Sports

This past year, Stuyvesant’s athletic program expanded to include more teams: cricket and lacrosse. Two things are needed to maintain Stuyvesant’s various teams. One is student interest, which is certainly not lacking. Another—a competent coach—is not as easy to find.

Coaches are not as important to a team’s success as are skilled players and team spirit. But passionate and experienced instruction can turn a decently skilled group of players into a seamless team.

However, the United Federation of Teachers’ (UFT) regulations make finding outstanding coaches difficult. According to Assistant Principal Athletics Martha Singer, union contracts require public high school coaches to have a teaching certificate.

Such tight regulations are put in place to protect players, who practice alone with coaches for hours.
However, knowledge of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and the use of an Automated External Defibrillator (AED), which coaches are required to have, and a routine job selection process are enough to ensure that coaches are responsible. Requiring coaches to be certified teachers and members of the UFT is unnecessary and hurts public school athletics. While many teachers would make ideal coaches, others get coaching positions simply because such a limited pool of applicants can’t produce a better candidate.

Under the current system, if coaches from within the school do not volunteer their time, teams are forced to look to teachers from other schools. This poses many scheduling conflicts and widens the communication gap between the coach and the team. Coaches who are teachers not only have responsibilities to their team, but also to their students. They therefore often show up to practice late or cannot get in touch with team members to disseminate vital information.

Rather than mandating that schools hire coaches who belong to the UFT, athletic programs should be looking for individuals who are the most qualified for the job. For example, because the boys’ ultimate Frisbee team is not a Public Schools’ Athletic League Sport, they were able to hire a coach, Dave Hollander, who won the world championships while playing for New York City Ultimate in 1994.

Athletics are am important part of students’ high school experiences. Athletics should not be harmed because of the UFT’s desire to protect its members. As of now, extremely qualified candidates, such as retired professional athletes, must either coach at private schools or at the college level. This must change.

Student athletes, not teachers, should be the first priority of high school athletics. The first step towards this goal is hiring coaches based on merit, not on whether or not they are UFT members. To improve high school athletics, the coaching pool must be widened.