By BRENDAN HALL
Too many sports are suffering from coach-separation syndrome.
There are countless sports on campus whose coaches have jobs in other places, whether they are teachers at another school or a professional elsewhere. Although many of them are great coaches, their absence during the school day poses a major problem to both the athletes and the campus community.
If a person is making a commitment to be a coach, then that coach also needs to make a commitment to be on campus as either a teacher or administrator.
It is true that many other jobs pay better than being a teacher or administrator and coaches have every right to pursue whatever career they desire. In that case though, they should relinquish their coaching responsibilities to another person on campus.
Life on campus is interpersonal. Teachers are close with the students and there is an established mood on campus, one of companionship and comfort. Coaches located off campus remove themselves and the sport from the campus community. Sports are partly defined by their coach; football with Ziglar, basketball with Anderson, cross country with Katauskas. The personality of the coaches and their ties to the campus generate interest in their sports and meld them into campus life.
There is no reason why a school of 162 teachers should not be able to find a coach. Also, if need be, the school could grab a staff member, one who usually would not coach, and use he or she as a coach. Another alternative would be for the school to hire some of its teachers on more than academic merit, hiring them as a coach as well.
Contact is another issue with coaches working elsewhere during the day. Students constantly have questions about sports, whether it be try-out times, games or simply questions about the program. If a coach is on campus during the school day then all someone would need to do is simply go visit the coach and get their questions answered, quickly and easily.
When coaches are off performing their day jobs somewhere else, contact becomes extremely difficult. A student or parent could always e-mail the coach, but often times that e-mail gets lost in the stream of other e-mails the coach has and the student never receives a response or the coach completely forgets. Oftentimes it takes coaches days or even weeks to respond, and by that time their e-mail was pointless.
Calling the coach is also an option, but no coach wants to make his or her phone numbers available to the general public at the risk of experiencing a wave of unnecessary calls.
The greatest benefit about being a coach on campus is being able to keep track of the student-athletes. As members of one of the sports teams on campus, students take responsibility as a role model; they need to keep their attitude, conduct and grades in check. Any student-athlete who fails to meet such standards should not be given the privilege to play on one of the teams.
When coaches are on campus they are better able to keep track of these students and are significantly more cognizant of how they behaves at school. Outside coaches don’t understand all that goes on with their athletes during a school day. They disregard bad conduct, grades, or absences because they cannot easily keep track of them. By being on campus coaches can then monitor things such as absences which determine whether or not an athlete is legally allowed to play in a game or not.
Numerous coaches make frequent visits to classrooms to make sure their students are doing well and even make sure they are wearing the proper attire on game days. This allows coaches to have control over how their sport is perceived as a result of how the players act. This leaves less room for misbehaving on the part of the student-athletes.
The personality of coaches becomes intertwined with the campus and establishes an identity and mood for their respective sport. If they are willing to make the commitment to the sport, they need to also make the commitment to the campus, the athletes and the community.