Sports Summit to Tap Best Thinking
Contact: Kay Hyatt at (207) 581-2761
ORONO, Maine — Student-athletes and administrators from 128 Maine high schools and 37 middle schools have been asked to participate in a March 9 summit to help identify essential qualities of positive, beneficial interscholastic sports programs. Taking place at the University of Maine, the summit is sponsored by the UMaine Coaching Maine Youth to Success initiative, a federally funded project to develop a national model for quality sports programs that complement academic standards and overall school objectives.
A statewide select panel of educational and sports leaders, and policy makers began work in October to define and articulate the characteristics of healthy athletic programs. Since then, panel members have been brainstorming, researching and gathering various perspective about the purpose, potential and realities of interscholastic sports at Maine middle schools and high schools.
The summit will provide another opportunity to tap the views and suggestions of students, coaches, athletic directors and principals to build a working philosophical base and mechanism for improving interscholastic athletics and supporting effective coaching education. Participants will work in targeted sessions to inform and advise the panel in shaping its recommendations for strengthening the educational and developmental contributions of athletics..
The panel’s final product — a common set of guidelines for preventing and working out problems under a broadly agreed-upon doctrine, and core principles and practices for providing and sustaining quality interscholastic programs — should be available by the start of the 2004-05 school year.
Project co-directors are Robert Cobb, dean of the UMaine College of Education and Human Development, and former Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese, lead policy advisor for the Great Maine School Project at the Sen. George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute.
More information about the initiative is available by calling (207) 581-2492 or on the Web at www.umaine.edu/coachingtosuccess.