Rockland High School and the rest of SAD 5 took a huge step toward implementing Sports Done Right as the school committee unanimously voted Thursday night to support the University of Maine initiative.

“We were cautiously optimistic,” said Rockland High assistant principal Tom Forti, who served as the school’s athletic director last year and is a member of the district-wide Sports Done Right leadership team.

“There were a lot of questions early on, but the board seemed to embrace it,” Forti added.

Rockland was one of 12 pilot sites for Sports Done Right, which is a federally funded program that seeks to define healthy interscholastic athletic programs. The pilot sites, which also include the Brewer School Department, SAD 29 (Houlton) and SAD 32 (Ashland), were announced in March 2005.

SAD 5 is the fifth pilot site to receive school board approval. The others are the Augusta School Department, Winthrop Public Schools, School Union 29 (Poland) and SAD 51 (Cumberland).

Forti said the SAD 5 leadership team handed out information packets to school board members at their meeting last month in hopes that the board would approve Sports Done Right at this month’s meeting.

The team also had approval from the board’s activities committee.

“That helped a great deal,” Forti said.

The board had several questions about how Sports Done Right would affect areas of athletics such as booster clubs and the cutting of athletes during tryouts. Forti said the board was assured that Sports Done Right wasn’t a hard-and-fast set of rules, but more a series of guidelines.

“I think people realized that the idea, in principle, is a wonderful idea,” he added.

Now that SAD 5 has the school board’s vote, which Forti said was unanimous, the district’s next step is to fill out a self-assessment form with help from Karen Brown, the director of the Maine Center for Sport and Coaching, which administers Sports Done Right.

The district will then get a site visit from Brown or one of Sports Done Right’s co-directors, either Robert Cobb or Duke Albanese. They’ll give their final approval after the visit.

“We’re excited for what the future holds,” Forti said.

Rockland has already started to use Sports Done Right in different ways. The report’s seven core principles have been inserted into Rockland’s handbook.

Forti plans to sit down with new athletic director Darryl Weiss, who is the high school head football coach, to discuss ways to get Sports Done Right into other areas.

“We’d like to use it as an evaluation tool for coaches, athlete decorum and spectator decorum,” Forti said.

Sports Done Right was initially funded by a $397,400 two-year federal grant designated in the Fiscal Year 2003 U.S. Department of Education appropriation.

The program was recently allocated $140,000 in the 2007 Department of Labor and Health and Human Services, and Education spending bill.

The Sports Done Right report, entitled “Sports Done Right: A Call to Action on Behalf of Maine’s Student-Athletes,” was released Jan. 6, 2005, in Augusta.