Buffalo Public Schools are continuing the push for more sports – for both sexes – and better sports performances, facilities, coaching and academics.
City schools get only a few students into big-time sports programs and there has been a long effort to do something about that. It is a substantial effort and has gained some help from Pegula Sports and Entertainment.
The effort will start in eighth grade, when the district explains college sports eligibility rules so kids understand they have to keep up their grades to get into the programs and there will be mandatory study tables during sports seasons.
The district also is bargaining with the Buffalo Teachers Federation to move beyond teachers as coaches. Strategic Alignment and Innovation Chief David Mauricio said when he was principal at Bennett High School looking for a baseball coach, he saw that system in action.
“The football coach at the time interviewed for the position and so we had some baseball questions in there and very simple opening questions was, ‘How you would work with the students to field ground balls,'” Maurico said. “He got down in a football three-point stance, as if it were a football position and it was a baseball question.”
Mauricio said the district has prepared a series of questions and a scoring system to evaluate all potential coaches, whether teachers or not, if there is an agreement with the BTF union.
Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash said he has seen this problem before, citing a conversation with star basketball coach John Calipari.
“What he would say is, ‘Doc, you got great athletes, but I can’t recruit them because they won’t be able to meet the college requirements to come to the University of Memphis, the University of Miami, University of Buffalo’ and I found the same issue here,” Cash said.
Read the entire article at WBFO.org.
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