Stoneham High School - Wildlife Yearbook (Stoneham, MA)

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THE STONEHAM HIGH SCHOOL AUTHENTIC The desire to win, coupled with a lack of understanding of the meaning of sportsmanship, results in unfair meth- ods of play, in a breaking of rules if possible, and in the abuse of officials. In such cases the coach must be a man of unquestionable integrity and sports- manship, ready and anxious to sacrifice victory for the sake of teaching that the struggle of a game is but a small-scale replica of the contest of life and that in each, the final reward of community re- spect goes only to the man who has played the game fairly and given his best, regardless of the result. The problem of the school may be po litical. There are communities in which the control of athletics in the school passes from the principal of the school to members of the schoolboard or poli- ticians -who exploit the games for their own financial gain, cleverly masking their actions under the misleading slo- gan that ■winning athletic teams serve to advertise the town. There are com- munities so lacking in civic pride and so blinded to true values that they per- mit the hiring of a professional coach for the sole purpose of producing winning teams, in order to attract crowds large enough to pay for a pri- vately owned athletic plant for the use of the school, which should be provided with such a plant from public funds. The solution of such problems is to put in charge of athletics a teacher capable of forcing public opinion to regard schoolboy games as educational and not professional. A coach should be a teacher because as such he grows to know the students from the point of view of their edu- cational aims rather than because of their physical development. He should know from daily contact with the other teachers which athletes are good stu- dents and which are doing only enough work to keep them eligible for the teams. As a teacher, he can demand classroom standards of the athletes that would not be respected by them if it Avere known that he was wholly inter- ested in physical activities. Also it is important to note that the addition to the staff of a teacher who can set an ex- ample in athletics raises the general level of the students’ opinion of the faculty. Furthermore, the man in charge of the school athletic teams should con- sider it his duty to teach athletics. There is a great difference bet-ween the teaching of athletics and the coaching of a team, although the distinction is seldom considered by those who judge the ability of the coach wholly on the basis of the number of games won. For example, in a certain high school enrolling about two hundred boys, ninety or more report at the athletic field four afternoons a week, dressed for physical exercise. For an hour they receive physical training and set- ting up drills, and for this work they may receive credits tow ' ard graduation. At the close of the training hour the j boys on the various squads go to prac- tice with their respective teams. The time left for team practice is necessar- ily shorter than the time enjoyed by I other schools, but no time needs to be j spent by the coach in conditioning the I players. The records show that since j the system was established the teams ! have been uniformly better than be- [ fore, and the school is famous for clean j hard playing. A visitor to that school I is impressed with the erect carriage land health of the students. Contrast this with a school of similar size w ' here a group of from fifteen to twenty-five boys report for football practice, each afternoon that the coach personally re- quests their coming, for the purpose of spending two hours in highly special- ized individual instruction for the de- feating of eleven boys representing some rival institution. It seems scarcely logical for a town to pay from two to five hundred dollars for a man to teach twenty boys how to play foot- ball and at the same time fail to pro- vide any athletic training for two hun- dred other boys who stand on the street corner and waste their time be- I cause they lack some physical ability which the twenty possess. I The trouble lies in the mistaken idea I that the way to produce a winning team is to concentrate attention on a I fc ' w selected individuals. It is due to j the fact that no man who believes that holding his job depends on victory dares to adopt the far-sighted policy I of providing thorough physical train- ing for all and then to rely on it to ; furnish the material out of which a successful team may be molded with a minimum of effort. The first step in the establishment of a uniformly suc- cessful system of athletics is to place in charge, a teacher Avhose business it is to give physical training and whose I success is measured in terms of the I moral and physical development of the j majority of the students of the school. 17

