I know absolutely nothing about American Football, but I do know a bit about “soccer,” and those of you proposing it as an alternative should be aware that soccer also has substantial brain injury risks - there are collisions in soccer too, and all players head the ball regularly, but strikers especially. It also has a fairly high injury rate in other body parts. I don’t know why it has the reputation of a safe sport in the US.
Ha! Good luck making FIFA change anything.
I’m not planning to, just pointing out that it’s probably no safer than American Football.
There are lots of cites out there, so I picked a couple: Neuroscience for Kids - Soccer and Does Heading a Soccer Ball Cause Brain Damage? | Scientific American Most of them seem to recommend not allowing kids to head the ball in soccer, but headers are a major part of the sport and it’s less fun without it, same as the problems with touch football. Headgear also make it much more difficult to head the ball and slightly restricts your field of vision, which is why almost all players don’t wear it (they are allowed to).
Also, as the first cite says, not all the head injuries are from heading the ball anyway. Some are from personal collisions and some are from goal posts; padding the goal posts is suggested in the first post but that would significantly change the game in that balls would be more likely to trickle into the goal after hitting the post instead of bouncing away as they usually do now.
:sigh: The stadium is NOT primarily used by the football team. I would bet that, in number of hours logged on the field, the marching band is probably the “primary” user, followed by the community using the track fro excercise. You keep trying to widen the scope to attempt to make a point. That’s obfuscation.
I’m beginning to see the issue here. You don’t know enough about sports to keep your argument on point. Fair enough. An Athletic Director is different from a coach. The AD deals with all sports and, in HS, often some other extracurriculars. At larger schools dealing with scheduling alone for 16+ teams varsity teams (not to mention JV and sub-JV teams) is more than a full time job. It is not require a teaching componenet because it wouldn’t be possible to do both. Oh, and did you catch the part about “all teams” - not just football? Obfuscation.
Here is a link to one local school’s coaching staff which shows their teaching position as well. Every varsity and JV coach has a teaching job. You have to get down to 9th grade teams (sub-JV, basically rec sports teams) before you find volunteer assistant coaches who do not teach. I can’t find a link anywhere that says teaching is or is not required to coach a HS team in GA and I’m not going to link to every high school in Georgia, but I can telll you for a fact that every HS football coach in the largest school sysstem in the state is required to teach.
Manda Jo, where you’re from that may well be true, but not around here!
Cute, but not every thing is neatly documented on the net, particularly salary and payment information. Here is ANOTHER cite showing it is legeal and outlining reporting steps the school employees must take when it happens.
Last post. Found a cite for one local school system that mandates all lead coaches must be a treacher employed by the district:
I’m done
Note they are required to teach (or have "other professional duties) part time–they can be teaching as few as 1/2 the classes of a non-coaching teacher. Some of that salary has to be considered part of the “cost” of football.
It’s safe relative to football or hockey, but not really when compared to the other safe sports of baseball or basketball.
Plus, at the lower levels where most Americans (kids) play, it’s just a bunch of running without serious heading or anything like that. So it’s considered safer, because most kids will go through a soccer game just running around a bunch and maybe kicking the ball a little bit.
Re: Coaches and teachers
In Texas, I’m pretty sure coaches have to be teachers and teach some kind of class. My brother teaches and coaches for our old private high school, and some years ago when they joined the public school league, there was a scramble to find/coerce qualified teachers to be coaches. My brother went from coaching one sport to coaching 3, because they needed coach/teachers, instead of the volunteer or paid part-time coaches they previously used for things like freshman soccer, or throwing field sports, or stuff like that.
Now that being said, the head coaches typically teach things like PE or Health, although some do teach real classes. When I was in high school, our defensive coordinator and the head swim coach were both math teachers, and the head baseball coach taught history along with the head basketball coach. IIRC the head soccer coach was a paid non-teaching coach, and the head football coach taught PE.
Almost every coach-teacher I knew of was just that - a coach first, teacher second. They were hired for their coaching ability. Not their ability to teach say history. The joke about the teacher/coach who just showed movies all the time is real.
