Coaches not always trained for injuries

September 30, 2007 04:48 pm

— A team of lanky 13-year-olds trails coach Mike Del Valle into a hallway outside a Canisius College gymnasium. “You played hard. You never quit. You can be proud,” Del Valle assures the Niagara Rapids girls.
Their defeat — to the powerhouse Blessed Sacrament Yellow Jackets of Hamilton, Ontario — came in the opening round of an Amateur Athletic Union super-regional basketball tournament in Buffalo, N.Y. l It is the first weekend in May, and Del Valle is spending his 64th birthday like so many before — coaching young athletes. He tells his players to stretch, as he draws upon training and experience that tell him conditioning after a game prevents sprains and joint problems in growing muscles.
Del Valle, who works for a bank in Buffalo, has carried clipboards for football, softball, baseball and basketball teams for 40 years. He has volunteered for most of those jobs. He has more training than most of his peers.
Cleburne Baseball and Softball Association president Darryle Taylor said he believes being competitive is important, but that it shouldn’t be taken out of control.
“At certain levels, I think being competitive is very important to the human spirit,” Taylor said. “I very rarely see the competitiveness being to a point where it’s a problem to a kid’s health. I know coaches are competitive, but parents are every bit as competitive as coaches. I think we push our kids sometimes, not necessarily too far, but because of competition. I think it helps them to later excel in society.”
While AAU has no specific training requirements for coaches, Del Valle also is head coach of the North High School Lady Spartans in Williamsville, N.Y. As a school coach in New York, he must prove he has completed classes on coaching philosophy and principles, sports health and techniques for his particular sport, girls basketball. He must be certified in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Since he is not a teacher, he must take a class in child abuse recognition.
Cleburne Athletic Director Phil Young said training clinics on how to spot heat exhaustion, fatigue and other heat-related injuries aren’t a required event at coaching school, but the coaches want to be educated.
“We encourage our coaches to make sure and attend those, even though they’re not mandatory or regulated,” Young said. “The coaches know the importance of that.”
New York’s rules for scholastic coaches are among the most rigorous in the United States, a CNHI News Service survey found. But most states are at the other end of the spectrum. A police background check in some states is the only requirement to coach.
Doctors and advocates say training coaches is key to preventing injuries among young athletes. More athletic organizations recognize that as they reexamine their programs and implement rules to emphasize safety.
Jim Flannery, director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, says injury prevention isn’t the only motivation.
“We believe we are losing sight of the purpose and mission of high school sports,” Flannery said. “Schools are for education. Coaches enhance educational outcomes using their sports.”

Spotty requirements
Legal concerns and lack of experience among coaches usually are what lead schools or youth groups to create training rules. But while many states require some form of training for school coaches, programs usually touch only on helping athletes avoid injury, the CNHI News Service study showed.
Cleburne Baseball and Softball’s Darryle Taylor said most of the coaches in the association have played baseball, but the majority of the training is through a coaching seminar.
“As far as an association, we play under the PONY organization, which oversees youth baseball,” Taylor said. “They have rules to address pitching at different age levels and how many innings they can pitch any given night. They also have to have a certain amount of rest before they can pitch again. We enforce that rule locally. Our board of directors is very explicit with coaches.”
Young pitchers in Cleburne are not allowed to throw curve balls, which put extra pressure on elbows and shoulders. Coaches are allowed to teach kids between the ages of 12 and 13 years old how to throw a curve.
“On a local level, as an association, if we found any coach breaking the rules and making a kid pitch more than the rules allowed, the coach would at least be warned on the first occasion and then removed as coach,” Taylor said.
Half the states require teachers to take courses in basic first aid or sports first aid before becoming coaches, and 34 require first aid classes for coaches not trained as teachers.
Coaches usually meet these requirements by taking online courses from the American Sport Education Program or the National Federation of High School Associations. The first-aid programs address injury prevention but focus mainly on how to handle medical emergencies.
Seven states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Virginia — have no training requirements at all, the survey found. Another 12 states require no additional training for teachers who become coaches.
Only three states — Iowa, Wyoming and Connecticut — require specific training in sports injury prevention.
The world outside interscholastic sports is even less regulated. Some national youth sports groups do not require training for coaches. Even if they did, local leagues are not always affiliated with national groups.

