At my school, there’s a set number (per sport) of (small)stipends. Cross-country is 1 head coach, 1 assistant. Track is 1 head coach, 3 assistants. I don’t know what the numbers are for the other sports.
The school also depends on a relatively large number of “off-campus coaches” as there’s not enough (not only numbers but desire and experience) here to fill all the sports.
Well I know of one high school where the PE teacher is also the head football coach and he also did private football related training and ran football camps in the summer. He had several players each year get college scholarships and many parents sent their sons to that high school just to be under him.
He has since quit HS and gone to coach football at the college level.
But yes, he was making $100k with all his side coaching. I know a woman PE teacher who also coaches the tennis team who also does private tennis coaching.
BTW, in some area the HS football coach works directly with the coaches of the kids in the lower grades. They start tackle at around grade 2. What he does is come up with sets of plays and all the lower coaches train the kids in that style so by the time they make the high school team they know the system. Of course whenever their is a new HS football coach that means a new system.
At some of the big schools in Texas they have staff who all they do is coach say football. But then I’ve seen HS football stadiums that rival college ones with box seats and televised games.
Sounds alot like Rockhurst High school here in Kansas City. Odd thing is private schools have to “play up” meaning say a 3A school has to play against 4A public schools. The idea is the private schools can “recruit” kids from all over and give them scholarships whereas a public school can only use the kids in their geographic zone (of course I’ve seen them work with real estate agents to bring in kids also).
Mine was a Jesuit high school as well, so that makes sense!
We played up at the time, mostly because we were all-male, so they doubled our enrollment for categorization purposes. We were still a Texas 4A school at the time- big 4A doubled, small straight-up.
Now, my school and Dallas Jesuit are both in the Texas University Interscholastic League, which means they’re the only private schools in the public school leagues. So they’re assigned to districts, etc… just like any other public school. The only catch is that they’re required AFAIK to be in the largest school tier- 6A these days.
And Texas schools can be MASSIVE. Why? to put 11 bigger boys on a football team. What is the biggest you have seen?
Here in Kansas a big high school is around 1200-1500.
The really big ones are in the 4-4500 range, but there are a few outliers larger that are close to and a little above 6k.
And in some cases, that’s even skewed, because they do stuff like put the 9th-10th graders in their own school, and only the 11th-12th graders are at the “high school” that plays varsity sports.
I don’t know why they concentrate them like that- it seems to be predominantly but not exclusively a suburban thing. Even back in the 1990s though, 1200 wouldn’t have been particularly large.
For my part, I’d say bust all of them to about 1000 or less; with the intention of allowing greater access to extracurriculars and stuff like that. Granted, there’s a good possibility that it might dilute other resources- having 5 smaller libraries rather than one large one is a different challenge, but they could adopt something like cities do where you can check out books from other schools’ libraries. Or just do it all digitally these days…
These words should be inscribed over the entrance to every locker room in the world:
“Nothing more important than a bet ever depends on the outcome of a game.”
I was expecting a thread about avoiding COVID exposure.
If that isn’t the issue being addressed then no. HS sports do a great deal of good and little harm.
They do almost no good and a great deal of harm.
True story time: A couple of years ago, I was subbing at a suburban middle school (grades 6-8). In the break room at lunch, one of the other teachers said that he wished that all of the Catholic schools would burn down. Another teacher pointed out that her children go to a Catholic school, whereupon he amended his wish that her children specifically get out safely before the schools burned down.
Why this hatred for the Catholic schools? Because he was the middle school football coach, and he was tired of having to tell the high school football coach that all of his best players were going to Catholic schools.
That’s the kind of “camaraderie” and “ethics” and “teamwork” that sports inspires: A desire to burn one’s rivals to the ground. You’ll never see that from the drama club. You’ll never even see it from other competitive extracurriculars like the chess club or academic challenge team. Only sports are that toxic.
Don’t be silly; of course there are people like in drama and chess clubs. There are jerks in all walks of life.
I’ve never heard any sentiment like that while playing 2 years of JH and 4 years of HS sports. Just as my experience does not mean all sports programs are good, yours does not mean all sports programs are bad.
The fact that sports can attract toxic people is a people problem; not due to sports per se. Although sports are not always taught in an ideal way - do we really need an “NFL High School Coach Of The Week”? - they still do plenty of good. One hopes better education can minimize the harms, which exist and are not always dealt with well.
High school sports in Canada do not attract significant funding or mich media. Nothing like the US. From my limited experience, the facilities in Quebec seem dramatically nicer than in other provinces, but I think they are also used as community centres.
I feel very lucky that while my high school had a sports program, it really wasn’t very important. Our football team was almost always very bad. In fact, we’d often only win one game a year…against Beverly Hills. If we beat Beverly, that was a winning season! Instead, my school was focused on academics. We had several kids with perfect SATs every year (and this was waaaaay before all those professional SAT tutors existed), and many went to Ivies. 90%+ of our kids went to college of some kind, mostly 4-year. I’m very VERY happy about this, and I had a pleasant, almost happy experience in high school. Any non-happiness is related to normal teen-age angsty-ness.
(The only year we lost to Beverly Hills was the 13th year of the school’s existence. Cue the spooky music).
So you’re just opposed to competitive sports in general?
I’ve also got to call BS on sports being unique in attracting toxic people. I was captain of the ice hockey team and an all-state musician. I had a foot in both worlds. There are absolutely competitive, nasty people in the arts, too.
In 1994, Plano East Senior high (11th and 12th grade) had approximately 2,000 students. I graduated in 1994 with approximately 830 other students. Plano Senior High (11th and 12th grade) had approximately 2,000 students that same year. Now I’m told there are three senior high schools in Plano and each one probably has about 2,000 students.
In about 1899, someone at MIT got injured playing football, and the administration thought it wasn’t worth the risk and killed the program. Chicago used to have a big sports program - Hubble was a star. I don’t know when it got killed.
MIT has tons of sports, too. From archery to pickle ball. And their ball room dance team is pretty competitive. They just don’t do football. And they keep academics first.
Most places, a “senior high school” is 9-12 grades, and even in Texas, they’re usually not much bigger than 2000 students.
Plano ISD does some wonky stuff… one is to have the 9-10 grade high schools and the 11-12 high schools, and then draw the varsity teams from only the 11-12 schools. Kind of stacks the deck versus a 2000 student 9-12 school, if you ask me.
Do you think Plano organized their schools in that fashion in order to stack the deck in their favor so far as athletics go? Because it seems to me that this economy of scale also worked well for other extra curricular activities including band, orchestra, and drama.
At the small, all-boys Catholic high school I attended (~300 students over four grades), we had five coaches:
- The head coach for football and basketball also taught English, as did his son, who was an assistant basketball coach.
- The assistant coach for football also taught typing.
- The coach for track & field and golf also taught PE (the only PE teacher we had)
- The coach for cross-country also taught history