Back when I was looking for a teaching job I swear, one of the first questions they asked was “what can you coach?”.
Often true in my experience, especially with the higher profile sports.
I was a nuisance and didn’t really fit in among PE teachers because I believed we should be teachers first. I don’t buy for a minute that a person who devotes the necessary time to football or basketball coaching can be a fully effective teacher. But say that to the typical AD or department chair and you’ll quickly be shown the door. So I coached until I had the cachet to give it up, and even then I had to make it look like a sacrifice.
Same here. I eventually left the field.
God knows PE needs some good, committed teachers. Everyone has stories about how useless their gym classes were, and they’re correct IMHO. The field doesn’t take itself seriously, largely because of sports and coaching commitments. This is all to say I’m glad the evidence for injuries is becoming persuasive. I realize someone has to oversee youth sports and activities, but teachers need to be teachers first. If football becomes less important, that might be a good thing overall.
You yourself admitted (post #51) that the stadium project was driven by football, and that the stadium would not need to be so large (#59) if not for football. What percentage of the stadium’s facilities (including dressing rooms, stands, press box, etc.) are used by the marching band, or by the community at large?
The parts of the stadium used primarily or exclusively for the football team should be charged to the football team’s budget. The parts that are shared amongst all of the users should be charged pro-rata to the various users.
That means if they needed to build another 3000 seats solely for football spectators, the cost of those 3000 seats is a cost of the football team, not the people walking around the track for exercise. Right now, from what you’ve shown us, the football team gets the revenue on those 3000 seats but pays not a single dime towards their construction or maintenance.
(And I would be shocked if the marching band spends more time on the field than the football program, counting practice time, game time, JV games, etc. [If the football squad doesn’t practice in the stadium, then you can add the cost of construction and maintenance of their practice ground instead.])
I do know what an athletic director does, so your snark is both unnecessary and unappreciated. You are missing or deliberately overlooking the point.
Let’s say that one-third of Darlington’s time as AD was devoted to the football program. (It’s probably one of the largest sports in terms of number of participants, it’s certainly the highest-profile sport, and by your admission it’s the largest revenue-generator, so I’d guess one-third is substantially less than reality, but we’ll take it as a starting assumption [and if you have a cite that I am overestimating, then provide it and we’ll use your number].)
The time spent scheduling and administering the football program is a cost of the football program, agreed? That means one-third of the AD’s salary (and one-third of the AD’s employer-paid benefits, which is probably another $15K) should be counted as part of the football program’s budget. As of the time of the article cited, it was not. Add $29K in salary and $15K in benefits, and their “profit” of $49K is just about wiped out.
If Darlington spent more than a third of his time on the football program (including JV and sub-JV squads), the entire profit is gone and the program is in the red, before we even address the cost of facilities.
We weren’t talking about whichever program to which you meant to link (no link in your post). We’re talking about Valdosta as a representative program. In Valdosta, according to the article I cited, the head coach did not teach a single class. You have provided nothing to refute that.
So show us some evidence that it’s not that way around your part of the world!
I’m not disputing it’s legal. I am disputing your assertion that the Valdosta Booster Club paid Coach Darlington’s base salary.
You have asserted that the Valdosta High School football program is self-supporting. So far, what is documented on the net shows that the Valdosta High School football program receives substantial subsidies in the form of tax dollars to pay for their facilities and staff.
I used to work with a woman whose (now ex-) husband was a HS football coach, and that school district required coaches to also teach. Because he wasn’t all that fond of teaching, he took a job at the alternative high school, where no learning took place anyway (srsly, the teachers there did not take attendance or have lesson plans) just so he could coach. He was not the only person who believed that mandatory sterilization should be a condition of attending that school. :eek:
I knew the marriage was doomed when she was coming in to work and telling all of us that she suspected that her husband, with whom she had just had their second child, was cheating on her with at least one of his students. :eek: :dubious: The reason I was skeptical was because IMNSHO, if he really was doing something like that, she wouldn’t be telling us about it. If it was true, he belonged UNDER the jail, and if it wasn’t, that’s an accusation which is as vile as accusing him of molesting the kids when there’s no evidence that he is.
