Master's Program in Athletic Administration

This course is designed to give you a better perspective of the day-to-day issues, tasks and methods used to manage and lead a high school athletic program. We will begin by providing you with several scenarios that will require familiarity with the use of various policies related to student eligibility for a high school athletic program. Eligibility policies include academic eligibility, age eligibility, amateur status and residence eligibility.

To give you a sense of the type of challenge that you may encounter, we will begin with a scenario that raises questions about residence eligibility and the potential for illegal recruiting of high school athletes.

We will also examine the importance of policies to guide school administrators in areas such as sportsmanship, contest scheduling considerations and the need for consistency of policy applications among member schools within a league or conference.

Your Challenge

Consider the following situation:

During the past decade, one of four high schools within a large urban school district has developed a profile of excellence in both girls and boys basketball competition. Boys and girls teams have been conference champions for eight of the past 10 years and both have appeared in the state tournament six times within the decade. The girls' team won the state association championship three times and the boys' team was champion or runner-up five times within the same time frame. Both teams have been invited to appear in prominent holiday tournaments throughout the nation and graduates of the school have gone on to play at highly visible Division I NCAA basketball programs with full grant-in-aid scholarships.

Increasing numbers of students from the other three district high schools have transferred to the "basketball school" and questions have been raised about recruiting and undue influence by local coaches, administrators and the state association. To date, no evidence has been collected that would support these allegations. An open-transfer rule within the district allows students to transfer to any other school within the district regardless of the residence of the parents. This policy has also been approved by the state association in response to the school district’s mandate to equalize ethnic enrollments in its schools.

As an additional issue, a basketball uniform and athletic shoe manufacturer has offered to provide free equipment to the "basketball school" in return for display of company logos on uniforms, advertising in the school contest program, banners in the gym and on the scoreboard. There is also an unwritten expectation that those basketball players with remaining high school eligibility will also play in private-sector competition during the off-season thus limiting their participation in other high school sports. The coach of the private-sector team is not the head coach of the boys or girls teams but works closely with both high school coaches to ensure consistency in the teaching of terminology, skills and team tactics. This coach is also paid a summer stipend by the equipment company to supervise both the girls and boys teams in private sector competition.

What issues concern you in this situation? How should they be handled?

What issues concern you in this situation? How should they be handled?

Put your initial ideas in the text box below before going on to the learning activities. You may edit your ideas as you go through the rest of the module.

Introduction | Learning Activities | Review | Revisit the Challenge