Two new groups were developed earlier this year in an effort to survey and write recommendations for the improvement of school sports: the Athletics Strategic Committee and the Captain’s Council.
The Athletics Strategic Committee is composed of six subcommittees each focused on different key initiatives: Student/Athlete Development, Team/Program Culture, Community, Coaching, Operations and Facilities. Each team is working independently, but are in communication with one another in order to prevent work overlap, with the intention of each bringing a unique angle to the greater discussion. Since their formation last spring and their first meetings in September, the committees have been working towards the tentative goal to write and develop a strategic plan for athletics that covers short-term, mid-term and long-range objectives for each of the boards. The project will ultimately lead to a revamp of the athletics program.
“We have been researching what schools are doing, what our differences are, what the greatest needs are for athletics facilities and doing an assessment of all of them,” said Facilities Committee chair John Cole. Cole and his team are in charge of evaluating how athletics spaces are currently being used, investigate any greater potential for them to be used or how to make them more accessible and what changes need to be made in order for them to be used optimally.
“[We’re] really trying to get a vision for everything, in terms of locker rooms, weight rooms, athletic fields, gym spaces, where students that are athletes after school are spending their time, how we can support them in different ways. You know, there’s great programs in the lower school and middle school for stuff after school for kids, but there’s not a lot going on for upper school students,” said Cole. Facilities such as the weight room, when not occupied by a sports team, are open for student use, but are largely underutilized, something that Cole would like to see remedied.
As part of this effort, the Facilities Committee sent a survey to students and alumni requesting input on potential athletic facility improvements. The data will be used to integrate community voice into the third draft of the committee plan to determine which improvements to prioritize most immediately.
Like the Facilities Committee, each of the other five are currently workshopping several drafts of a proposal, which contains their objective, action steps broken up by year for the next five years and the estimated costs of their proposed improvements. Each committee will complete their final draft plans by early February, then combine their work into a complete proposal to present to the board of trustees later in the spring.
However, no branch of the Athletics Committee has any students on the official boards. Instead, the Captain’s Council is the primary format of student input.
Tennis captain David Schumacher has attended several Captain’s Council meetings, which have recently been moved to X-periods to make them more accessible to students. “Recently, we’ve been going over drafts of a mission statement the committee presented, helping edit it and rank what areas we think matter the most to the athletics program in order of importance,” he said. “Last meeting we talked about getting lockers rooms back into use, since bags being dumped in Huss is a problem and I think people forget about them.”
While Schumacher appreciates the increased communication between students and faculty so far as a result of the council’s formation, he hopes to spend more time discussing coaching–something that students have not historically been involved with and a committee that has not yet met with students.
“Better coaching is the biggest thing. It doesn’t fit with SPA culture to have sports to become really competitive in middle school, but it’s part of the reason why the tennis team is so strong–the parents are more involved and coaching is better than for the average team.”
Fencing captain Belle Weng described a “disconnect” between what the committee might want input on versus what she believes needs to be changed most immediately. “I feel like captains’ families carry a lot of the weight,” Weng said. “Carpooling comes down to parents…it’s a huge burden.”
A fellow captain’s mother, for example, is compiling a document for the parents of next year’s captains on how to manage parent coordination. What she’d like to see most in the strategic plan is a set plan for supporting all sports teams in a more hands-on way. “Once we graduate, there’s no good method for passing on the mantle,” she said. She highlighted that each sport and their needs look different, and that future changes should reflect that.
Cole and other Committee members will continue to collect student feedback over the course of this semester to integrate with their individual investigations. No official deadline for the strategic plan’s completion or publicization has been finalized yet, but Cole predicts that it will include plans that extend ten to fifteen years into the future.
The next full cross-committee meeting is scheduled for Feb. 10.