New coaches
prompt training
Schools began adopting training rules when they started looking for coaches outside the teaching staff, said Roch King, who coordinates the graduate coaching program at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
“In the past, all coaches used to be physical education teachers,” King said. “As the number of teams grew and the physical education faculty diminished, other teachers stepped in.”
Now, King said, the majority of scholastic coaches are hired with no formal teaching education or experience.
“It has become an apprenticeship model,” he said, “where coaches have played or worked for other coaches.”
School administrators in more than half the states said they enroll coaches in classes that teach the principles of responsible coaching and first aid.
The American Sport Education Program is behind many of these classes, said spokesman Jerry Reeder. The program, which has been teaching coaches for 25 years, developed courses. It also helped the National Federation of High School Associations design its courses in coaching fundamentals and first aid, which are now required in 28 states, with another 12 states saying they plan to adopt the classes.
“The thing we try to impress on our coaches is the physical safety of an athlete has to come first,” Reeder said. “The next thing is the mental and emotional safety of an athlete.”
States or youth groups that adopt the courses also want to avoid what King calls the “hassle factor” of parental complaints, and potential lawsuits, about how their children are trained and treated.
Litigation and the threat of it have expanded coach education everywhere, said Gregg Heinzmann, director of the Youth Sports Research Council at Rutgers University. More than 20 years ago, New Jersey adopted the country’s first law giving coaches limited immunity from civil lawsuits filed by parents.
The law was passed in the wake of a lawsuit filed by parents of Joey Fort, a Little League player struck in the face by a baseball during warm-ups before an all-star game.
The boy’s parents claimed his four coaches were negligent in moving the 10-year-old from second base to the outfield without teaching him to shield his eyes from the sun to catch fly balls. A league official told The New York Times the injury was “an act of God.”
The case was settled, and terms were not made public.
But, said Heinzmann, it chilled interest in coaching.
“When the news hit, people started saying, ‘I’m not going to risk my livelihood to go out there and coach,’” he said.
Three other states — Louisiana, New Hampshire and North Dakota — have since enacted similar laws.

An array of standards
In states that do not encourage or require training, athletic association officials are quick to note that local schools or districts can set their own requirements.
But Jeff Dietze, who runs a training program for the Virginia High School League, which has no specific requirement for coaches, said few local districts take that step.
“We are getting more, although it’s really slow,” he said.
Virginia is the only state with its own accredited coaches’ training program. Efforts to make it mandatory have failed because of resistance from rural, and sometimes poorer, schools in the western part of the state.
At the other end of the spectrum are New York, Connecticut, Iowa and Montana — states where coaches must complete hours of training for certification.
New York’s requirements reflect a commitment to education, said Lloyd Mott, assistant director of the state’s Public High School Athletic Association.
“We do not put non-certified teachers in a classroom,” Mott said. “If participation in interscholastic athletics is an educational process, the coaches need to have basic lessons in the philosophy and principles of interscholastic athletics, sports-related first aid, health, conditioning and nutrition.”
Montana has an extensive online course, developed by Craig Stewart of Montana State University.
Web-based classes are the only feasible approach for a vast, sparsely populated state, Stewart said. But they cover an array of topics including safety, physical development, training and conditioning, injury prevention, social and psychological aspects of sports, sport-specific skills, teaching and administration, coaching female athletes, professional development and state association rules.

Stepping out of the stands
Youth sports coaches, by comparison, are not regulated in any consistent way.
Some national groups — including Little League, US Youth Soccer and AAU — have no specific regulations. Nor does Pop Warner football, though next year the group will start requiring coaches to attend one-day clinics that involve some lessons on health and safety.
In the AAU, national and regional groups sanction tournaments in more than 30 sports for member clubs such as the Niagara Rapids. Each club has its own bylaws and may require training. However, most do not, coach Del Valle said.
“You can be a parent and step right off the stands and be a coach,” Del Valle said. The Niagara Rapids are among the fortunate. They have Del Valle.
Players and parents say they trust him, his training and experience. Steve Smith of Lockport, N.Y., said his 13-year-old daughter, Ashley, does basic running, leg stretches and strength-building exercises at home — all based on Del Valle’s advice.
“As a parent,” Smith said, “you are always concerned about injuries.”
That’s why, sports experts say, it is important for coaches at all levels to know how to prevent injuries and, when they occur, how to properly treat them.

Randy Griffith is a reporter at the Johnstown (Pa.)
Tribune-Democrat.
He may be reached
at rgriffith@tribdem.com.

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