Tim Newton, here sporting his homecoming gear, says having teachers head sports teams is a "perfect fit."
In January 2009, Kentucky high school technology teacher and varsity football coach, Jason Stinson, was charged with reckless homicide and wanton endangerment after one of his 15-year-old players died of a heat stroke. The scenario tucked itself neatly into a common stereotype. Though Stinson was ultimately acquitted, in the court of public opinion, he was just another one of those high school coaches with obstinate tunnel vision fixed on winning, student-athletes be damned.
The coach stereotype plays out on the silver screens of Hollywood (think Jon Voight in “Varsity Blues”) and in oversized high school stadiums found in the midst of west Texas oil fields: the high school coach who teaches solely as a prerequisite to coaching.
These coaches live by the saying popularized by legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” They push their high school athletes to inhumane lengths in search of that year’s state title, all while neglecting their teaching responsibilities and favoring their players in the classroom.
The problem with the stereotype, however, is that not many–in fact, extremely few–places actually see this type of teacher-coach. Case in point: In Door County, the mostly rural, scenic “thumb” of the state, populated by just less than 28,000 people (the annual tourist influx notwithstanding), there is almost universal agreement that a teacher who can coach is the best arrangement for all parties.
Those who do both say it is simply easier for them to handle coaching duties when they are immersed in the school environment for eight hours a day, compared to someone who arrives at the school to coach after the final bell of the day has rung, a so-called “lay coach.”
“I’m not saying that teachers are always going to make the best coaches,” says Tim Newton, a boyish-looking junior high math teacher, varsity softball coach and athletic director at the K-12 Sevastopol School in Institute, Wis. But Newton says a teacher who is able to translate passion in the classroom to passion in the coaching realm will often be successful.
For him, Newton cannot get enough of coaching. Since graduating from UW-La Crosse 12 years ago, he has coached one sport or another, trying his hand at everything from hockey to track and field to football to softball, which he led to the 2008 state championship.
According to Newton, 36, and some of his teacher-coach colleagues, the benefits in doing both are manifold and vastly outweigh any conflicts of interest potentially perceived by the community.
“When you’re not around the kids all the time, you don’t really know what’s going on in school,” says Pat Delcore, 44, a soft-spoken junior high and high school health teacher, varsity softball coach and former varsity girls basketball coach at Southern Door Schools in Brussels, Wis. “You don’t know if [a] kid had a bad day—if they got into an argument with their boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever at lunchtime. If you’re there, you can be kind of aware of some of those things, where otherwise the lay coach comes in from the outside and they might not know what’s going on with a kid during the day that could cause them to go off at practice or whatever. I think overall it’s probably better that the coaches are teachers within the school.”
And it is not just a benefit from the teacher-coach’s angle. By and large, student-athletes convey a fondness for having access to their coach at a moment’s notice.Riley Spetz, 16, a junior and three-sport athlete at Sevastopol High School, says he enjoys just being able to shoot the breeze and talk sports with coaches in between classes—something that helps to build a stronger bond between player and coach.
“Teacher-coaches are more effective because a lot of the time they have a relationship with players [and] students that can help them to know the strengths and weaknesses of the kids,” says Nick VanDreese, 17, a junior and three-sport athlete at Sturgeon Bay High School.
Considering those advantages, it would be impractical for an administrator not to seek teachers who are willing to coach, right? Not quite. Many people, including parents and non-coach teachers, contend the ability to head an extracurricular should not factor into the hiring process in the slightest.
Doreen Carmody, a former chemistry and physics teacher and unabashed non-coach who retired from Sevastopol in 2007 after 40 total years of teaching, says that kind of thinking may be noble and ideal, but is nevertheless naïve.
“Many young teachers that apply for a job, if they say in their interview … they have that extra plus of being maybe a former athlete—a decent athlete—they have a leg up on getting the job!” she says. “They’ll never tell you that, and it’s not legal, but if you had two candidates—credentials are equal, you like them both, they have good backgrounds—but one of them was a basketball player in high school and might be an addition to your staff as a coach? That candidate is given a little extra, even if it isn’t conscious, it’s in your subconscious.”
Newton disagrees, claiming teaching credentials are always considered aside from any willingness to coach, “but boy, it sure is an advantage to get someone who can do both.”
But this rosy appraisal of teacher-coaches glosses over the major conflicts that can arise for someone trying to fill both roles simultaneously, not the least of which is time. Typically, teacher-coaches report difficulty balancing school, sport and home.
