Athletic Director Series: How to Support Your Coaches and Referees

 

As a Director of Athletics or Athletic Director at your school, you set the culture of the school’s athletic program, and you are in charge of ensuring that coaches and other athletic staff have the resources they need to thrive. This is especially important in an era when coaching staff and referees often feel overworked and lacking in both emotional and practical support.

Here, Vicki Vaughan, Director of Athletics at The Colorado Springs School and a longtime contributor to TrueSport curriculum, shares a few ways that an athletic director can best help coaches and referees thrive.

Be clear about expectations and values for your program

Being part of a TrueSport style of culture means having strong core values around sportsmanship, character building and life skills, and clean and healthy performance. Using those three cornerstones, you can create a set of values and expectations for your coaches and referees with regards to fair play, treatment of athletes, and what really matters to the athletic department. Vaughan notes that for some schools, winning might be a higher-priority value than participation, for example. Determining what matters most to your school will inform everything from how auditions and tryouts are run to how teams are selected and how practice space is prioritized. Being upfront and open about these values will help your coaches make choices that are aligned with your program, as well as make it easier for you to support their efforts.

Ask what they need and set clear protocols for those needs

Tasks like booking fields and gym space for practices are obviously part of an Athletic Director’s job, but actually doing this part of the job is much more complicated than it may seem. Coaches are almost certainly going to have conflicts with other coaches as teams vie for practice space, and referees are often stretched between sports or competitions. Your calendar should be coordinated to the best of your abilities, and to do this, it’s helpful to set early, simple protocols around submitting practice and competition space requests, transportation needs, and any other administrative details. This way, rather than having some coaches provide you a schedule in July while others wait until October, you have a deadline and a format that makes it easy to allocate resources, supporting each coach in the way that they require. Referees should also know how to submit schedule requests as early as possible. Make it as simple as possible for coaches and referees to help themselves by helping you!