Elite sports seldom tell us much about what goes on in scholastic and youth sports. But every now and then someone connects. Consider Sarah Hughes' winning Olympic Gold at Salt Lake City:

About her performance she said, "Going into it, I didn't really think I had a chance for a medal, let alone a gold because I know the competition is really difficult here." 

But she skated with abandon, for herself, to display her skill. As a result, an AP analyst wrote, "Not only did the 16-year-old do the toughest tricks of the night, but she electrified the crowd with her joy and spunk. She skated with her heart not her feet, and by the end of the program, she had a smile so bright it lit up the arena." 

Isn't that what we hope for all our athletes? To give it their best shot, enjoy what they do, and let the results speak for themselves. 

Most sports have an optimal level of conditioning, and many coaches begin their season with some sort of fitness testing. Some coaches keep records tracking performance over the years, but many others don't really know how their athletes stack up. There is a site that will help. The two most common forms of testing used are the 12 minute run and a timed 1.5 mile run. Run results from these assessments through the calculator to compare your athletes to others in their age groups.

A quick review of essential points for every coach to consider is hard to find. But it is something that every coach should do prior to every season. Consult "A Question of Coaching" for just this sort of help.

Rather than being stuck on one sport, coaches ought to consider encouraging their athletes to cross-train. This has real benefits for athletes and coaches alike, as cross-training improves conditioning and can be a means of fighting burn-out among athletes. A good source of information is the "whole-body" work out approach. 

A quick introduction to sports injuries--put together by the PTA--is available. Look it over before your meeting with parents. It should prepare you to answer many of their questions. 

So many of our spring sports get athletes running around before they're ready for it. As a result, lots of running related injuries occur. Tips on a variety of  leg and foot injuries appear on "Dr. Pribut's Running Injuries Page." 

The Art of Running will help you understand some other bits of this essential skill. 

Clearly, the momentum is towards evaluating educators on the "outcomes" realized by their students. Since we have already agreed that coaches are educators, then they too should be measured against the outcomes for their students, i.e. the athletes.

But what are the "outcomes" we should be observing.

They CANNOT be wins/loses. These are much too ephemeral. Far too many things beyond the control of coaches and athletes go into determining the winners and losers of contests. Therefore, something else--something essentially educational--needs to be the standard against which coaches are measured.

This "something else" is what the coaches are teaching. 

But how does this help us create a scheme for evaluating coaches?

Each coach should be responsible for teaching various things related to the sport. These include: (1) sports skills, (2) rules and strategies of the sport, (3) proper training and conditioning and (4) personal and social skills.

Obviously, each of these categories includes many different things that might be taught. The challenge for the coach is limiting what is taught to the essentials. This varies with the situation. Experienced athletes have one set of needs; beginners another. And there are all sorts of variations in between.

The key is for the coach to focus on the essential elements that are right for the athletes being coached. 

(This can be a challenge--especially for the beginning coach. Mentoring is a key element but something seldom done in coaching. Nevertheless, an experienced coach or program administrator needs to provide this support for younger, inexperienced coaches.)

The coach--with help as needed--arrives at a set of skills and knowledge to be learned. These might include 15 to 20 key pieces of learning.

Having selected what to teach, the coach decides what will indicate learning. Of course performance in competition is important. But so is what happens in practice. Therefore, the coach needs to describe how learning will be evaluated.

For example, a junior high basketball coach might decide that players need to use correct form in shooting free throws. After instructing the players in the skill and practicing throughout the season, the coach feels that using the proper form 100% of the time and making 65% of free throws in practice indicates learning. (The coach also can check performance in game situations. The expected percentages might be lower to reflect the stress inherent in competition.)

By rating how each athlete performs each of the 15 to 20 key pieces of knowledge, the coach builds an assessment of learning by the group in general.

This feeds directly into an evaluation of the coach: If the athletes learn, the coach is successful! The program administrator works through the process of seeing how many athletes are display expected the characteristics. If most of the athletes show that they have learned most of what was to be taught, then the coach has been successful. This is independent of wins/losses. However, the expectation is that better instruction translates into better athletic performance.

Two potential problems arise: (1) Since the coach is involved in choosing what will be rated, there might be times when the coach makes things too easy--possibly in an effort to "look good." Then the administrator needs to mentor the coach and encourage the development of higher standards. (2) If learning is poor, the administrator has the responsibility to work with the coach to identify possible causes and correct these deficiencies.

This is the barest outline of an "Outcomes Based" evaluation scheme for coaches. However, it does provide a starting point.

Next time around, we will look at ways to include other elements in the evaluation process. However, the focus on learning should be the key to all evaluations of coaching success.