Rules, rules, rules. The Kansas State High School Activities Association has lots of them, and every year, some of them change.
This year’s biggest, broadest changes have made some area high school coaches, new and old, pretty happy. Emporia High boys basketball coach Rick Bloomquist is one veteran coach who falls in the “happy” category.
“For two tournaments, I coached my kids,” Bloomquist said, “which is better than having a parent coaching ’em, or somebody coach ’em that really doesn’t know your system or really doesn’t know the kids as well as you do. We can work with our kids, as many as we want.”
Changes loosening restrictions for basketball, football and volleyball coaches, implemented for this summer, have changed the landscape of offseason preparation for those sports. In past summers, coaches in the aforementioned sports had been restricted to coaching their athletes at the standard one-week camp, and to working with only small groups of athletes at any one time during separate, non-mandatory sessions.
Under KSHSAA’s new rules, for an eight-week period in the summer, coaches can coach as much as they want to, without any restrictions on when and where they can see their athletes. This year, that eight-week period began May 23 and ends this Saturday.
That’s not the only major rule change — on top of that, there was also the elimination of the “10-percent restriction.” That rule stated that if a high school coach was going to be on the coaching staff of a summer camp — such as the Emporia State football camp in June — camp athletes from his school could make up no more than 10 percent of the camp’s total enrollment. With that rule gone, schools can send their whole team to such a camp if they so choose.
New head coaches, taking the reins of a program for the first time, love the new guidelines — and so does Bloomquist, an older coach. For others, like EHS football coach Bill Lowe, it may not necessarily make much difference. Patrick Gardner, who’s entering his first season as Hartford’s football coach, is a fan.
“Because it allowed me, as a new coach, to come in and start on stuff early, and get a fresh start on the stuff that I needed to put in, and really almost a head start,” he said. “Because camp time, only a week, is not bad during the summertime, but having a full year for first-year head coaches, is really big, I think. It really helps us out a lot.”
“I love it,” said Ashley Nehls, Emporia High’s new head volleyball coach. “This is actually the first week we haven’t done something. ... I got married May 30, and then Monday, we started camp, and we did camp through Thursday, and then Sunday we did open gym, and we’ve been alternating between open gym and summer league ballgames until this week.”
Gradual shift
KSHSAA executive director Gary Musselman said the loosening of summer coaching restrictions for other sports came around 1996. Part of the reasoning for those changes was that in many areas, traditional summertime sports, such as American Legion baseball, relied on local high school coaches being available to coach those sports. But at the time, the restrictions on basketball, football and volleyball remained.
“(The schools) said, ‘Look, we think these three sports — volleyball, basketball and football — are by far the largest, most significant, most high-pressure team sports for kids and coaches, and we still feel like there ought to be limitations on those,’” Musselman said. “‘There needs to be something that puts the brakes on runaway demands on time for coaches and the kids.’ And so at that time... that was put in place with a proviso that after three years, we’d check back and see how people felt about it.”
After the three-year period, schools indicated they were comfortable with the new guidelines. It’s been over the last decade or so, Musselman said, that schools began to feel that the restrictions on basketball, football and volleyball coaches should be loosened as well.
“And to some extent, it’s because maybe the coaching the kids are getting, away from school coaching, may or may not be the quality (that) the school coach would provide,” Musselman said. “... So I think for a variety of reasons, gradually the tipping point was reached where obviously, this last year, the schools said, ‘We’re willing to try a new rule.’ And it’ll be interesting to see, because there’s obviously feelings both ways, whether it’s too much, or whether it’s about right, or whether it’s not open enough.”
In the new rules, the eight-week period is followed by a two-week period — this year, beginning Sunday and running until Aug. 1 — in which basketball, football and volleyball coaches can only provide instruction in small groups, and only at the request of players. Those groups can be no more than three players for basketball, four for volleyball, five for 8-man football and six for 11-man football. Players cannot be required to participate in these coaching sessions.
For the two weeks after that, beginning Aug. 2 and ending Aug. 16, coaches are only allowed to supervise athletes in weightlifting and nonsport-specific conditioning. They’re not allowed to provide coaching. Fall sports practices begin Aug. 17.
Bloomquist said he has a lot of respect for summer baseball, and he has allowed his players to choose baseball over basketball in the summer, as long as they’ve made an effort to communicate with him, make some of his summer practice sessions and spend some time in the weight room. He believes the new rule takes stress off athletes and off coaches, who don’t have to worry about regulations and restrictions.
“The thing is, for so many years, especially I think basketball, has been probably restricted, in my opinion, a little bit too much in the summertime activity, to be around your coaches,” Bloomquist said. “And with the new rule, we were able to basically dictate who’s gonna coach our kids in a better format.”
Too much time?
For Lowe and the Spartan football program, the rule changes haven’t brought drastic adjustments in summer preparation.
“For football, it really is not a big deal,” Lowe said. “Everybody plays basketball and baseball all summer. So really, asking ’em to do something else for football, there’s really not much time. There’s no extra time in meetings for kids to do that.”
During this year’s eight-week period, the Spartans have had the usual strength and conditioning sessions, which have been part of standard summer activities for years. Their team camp was held this week and was scheduled to end today. The elimination of the 10-percent rule did mean that EHS coaches no longer had to watch their enrollment level at the Emporia State football camp.
“I don’t know how that’ll pay off,” Lowe said of the changes. “I’m just not a big fan of overdoing it in the summer with the kids. I just think they need some summer time. They’re still high school kids and not college athletes yet. But there’s different philosophies on that.
“I don’t think kids should sit around and do nothing in the summer, but I think when every coach is asking the kids to do something two or three nights a week, it gets really hard on the kids, making choices.”
Musselman says that thus far, the people he’s probably heard the most from are those who believe the new rules put too many time demands on coaches and athletes. This year, the rule changes will serve as something of an experiment to see what schools think.
“Change is different. Change always requires adjustment,” he said. “There’ll probably be some people that maybe went overboard that might realize, ‘Look, we need to back off a little bit.’”
For now, as the first summer of the experiment winds down, some coaches, like Gardner, are firmly in the camp of those who like the new rules.
“I think,” Gardner said, “that we’re either two or three steps ahead of what we would’ve been this year without that rule.”
solong (anonymous) says...
The 10 per cent rule made it very difficult for those in rural areas to participate in quality programs, it's elimination is a good thing.
July 17, 2009 at 10:58 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )