Though Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey are not seen too often in competitive poetry rounds, they remain the greatest works in the canon of Western Literature. This statement is the foundational irony of literature as Homer, growing up in what will eventually become modern-day Turkey, was barely Western and illiterate – not illiterate because he was blind (he was) or because he was stupid (only in the assessment of middle school students forced to battle their way through the Iliad’s catalogue of ships), but because the Greeks had not really developed letters. Yet, Homer, writing hundreds of years following the events of the Iliad and Odyssey was faithfully able to name all the names and specify all the places that 20th century archeologists have proven-out. How was he able to recall specific information of place and person generations-past? Oral tradition. Studies have shown, repeatedly, the accuracy of oral tradition in pre-literate societies... the circumscription of the present by the wisdom of the past.
Speech and Debate coaches readily argue the value of oral communication. We do it everyday when we justify this activity of forensics to parents, students, school administrators, or the school bus driver on early Saturday morning. And we do it very well, as seen in the constant growth in the numbers of students and schools in the National Forensic League. But we perhaps falter in the area of oral tradition... the passing- down of knowledge and wisdom to those coaches coming into the field.
Forensics coaching is facing a tremendous retirement bubble, a generational shift. There are always top-down initiatives to hire more forensics coaches and encourage more communications majors into teaching at the secondary level. These
are great ideas and wonderful programs. But, they are about as useful in equipping new coaches as MTV’s Rock the Vote Campaign in getting Hillary Duff a Senate seat. The most effective way that this generational shift can be addressed, as this article argues, is from bottom-up, grassroots work at the District and sub-District level that looks at the needs of local, novice coaches and works to meet those needs. Let’s identify the needs of a novice coach: 1) Delineating the Crisis, 2) Discovery of Events, 3) Definition of Responsibilities, and 4) Deepening Skills.
Delineating the Crisis
We all remember our first tournament as coach. Running through a forest of deadlines, forms, dues, parental permission slips, transportation requests, meal vouchers, chaperonage, and hotel reservations, we ended the tournament with a certain numbness that, like a trip to a dentist heavy- handed on the novocaine, lasted for much longer than we originally expected. Over the course of months, we began to get a better grip on the events and the rules, and, after a good long time, we started entering into the judges’ lounge less like a heathen trespassing into the Holy of Holies and began approaching the registration table with slightly less timidity than the young boy or girl taking their first communion. Time and experience is the best cure for the novice coach. After all, if you are reading this article, you probably already are an experienced coach who has passed beyond those first difficult years.
But for every coach reading this article, there are twenty others who think that The Rostrum is where we speak and the NFL stands for... well, you get the picture. It is no sudden revelation that our profes
sion is facing a huge generational shift. Beginning in the nineties, high-profile reports on teacher shortages have predicted a rapidly retiring teacher workforce (National Committee on Teaching and America’s Future, 1997). But even more depressing is that nearly 110% of all new teacher hires leave in a period of five years (Ingersoll, 2001).
As most forensics coaches are also teachers, these statistics are even more sobering. A school can replace an experienced teacher in the education trenches without too many bumps. But a school has a significant problem in replacing an experienced speech and debate coach with someone with a vague idea that forensics means speaking and not slicing. Continuity within a school and within a forensics program means the difference between having effective programs or faltering ones. Studies indicate that nearly one-fourth of all teacher departures have a negative effect on continuity of a school (Mobley, 1982). I would posit that forensics coach departures have nearly a 100% negative effect on teams. The longer we coach, the more once-great programs come to mind that folded-in on themselves when the coach left that position. It is a basic reality of leadership: an organization is the shadow cast by the leader; and, in respect to our profession, a forensics team is merely the shadow cast by the coach.
The good news is that new teachers are streaming into the field to replace the teachers who are retiring. There are animate bodies standing in front of classrooms across America. But, as many of us who have been teaching for a while see, many new teachers are right now trying out teaching to see if they want to continue in the career. As Bob Button, retiring speech and debate director of the Virginia High School League put it, many new teachers are in the process of determining their commitment just to the art of teaching, never mind coaching. New teachers are lured into teaching from universities and school districts with the promise of summers off, regular breaks, classroom obligations from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon, health care, and retirement. Once hired, new teachers face apathetic students, territorial colleagues, demanding administrators, lesson plans for every class, class loads that change each quarter, and supplies that melt faster than an April snow shower.
Into this unexpected reality, we thrust the overwhelming responsibility of coaching the speech and debate team. Think about it. Football - one season. Track one season. Baseball - one season. Forensics – we start in August and go through until Nationals in June. Hmmm. And when is this new extracurricular obligation going to occur? Just about every Saturday. And the pay for this coaching obligation? In most schools, the football coach can hire us to wash his personal golf cart and, while he’s sitting back and watching footage of the Game of Century on ESPN2, we’re trying to find hotel reservations in Delaware. Now, given the parameters just laid out, absent your knowledge of the reward forensics offers its coaches in respect to the lives we deeply impact, what would you as a new teacher choose? Don’t give it too much thought, you may end up quitting now.
Discovery of Events
Face it, there are more forensics events than there are track and field events; but not as clearly understood. After all, what is the difference in most parts of the country between HI and Storytelling? At least track and field has shotputs and javelins. More, rules change from league to league and year to year. Running with this same track and field reference, what would the effect on that activity be if Virginia offered the 100-yard dash, Maryland offered the 100-meter dash, and Pennsylvania offered the 100-cubit dash? And then, just to add to the confusion, each year coaches met to redefine how many strides you could
take in each race. Novice coaches who competed in high school forensics in another part of the country are little more prepared to coach than those utterly new to the event. This is where the role of coach- mentor becomes essential.
Any current coach remembers fondly the experienced guru who put aside competition and took the novice under wing. Martha Carr, longtime NFL member and former Chair of the Mid-Atlantic District, brought me to my first District tournament and helped me in each step of my first Nationals. Without her, I would’ve been utterly lost; and I had been coaching for a number of years before joining NFL. With our necessary, but systemic Byzantine rules meant to establish standards, to throw a novice coach in to sink or swim usually results in the former and not the latter. Many NFL Districts have mentor programs long- established with tremendous results. Given the fact that new teachers are eight times more likely to leave the field than experienced teachers, and given the fact that after three years, more than one-third of all new teachers have left the profession (Ingersoll, 2002), mentor programs for new coaches are long overdue.
This year, the Mid-Atlantic District has finally begun a coach-mentor program working in conjunction with the Virginia High School League. During the mandatory Rules Clinics, an NFL Mid-Atlantic brochure is given to each of the nearly 300 speech and debate coaches in the state public school systems. Not only does the brochure outline the benefits of the NFL, but gives our website address and offers to connect new coaches with experienced mentors. The Mid-Atlantic boasts a membership of around 75 schools. Through this coach-mentor program, we believe that we can not only actively contribute to the activity, but actively build the membership of the NFL in Virginia, thus allowing us to continue to actively contribute in years to come. Through networking with existing forensics leagues, as we are dealing with much the same niche market, the NFL can expand its membership and new coaches can be brought into the event to swim and not to sink.
In addition to interpersonal mentoring, districts need to use all the tools in the tool shed. The most over-rated, but still-effective tool for communication is the internet and its ability to disseminate huge quantities of information to large numbers of people in a very short period of time. With the enthusiastic cooperation of Dr. Peter Pober at George Mason University, the NFL Mid-Atlantic has been able to digitally post videos of common forensics warm-up techniques for novice coaches to download and review (www.nflva.org/ gmif). We have also been able to digitally record extemporaneous speeches and original oratories developed at the George Mason Institute of Forensics. There are copyright questions in posting interpretation pieces online and those are thorny ones. Certainly, through cooperation of certain authors, this next step is possible. But, for today, the NFL has a great library of videotapes to loan and return on the various events. Yet mail is slow and ponderous. In the Mid-Atlantic, we have digitized the NFL instructional series for LD Debate and posting it on our NFLVa.org site. With the growth of broadband in homes and the T1 lines in schools, we have not begun to touch the tip of the iceberg in respect to communication and education of novice coaches.
Definition of Responsibilities
Each district, each school has its own complex web of procedures for extracurricular trips. If we were to think about just how many different steps go into a tournament in terms of paperwork, we don’t have to look too long to find discouragement for novice coaches. A short list: parental permission slips, teacher permission forms, requisitions for transportation, responsibilities of chaperones, travel restrictions, purchase orders for tournament registration, reimbursement paperwork for hotel stays, emergency medical release forms, schedules, contact numbers, substitute lesson plans. Okay, I hate paperwork. I mean, I really hate paperwork. Consequently, I have nothing but the greatest respect and deepest sympathy for novice coaches who are taking their first team on the road. This is where the coach-mentor ideally should be in the same school district as the novice coach. We should encourage a passing- on of the mentor’s own check-list of procedures and finding time for a follow-up meeting over coffee to check into how well the novice coach is doing. At this step, hand- holding is called for.