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THE STONEHAM HIGH SCHOOL AUTHENTIC Oloacli nnb ' 2TI]e cliaol By R. S. Morrill, Stoneham High School Published in the School Review, Chicago, Illinois, May 1924 A generation ago, the athletic coach, as he is today, was almost unknown a- mong the smaller schools. One of the men teachers or the principal went to games with the boys, perhaps attended practice occasionally, and helped to pre- serve order and uiiitj in the teams, but with that his responsibility ceased. The boys organized, conducted, and control- led their extra-curricular activities. Educational authorities now recognize the fact that sports have a tremendous bearing on the development of youth and that athletics should be used to give impetus to school aims and endeavors, and, in order to obtain the development of character, physique, and personality in the highest degree, they are putting in charge of athletics highly specialized teachers called coaches or teachers of athletics. These athletic instructors may be di- vided roughly into tw ' o classes, namely, members of the faculty who are engaged to teach classes and coach sports and meji who are hired primarily and solely to coach the teams. Men of the former class are proving themselves indispens- able to modern school life. Men of the latter class are frequently found to bo dangerous liabilities Avhen allowed to assume control of school athletics. In order to maintain a true personal perspective with regard to he funda- mental aims of the school, it is necessa- ry for the coach to be a teacher. It is noticeable that every teacher tends to overemphasize his own subject. The teacher of history year after year in- creases the demands which he makes on his students and enlarges his conception of the place that history should occupy in the curriculum. The teachers of mathematics beAvail the lack of prep- aration on the part of the students who come to them and demand more time in which to increase their accomplish- ments. Likewise, if a man teaches ex- clusively, he magnifies their importance until, unless checked, the school be- comes an institution for the training of modern gladiators rather than modern citizens. Coaching must be considered as merely a part of a teacher’s duty if the coach is to maintain the proper bal- ance beween athletics and instruction. The coach should be a teacher in or- der to have that understanding of the problems of the school which will en- lable him properly to correlate his ac- ! tivities with what the school is trying to j do. Such problems may be purely ed- jucatioiial; that is, they may involve the I preparation of athletes for college, classroom requirements, school disci- pline, the financing of athletics, or ideals which the school is trying to establish ; or they may involve the en- tire community and be political or soc- ial. A coach who fails to adjust his coaching so as to assist the school in attaining its highest ideals fails to give athletics the place v.’hich they should occupy in school life, even though he may win every game sched- uled. Such adjustment can come only from a coach who thoroughly under- stand s the school and who is in sym- pathy with the school officials through daily contact with them. The problem of the school may be the implanting of American ideals in the minds of the children of immi- grants, newly landed, with all of the Old World selfishness and poverty and class distinction imbedded and reflected in their offspring. In the case of such children, the American admiration of the athlete develops a most unhealthy egotism unless continually combatted. 16

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THE STONEHAM HIGH SCHOOL AUTHENTIC An important cause of the failure of the teacher-coach system, either in teaching or coaching, is the schedule of classes assigned to each men. It is not uncommon to find a teacher-coach whose schedule is as full as that of any other teacher in the school system. In manj schools the teacher-coaches are given home-rooms and study rooms to look after, in which are to be found most of the difficult disciplinary cases because such men can usually handle the obstreperous boys. In other schools they are assistant principals and are expected to assume administrative du- ties. The excuse of the school board or superintendent for overworking such a teacher is that he is given extra pay for coaching and doing it outside of school hours, and the same school board or superintendent will either ac- cept criticisms from parents because the teacher was not able to give the students enough out-of-school help to enable them to keep up to standard or else accept the suggestion of the alum- ni that they hire a coach with energy enough to make the squad into an ag- gressive, victorious unit. Then peo- ple think that the remedy lies in hir- ing some popular athlete who needs a job, whom they think qualified be- cause he wears a college letter and is liked by the boys. The proper use of an able teacher-coach solves the coach- ing problem, but no man can teach and su pervise all morning, coach in the af- ternoon, prepare for his teaching in the evening, conduct games on Satur- day, and be the success that he is ex- pected to be in all that he is expected to do. As a teacher, the coach has an oppor- tunity to advance his coaching by use- ing his schoolroom. The best teachers of the academic subjects are constant- ly collecting pictures and reports of activities of their departments; the coach should be alert to secure any- thing of value to the teaching of ath- letics and display it in his room. For example, a teacher-coach was assigned to a small recitation room that was un- decorated, and he proceeded to make it distinctly an athletic room. He se- cured a number of photographs of a famous college football team in action, hung them conspicuously and used them in showing the boys how the game should be played. Winning balls and treasured bats helped to decorate the room. On a huge bulletin board he posted pictures and articles of in- terest taken from newspapers. Par- ticular blue-pencil emphasis was given to items that advanced the cause of good sportsmanship, and this bulletin l)oard was visited every day by so many students that it became necessa- ry to restrict them. That coach sel- dom preached directly to the players, but from the articles on that bulletin board they absorbed good sportsman- ship until it was reflected in their play- ing on the field. At a halt in a foot- ball game on a muddy field that man gave the members of his team a blanket on which to wipe their slippery hands. As they finished, the captain handed it to his opponents to use, and the coach led the applause that followed the act. Many people were surprised because the feeling between the teams was intense. Afterwards the coach ask- ed the boy wdiy he did it and received the reply, “You told me that Harvard and Yale swapped towels the day that they played in the rain.” In this same classroom were hung pictures of the teams representing the school. In one corner was a long shelf on which were kept a number of books about the different sports. Members of the squads were allowed to borrow them, and the information secured from such reading was used for the benefit of the school. The students liked to go to that room for classes, and a group could usually be found there in the afternoon discussing ath- letics. The room was used for meet- ings of the teams and for signal drills aud discussions, and on rainy days athletes might be found there who needed help of any kind, whether ath- letic or scholastic. The spirit of the room finally resulted in the forming of a club by the wearers of the school let- ter for the purpose of promoting bet- ter sportsmanship among the teams of the school. As a teacher, the coach has a great opportunity to assist in the discipline of the school. It is not uncommon to find teachers who rejoice over the chance to use interference with a boy’s athletic opportunity as a whip with which to beat him into disciplinary or scholastic submission. “If John does not stop whispering and do his home work, I will stop his playing basket- ball,” a teacher in English told a coach recently, and a serious split in the faculty was caused when that young man courageously replied that he did not believe any teacher of abil- 18