Stoneham High School - Wildlife Yearbook (Stoneham, MA)

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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

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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 ity needed to cripple an athletic team in order to solve a classroom problem. No athlete should be given privileges or opportunities not offered to other students, but surely no boy ought to find his athletic position furnishing a club with which a belligerent teacher can drive him to standards not de- manded of his classmates or reached by them. A good teacher-coach can entirely eliminate this opposition between the purely academic teacher and the pure- ly athletic instructor. By appealing directly to the athletes, a teacher-coach can make them see that they owe to their team and school such conduct and scholarship as will make them worthy members of the group, and, for the sake of the team, the boys will main- tain standards that they never could be coerced into upholding. A quiet word from the teacher to the teacher- coach, informing him that a certain athlete is not doing as he should, re- sults in action by the coach on the grou2id that such misconduct, if con- tinued, will harm the team. Some- times a teacher-coach will suspend from play an athlete whose scholastic reports are not satisfactory, telling him that someone must be trained who surely will be eligible when the hard games are played. It never fails to produce an immediate change for the better in the classroom. The coach may perhaps tell the players that they are almost revered by the students in the lower grades of the school, that they are the idols of every small boy in the town, that their actions are copied and their attitudes mimicked, and that their influence is tremendous. This is flattery perhaps but flattery that will make the boys realize that they owe to themselves the setting of a worthy standard of conduct. Again, a teacher-coach may exert a powerful influence in the direction of keeping boys in school. Many a boy is held in school by the charm of athlet- ics when othei-Avise he would be drift- ing from one poorly selected job to another. Some people say that if ath- letics are all that he goes to school for, he would be better off at work. Many such boys, however, come to find them- selves during these athletic years, grow to realize what school really means to them, and finally make for themselves a place that they would never have attained except for the ex- tra schooling athletics made them ac- . cept. Usually their awakening dates from the time when their teacher-coach talked seriously with them of the future. Finally, as we study the question, it becomes evident that all of the advan- tages of schoolboy athletics depend on the personality of the coach. Athletics are probablj ' the most important single factor in the school life of the boys, and undoubtedly the most important influence in athletics is the personality I of the coach. He leads. His standards jare their standards; his example their i aim. He has a tremoundous responsi- j bility. In taking his place in school i life he is making more than his own ! reputation or even the reputation of ; the school; he is making the character I of youth. What type of man must ho ;be? What standards should we de- I mand of this man to whom we intrust I our boys in their most important ac I tivity ? j He must be morally clean. No list of victories, however long, no reputa- I tion for producing star players, can I balance in the slightest degree any im- i plication that his life off the field is not exemplary. He should not smoke. This is a much disputed question, but we are in- consistent if we expect our boys to at- tain maturity without using tobacco and the same time place them under the control of a coach who finds it necessary to smoke in public. He should not use or tolerate profan- ity. This is another disputed ques- tion ; men will argue that in football a coach has to swear in order to arouse his men to a fighting pitch, but expe- rience proves the contraiy. He should keep his temper, always, I have seen a football coach strike one of the players with his fist, and I heard the father of one of his opponents say, “That may be the way he won three city championships, but he never could coach my boy, for I wouldn’t let him play under him.” I have seen many coaches abuse otficials, but I have never seen one piofit thereby. Finally, he must be a gentleman, first, last, and all of the time. No matter what conditions may be, in vic- tory or defeat, in practice or games, under fair or dishonest officials, in the face of any circumstances, that stan- dard must be maintained. Sportsman- ship is a word to inspire, but all of its new meanings and applications are in- cluded in what men have always meant 19