“You have to, number one, maintain your personal life,” explains Riley’s mother and Newton’s predecessor, Heather Spetz, 43, an energetic high school English teacher at Sevastopol. Spetz coached for 19 years—five years of boys basketball in Unalaska, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands, and 14 of softball at Sevastopol—before hanging up the whistle in 2007.
“You know you have to do things with your family on a regular basis,” Spetz says. “You have to put away school at least while you’re coaching and at least two or three nights a week. But as an English teacher, would I encourage people to be varsity coaches? Nope. You know, if you’re going to teach writing, it’s just too hard.”
Because of the inevitable time crunch, most coaches are allowed to forgo otherwise mandatory faculty meetings in favor of practice—something Carmody reports as the source of some resentment from other teachers. Moreover, she says, it becomes problematic when a kid wants to come in for after-school help but can’t because the teacher is at practice.
And then there are the favoritism allegations that circulate widely among the non-athlete students. Candidly, Pete Claflin, 42—a reserved, self-assured junior high and high school physical education teacher, assistant football coach and boys’ basketball coach at Southern Door, who has coached for two decades—says there may be some underlying truth to that sentiment.
“When I’m in class, I try to separate that, and try to treat everyone fairly, whether you’re an athlete or not an athlete,” Claflin says. “I think you may say that, but you know down deep you’re always going to help those kids because you spend so much time with them. You’re always going to keep an eye on them, and try to push them a little harder; hopefully you don’t try to do it too much.”
Despite these conflicts, though, everyone agrees the challenges facing a lay coach are far larger, starting with a basic disconnection from the day-to-day happenings in the school. As Newton says, lay coaches won’t hear about a player struggling academically until it is brought to their attention, whereas coaches who are teaching all day will be in near⎯constant touch with that information.
“I think they’re totally disadvantaged because they don’t see the kids every day,” the elder Spetz says. “You know, you can build relationships and team chemistry because you see them every day. You can put out some fires, if a kid’s struggling in a class, you’re right there to know that. A lay coach doesn’t always have access to that as quickly.”
Eddie Gonzalez, 16, a junior and three-sport Sevastopol athlete, agrees.
“You don’t really get to see the guy—I mean how long is practice?” Gonzalez asks rhetorically. “Two-and-a-half hours? If you’re there the whole day, you can build a relationship for eight hours.”
Robert Nickel, 48, a tall, orderly principal at Sturgeon Bay High School, says lay coaches also present logistical problems since they are not always there to deal with scheduling issues or unexpected changes that arise. Nickel says any increased workload, such as scheduling transportation for road games, created by a lay coach’s inaccessibility falls to the athletic director, complicating his or her job.
While a lay coach can be a good thing because he or she represents a clean slate for an athlete and is unaware of any past transgressions or baggage, everyone agrees it doesn’t make up for the lack of contact an outside coach has with a student-athlete.
And yet, both Delcore and Newton said there seemed to be an emerging trend toward more non-teacher coaches. Since neither the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction nor the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association keep numbers on how many teachers coach, or vice versa, it is tough to verify such a trend.
However, anecdotally, Delcore says 40 percent of the football coaches are non-staff members, and one-third of his softball staff is made up of coaches from outside of the school. Newton went beyond that, guessing almost four out of five of his coaches are lay coaches.
When pressed to speculate why, the Sevastopol athletic director points to the increased parental involvement and pressure. He says regardless how a coach performs he or she still will be relentlessly criticized from some segment of the parents.
“My personal opinion is, we don’t pay a lot,” he says. “And parents expect a lot out of a coach, and I think that keeps some teachers from doing it. Sometimes you can be a great teacher and go around in coaching, and whether it’s your fault or not, get thrown through the ringer, and all of a sudden it reflects on how [parents] think of you as a teacher.”
Nickel, who has advertised three vacant junior varsity coaching jobs since summer with no response, concurs with Newton’s assessment of parental over-involvement serving as a deterrent for prospective coaches.
“It’s getting to be very difficult to fill the positions,” he says. “And, to be honest, one of the problems is that the parent community has gotten to be so vocal about their students and playing time and things like that, that people are just getting worn out and don’t want to fill the positions anymore.”
Three vacant coaching spots underscore a changing of the coaching guard. Instead of parents worrying about the overbearing Jon Voight-like coach with no regard for the educational development of his students, there is a new stereotype budding: the overbearing parent scaring all the skilled teachers-coaches away, coaching assets be damned.