The need for a fresh look at the way sports are played in Maine high schools and middle schools should be raised delicately. Without a few specific examples of boorish behavior by athletes or parents pointing to a reason for such an examination, many people associated with sports in Maine schools would feel defensive when a special statewide board convenes to reform the current sports systems.

Robert Cobb, dean of the College of Education at UMaine, however, can point to problems that will seem uncomfortably familiar to parents. “I think there’s been an increase in parental difficulties and challenges,” he said politely. He and Duke Albanese, a former education commissioner and co-chair, with Dr. Cobb, of the university’s new Coaching Maine Youth to Success study, also noticed a drop in the number of teachers coaching as expectations for their classroom performance has increased, resulting in a drop in the quality of sports instruction. And they note an increase in community sports programs that are, in some instances, becoming a year-round minor league for major aspirations, sometimes to the detriment of the players.

Followers of the sports pages will recall plenty of national examples of teen-agers with de facto agents and mega-shoe contracts, high-pressure leagues for pre-pubescents and parents with control issues. What is blatant nationally often is subtle locally but is nevertheless there. The question for the study is this: What should sports programs in Maine middle and high schools look like to produce the best results for the whole student?

The guide is the 1998 Promising Futures document, a set of principles that tries to improve education by establishing standards for safety in schools, for learning opportunities, values, equity, coherence of curriculum and other measures. Doing the same for sports, Messrs. Cobb and Albanese hope, would give communities a means for improving their perspective of local sports. The funding for this enterprise came from a U.S. Department of Education grant, shepherded through Congress by Sen. Susan Collins.

The youth study has nothing to do with feel-good programs, where everyone (and no one) is a winner but very much to do with encouraging more students to gain the benefits sports offers, to encourage students to try different sports for the sheer joy of it and leave specialization for later. The program would seek ways to re-involve teachers so that their instruction and mentoring skills carry beyond the classroom. And it wants parents to better appreciate that achievement is not only found in box scores.

Expanding the possibility of what sports can offer students is not simple; in some ways it will be harder than academic reform because so much more of it takes place outside of school and it treads on turf not known to welcome public scrutiny. The two education leaders, however, have assembled a fine board, including some impressive athletes and coaches. They hope to meet with many students, coaches, teachers, administrators and parents over the next year and then present their findings. A successful attempt at adding new perspective to a culture desperately enamored of sports and winning, it needs barely be said, would make UMaine a national leader in this field. Not that it is overly competitive or anything.