s Sports Done Right initiative.

But when the rest of the Sports Done Right pilot sites at Thursday’s training session got a look at what the team representing Rockland, Owls Head and South Thomaston had done, the SAD 5 group didn’t quite get the response they were hoping for.

The ensuing discussion highlighted the struggle between local control and an initiative-wide standard as Sports Done Right reaches a key stretch in its progression.

The pilot sites, of which there are 12 from a variety of school systems around Maine, meet periodically to discuss their progress in Sports Done Right, a federally funded initiative that seeks to define healthy interscholastic sports programs in Maine. Sports Done Right operates under the Maine Center for Sport and Coaching, which is part of the university’s College of Education and Human Development.

An important piece of the initiative is the compact that parents, student-athletes, coaches, and athletic directors will be asked to sign if the pilot sites’ school boards vote to approve Sports Done Right as policy for their town or district.

The ultimate goal of Sports Done Right is for the pilot sites to convince their school boards to adopt the initiative as policy.

The form that the compact should take was the crux of Thursday’s conversation at UMaine’s Buchanan Alumni House.

During a Sept. 22 pilot site session in Brunswick, MCSC director Karen Brown told the school districts they were welcome to tweak the sample compacts contained in an appendix of the Sports Done Right report, which was released Jan. 6, 2005. She asked that any changes be sent to her by Nov. 1.

The set of sample compacts was four pages long. The pilot sites told Brown they’d rather have an all-inclusive, one-page compact.

In response, Brown drafted three one-page compacts, each with a different format. The pilot sites e-mailed her with small wording and format suggestions.

The SAD 5 team, meanwhile, worked on its own one-page compact, the format of which is much different from the MCSC’s samples, and sent it to Brown by Nov. 1.

The SAD 5 compact retains much of the language from Sports Done Right, but is briefer and eliminates the brackets and sections of the MCSC compacts.

“We wanted something that was all-inclusive and not separated out,” said Tom Forti, the Rockland High School athletic director. “It’s not a matter of an ability to read it. It’s knowing what flowed more freely, was more concise, and what would work in our community. People would want to read something like that more so than wading through the issues of a couple of pages.”

But when the rest of the pilot sites got a look at Rockland’s draft Thursday – time was set aside on the agenda to discuss the sample compacts – some of the pilot sites disagreed with having different compacts around the state.

Other sites argued for a compact that all 12 sites would use, because the goal of Sports Done Right is to standardize practices.

“The reason we have Sports Done Right is that everyone had their own standards [before],” Stephen Rogers, the principal of Lyman Moore Middle School in Portland, told the group.

Other pilot sites said they wanted to have a choice of what kind of compact they eventually use, because each community has different needs.

Winthrop Area YMCA director Lonney Steeves said he would advocate use of one of the MCSC sample compacts, and his pilot site might choose to use the back of the sheet for information more specific to Winthrop.

After the meeting, Forti said SAD 5 wasn’t out to convince any other pilot site to use its compact.

“We were just advocating us using our one-page document,” he said. “I don’t care if anyone else wants to use it.”

Forti kept quiet during the meeting, but other SAD 5 team members told the group they were disappointed with their compact’s reception.

“It was a tremendous amount of local team building that went into this,” said Lucy Levenseler, the parent of a former Rockland High athlete. “Frankly I think we’re sitting here feeling like some of the wind has been taken out of our own community sails. … But I know we’ll regroup. We’re all invested and we all want to have it continue.”

Nothing was decided Thursday, but there likely will be a decision by Feb. 8, the date of the next pilot site training session.

Brown said she envisions a set of three different Sports Done Right-approved compacts. While the pilot sites will have more freedom to do what Rockland has done, schools that seek to become Sports Done Right sites in the next phase would have to chose from among one of the three versions.

One of those versions would be close to what SAD 5 drafted, as long as it’s approved by the Sports Done Right officials, Brown added.

“We’re giving a little more freedom to our pilot sites,” she said.

Forti said the SAD 5 team will go along with whatever the larger group decides.

“We’ll go by whatever they say because I believe in these principles so strongly and I’m still committed to the whole thing,” he said.