The UNC Academic Scandal: The Power of a Coach

When reflecting on a 38 year career in coaching, the late Hall of Fame basketball coach, Don Meyer stated, “…I love to see how a team can improve and kids improve…And that is why I coach.  I mean, there’s nothing better than that.  It just eats you up inside how lucky you can be to coach” (Olney, 2010, p. 141). Although Meyer was respected nationally for his knowledge of the game and willingness to share amongst his colleagues, the influence he had on the lives of his players is worth noting.  Steve Smiley, a player for Meyer at Northern State University in South Dakota, commented on the impact Coach Meyer had on his life off the court (Smiley, 2005).

 

…I knew that my experience as a basketball player at Northern would serve me in every area of my life, simply because I was blessed to be around Coach Meyer and learn his life lessons for five years.  He taught me how to completely engross myself in the team concept and worry about other people, instead of putting the emphasis on myself.  I will forever be indebted to Coach Meyer… (p.190-191).

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Promoting and Communicating Your Team Via a Team Website

When I started coaching I was told that a coach wears many different hats– teacher, counselor, administrator, role model, etc.  For today’s coaches, the world is demanding one more hat to wear–website manager/administrator.  People get their “news” in the palm of their hand (their smart phone or tablet).  Even television “news” is beginning to see the impact of social media.  In the “old days” the media would come to you and your school seeking information– to interview coaches, take pictures, get rosters, etc. Today, the local paper no longer comes to you.   The print media is a dying business and to stay afloat it’s fast becoming more electronic.  Because of this, coaches have to put on their own promoter hats and generate team news and information.  Put figuratively, a webpage is like your “front porch.” If kept attractive and clean– regularly updated and loaded with interesting news and information your athletes, parents, fans, and community will visit it often.  They’ll want to “sit on it” with their friends and have conversations with you and your coaches.

Almost two years ago, we contracted with a national website management company – National Amateur Sports – to create an athletic website for our large school district, and for each of our schools and each of their sports teams.  Why did we do this and what were the selling points in getting buy-in from our schools? I’m about to explain because my goal in this article is to convince you of the value of doing whatever it takes to establish and maintain a team webpage for your program and athletes.

For a good many years, our coaches and athletic directors had been constantly complaining about the lack of media coverage.  About twenty years ago, our local newspaper The Greenville News, was our state’s largest newspaper.  The coverage our high school sports teams received was phenomenal.  They reported on virtually all of our sports teams as well as football and basketball throughout the entire state.  They sponsored events such as district-wide track meets and coordinated and gave coverage to all-district teams in most sports.  Slowly, all of this disappeared.  The newspaper’s circulation dropped significantly, its staff shrunk in size, and our sports team’s media coverage became a trickle.  Most days, there is now not even a single item on high school sports in our local paper’s sports section. Although most coaches hardly noticed this subtle paradigm shift, shift it did and so must we! I’m guessing the above story is a familiar one in your own community because of the tidal wave of 24/7 news coverage via social media through smartphones, tablets, and smart TV’s.  These devices, in concert with the Internet are driving change. It’s happening in every community across the country and around the world.  Today, I get my newspaper delivered electronically and read it on my I-pad.  Everywhere you see people gathering, they are glued to their smartphones reading or sending tweets or texts, and getting news and sports updates, instagram’s, and instant messages from major news and sports media outlets. We can now follow games with live streaming and get live scoring via website links. It’s a whole new world and it is how people expect news and information to be shared with them.

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Taking the “LEPE” into Literature Enhanced Physical Education

Like many elementary school physical education teachers, early in my career I began creating an imaginary world in which my students could practice their skills.  Many of the activities simply changed themes as Disney changed heroes and heroines.  The beauty and brilliance of motivating students through their imagination is that when young children are pretending, they aren’t embarrassed, intimidated, or fearful of failure because they have lost themselves in the characters and setting of their imaginary world.  All students – big, small, heavy or tall will move with purpose when they become Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, dinosaurs or Spongebob.