The growing number of coaching resources on NFL Online that deal with trip notification and parental permission can easily be adapted to each school’s specific needs. We live in a litigious age and need to have as much protection as afforded. And speaking of protection, the coach- mentor relationship can be useful for both parties in terms of chaperonage. Many has been the tournament where Martha Carr has served as my female chaperone and I have served as her male counterpart. More, in terms of hotel costs – especially for Nationals – through combining her program and mine, in addition to a novice coach and her team we were mentoring, the three schools were able to drastically reduce hotel costs for all of us and give each of the coaches a little breather. Too often, we look at other schools as cut-throat competitors and forget that we can pool our resources and do better than we would’ve alone.
When we have cleared the previous hurdles for the novice coach, the question of dates and deadlines needs to be cleared. As registrar for the NFL District tournament for the last few years, we have always seen late entries. No matter the emails, no matter the carrots, no matter the sticks – someone always asks days past the deadline if it is too late to get their registration faxed. As president of the Northern Virginia Forensics League, a mid-week league in the DC metroplex, we have had entire buses pull up to the tournament led by an energetic but utterly lost coach. Here is where the compassion of the Tab Staff is not strained, but falls from heaven. No matter the tournament, no matter the time, we need to make the extra effort to not discourage new coaches and new students in this activity. Emails from the District Committee or Tab Staff are easy to send. We cannot expect novice coaches to instinctively know the arcane deadlines we have absorbed over the years. But that’s from the top-down, the coach-mentor relation ship works from the bottom-up. Through a quick email before a major tournament, just a simple communication that takes about a minute to send, novice coaches can be saved from student disappointment and parent disapproval when the deadline for a national qualifier is missed.
Deepening Skills
Once that first year is done, once the events have been outlined, once the hurdles of travel have been cleared, once the deadlines and dates have all been established, comes the greatest opportunity of developing new coaches – summer camp. There are hundreds of forensics camps in this country and beyond that can give the new coach a deeper understanding of, not what an event is, but how to deepen the experience and expertise in that event. The summer I went to Seton Hall’s Metropolitan Forensics Institute was seminal in learning from incredible coaches in seminars and in impromptu bull sessions on the floors afterwards. The successes our school enjoyed were directly attributable to the training and experienced gained from MFI.
As a District, the Mid-Atlantic has established sponsor relationships with the colleges in Virginia that boast forensics teams. With two such colleges that offer summer camps, we have established novice coach scholarships. With the University of Mary Washington, we have developed a novice policy coach scholarship to attend their Francis Farmer Policy Debate Institute for students and coaches of color. With George Mason University, we have established a novice speech coach scholarship for a speech coach to attend their superlative summer institute. These scholarships just make sense. After all, if a coach has a positive experience at a camp, that coach is likely to recommend that camp to his or her students. As there are hundreds of forensics camps of one form or another in the country, these sponsorships can be replicated in nearly every NFL District and can help build the great coaches of tomorrow.
In summation, I want to note that everything I have written to this point is eye-wash. It sounds great on paper and it
works great in practice. But it’s far from easy. For the experienced coach, that person has to take time out of his or her already packed schedule to lead along a new coach. For the competitive coach, we need to extend ourselves to help schools that could threaten our lock on Nationals. For the seasoned coach, we need to look back on our first year when no one helped us and resolve to work so that another new coach does not have to go through the same struggle. We all love forensics for the positive impact the activity has on young people. Through strong and supportive mentor relationships, we not only can impact another adult, but have some small share in the success of that novice coach’s children. None of us are going to recapture the grandeur of Priam in the tent ofAchilles. But, through the power of oral tradition in the act mentoring, our impact as a professional can circumscribe the future of our activity.
References
Ingersoll, R. (2001). Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 499-534.
Ingersoll, R. (2002). The Teacher Shortage: A Case of Wrong Diagnosis and Wrong Prescription. NASSP Bulletin, 631, 16-31.
Mobley, W. (1982). Employee Turnover: Causes, consequences, and control. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. (1997). Doing what matters most: Investing in quality teaching. New York.
(Rev. B.A. Gregg, District Chair of the Mid-Atlantic, is Debate Czar at Randolph- Macon Academy in Front Royal, Virginia. He cuts an impressive figure in top hat and faux-fur coat. The Mid-Atlantic Website is www.nflva.org)
