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Essay On Effectively Engaging With Parents In Interscholastic Athletics

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Effectively Engaging with Parents in Interscholastic Athletics
Max Golden
Wayne State University Effectively Engaging with Parents in Interscholastic Athletics

For this assignment, I chose to complete the NFHS course entitled “Engaging Effectively with Parents”. The course focused on how to interact with the parents of athletes with a focus on what to do to prepare for the season and how to handle upset parents during the course of the season. Anyone who plans on working in interscholastic athletics whether as a coach or administrator will have to interact with parents on a near daily basis, this is simple the nature of the field. Parents are valuable to interscholastic athletics because they serve as role models for their …show more content…

While I was able to translate the lesson in my head so it made sense from an athletic director standpoint, not everyone may be able to. Engaging effectively with parents is vital for athletic directors as they are the head of the whole department and should be expected to talk to parents on a daily basis, especially if someone has an issue with coach. While the content was up to date and useful, the delivery of the material left something to be desired. Yes, it is not easy to make an online course fun and exciting but I felt my self not paying full attention at times as the pace of the course was far too slow and did not grab my attention fully. An interesting aspect that continuously came up repeatedly of the entirety of the course was the issues with sportsmanship. Obviously, it is important to teach athletes the importance of being a good sport but the parents are just as important in this area as well. If a student see’s their parents being disrespectful to an opponent, official or coach will send the wrong message to the athlete. Just a few years ago, 116 boys’ soccer players in Minnesota were thrown out of games, which is a troubling statistic (Sawyer 2015). If coaches and athletic directors can communicate to the parents the importance of good sportsmanship we will hopefully see the students act more responsibility. The course also focused on how athletics is an extension of the educational environment. It

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