That said, I went to a high school where NONE of the football players could be described as “good kids”, and some of them did things that would make the Steubenville pond scum look like choirboys. No, we didn’t have social media back then, but there were Polaroids. Do I believe the stories? Oh, yeah.
I am pretty sure you are right, with the exception of athletic directors. But there are a TON of football coaches who teach (including PE) 66% or 75% of the number of classes a normal teacher teaches, and coach Football in the fall and Something Else in the spring. A school with 1200 kids will likely have 4 or 5 football coaches, especially once you include JV and Freshmen. So even 1/4 of 1/2 of their salaries (they only coach Football May-December, say) adds up to real money across 5 coaches.
You really cannot expect a coach/teacher to be that effective during the season. Consider they have practice every night for 2 hours or so plus dealing with team administrative duties, and then there are games which can last until pretty late so they do not get home until 6-7 or later so they dont have time to grade papers or make lesson plans. And this cuts across all sports (basketball, volleyball, tennis) and includes women coaches. Now once their sports season is over you see them putting out more effort.
And then their is the teacher/student interaction. Coach/teachers will respond to their players differently. Sometimes they give them a break, sometimes not. But never will they flunk a star player and if say 2 kids get into a fight where they both face suspension - you can bet who’s side that teacher is going to take.
You can also spot coach/teachers too. They tend to dress less professionally or often just wear their coaches gear or sweats.
Maybe at shitty schools that don’t care about academics.
Where I coach, I’ve seen star/high level players kicked off teams for any number of offenses.
Teachers have a minimum dress code. Only exception is on game day, coaches can wear a team jacket, students can wear their jersey/warm up jacket (depending on the sport).
The teacher I coach with, besides the regular teaching duties, will come in early or stay late to help students with lab work or make-up work.
More to the point, they get hired/fired based on what happens on the field, not in the classroom. Whatever the lip service that may be given to teaching first, at many schools, that’s the reality. Given that, putting coaching first is simply doing the job your boss has told you to do. You can’t blame a person for that. You CAN blame a fucked up system.
What sport does that teacher coach?
It all depends upon the school.
A lot of that probably is dependent on the sport, the school, and the level of coach. My brother is an assistant soccer coach, and also the Social Studies department head. I’m pretty sure his performance is not particularly dependent on the performance of his teams, and I suspect that’s true of most assistants.
Head coaches are probably different, but even then, it’s probably very dependent on the emphasis that the administration puts on that particular sport. I’d bet that the golf coach can perpetually lose with no penalty, but the head basketball and football coaches are under a microscope.
Also, he wears a dress shirt, tie and slacks every day, as do most of the coaches that aren’t PE teachers.
Track/Cross-country, though I know it’s also happened in basketball, football and softball.
I don’t know about the other sports as I don’t usually cross paths with those particular coaches.
The vast majority of the coaches here are non-teachers including several of the Head Coaches.
There’s maybe 35 teachers here so staffing the sports requires non-teaching volunteers though they are hired by and on the payroll of the school district.
They LET the marching band practice on the field? When I was in school, we had to practice on the asphalt parking lot. There’s no way they would let us touch their precious football field.
I’ll say this about the public school stadiums; they’re kept hopping.
The stadium for the public school district I went to middle school in had 2 high schools and 5 middle schools, and one stadium.
During football season this meant that every week they had 2 varsity games on Friday, 2 JV games on Thursday, 2 Soph. games on Thursday, 2 freshman games on Thursday. 10 8th grade games on Wednesday, 10 7th grade games on Tuesday. Obviously, they weren’t all home games every week, but assuming half of them were, you still end up with a total of 14 football games each week and 14 marching band performances in halftime. In the winter you had soccer- usually varsity and JV for the high schools. In the spring you had track- varsity, JV, freshman, 8th and 7th grades. Someone was usually having a meet of some kind every week, and some weeks more than one.
It wasn’t like the field was set up for one varsity football game on Fridays at 7:30 at all.
If there are gripes about single-purpose fields, gripe about baseball- most girls’ softball teams played on other fields because the dimensions are different, and the fields are only used for one part of the year.