About ten years into teaching, I found myself entertaining the students with a descriptive fictional scenario of the activity they were about to engage in when it dawned on me that there could be more to the story than just the opening scene.  I realized that pushing my curriculum into the lives of Hollywood cartoon characters was a backward approach.  Developing unique characters and a fantasy world to fit my curricular needs would be more educationally sound.  A full-length screenplay could do more than just motivate students to move; it could educate students on how to move.  By taking each unit and developing a storyline to fit the skills and strategies the students needed to learn, the philosophy of Literature Enhanced Physical Education (LEPE) was born.

It has been five years since the first teacher resource, Clean Up Your Backyard was published.  In those early years, LEPE struggled to find a place in the physical education community. The idea of reading in the gymnasium seemed irreverent to many and I struggled to get people to appreciate my philosophy.  Then…along came the Common Core State Standards and many in the PE world decided to take a look at this new teaching tool.  While the intentions of LEPE are to motivate and educate children in physical education, LEPE stories have the ability to meet any number of Common Core Standards for Listen and Speaking, Literature, and Informational Text.

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Promoting Your Physical Education Program

This article is the first part of a two part series. The second segment will be published in the next issue of PHE America.

Do you ever feel that as a PE teacher you are the “best kept secret” around? You know that what you do and what you can offer children is vital. It’s hard to believe that others don’t really know or understand what you are really all about. If only they would listen!

stock-photo-57920752-yound-girl-whispering-in-man-s-ear

Well guess what? Why wait? Why not take it upon yourself to explain to others the importance of what you do? But here’s the key: To be effective you have to do it in the context of how you fit into what they are trying to do, whether they be kids, staff or parents.

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2014: Physical Education Reading Recommendations

As 2014 comes to a close, perhaps you’ll have a bit of extra reading time over the holidays? Here are a few reading suggestions from the nearly 50 essays and teaching tips articles we published in pelinks4u in 2014. You can also of course browse them all in our Archives. Enjoy!

A Profession in Transition
2013-14 was a year of great change for our professional organization AAHPERD. Five national associations were integrated into the new SHAPE America. AAHPERD President Gale Wiedow shared with pelinks4u the reasons and motivation for these changes and his hopes for our professional future.

Is Physical Education Heading Towards Extinction or a Renaissance?

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We are a Culture in Crisis: How PE can Begin Changing the Next Generation?

Ready or not, here it comes!  New teacher evaluations, high stakes student assessments, and common core standards have been implemented whether educators are ready or willing.  While most teachers out there are plenty able, the real question is whether or not we have the ability to find the time to figure out how to implement the new content, collect enough evidence, differentiate various artifacts, and decipher between SLOs, GLEs, EALRS, EOCs, CBAs, and any other acronym I may have missed!  These days it seems as though there is so much more to learn and do ourselves we may actually forget our true task at hand – teaching.  Honestly, when do you have the time to stop, collaborate, and listen? Wait, I mean to collaborate, collect, plan, assess, communicate, and analyze? What time is left for the actual teaching itself?

Teens across the country are feeling extremely high levels of stress with some studies reporting this is the most stressed generation. Stressors include school, friends, work, extra-curricular activities and family. And stress continues to show up in studies as an underlying cause of many diseases. So what can physical and health educators do to help this generation of youth? The most obvious, which we know well, is to get our students involved in vigorous exercise, particularly cardiovascular exercise. Below is a short list of the benefits of exercise:

▸ Builds BRAIN cells

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What Should Be the Main Focus of Today’s PE Teacher?

“Believing we can improve schooling with more tests is like believing you can make yourself grow taller by measuring your height” (Robert Schaeffer).

Physical education teachers juggle their time between instructing, assessing skills and fitness levels, managing space, organizing equipment, monitoring behaviors, and much more. I confess I’m confused and frustrated. As educators shouldn’t our main focus be on addressing the students’ current needs and serving as a resource to their future learning rather than constantly testing? In my experience the teachers that end up being more of an influence on students’ pursuit of lifelong fitness are the ones who devote huge amounts of time creating additional physical activity opportunities and experiences in and beyond the school community.

When I was in elementary school, my PE teacher offered softball practice after school hours to students who were interested in extra physical activity. I used these skills later in adult league games. Our classes were also offered swimming at Timberline High School located across the road. Mr. Myers created additional chances for his students to improve important life skills. His focus was more on giving opportunities rather than assessments.

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